This is my bathroom. It wasn't always this bad. When we started renovating the house in the fall of 2011 and finished up in the beginning of 2012, we didn't really plan to touch the bathroom or kitchen because we figured that those would be huge, expensive projects that we just couldn't afford at that time and also didn't quite know what we wanted to do yet. But when we decided to rip out the built-in shelves in the hallway to make a large double door hallway closet, I found that there was no wall between the built-in shelves in the hallway and the built-in closet in the bathroom so I ripped the built-in closet in the bathroom out and had our contractor frame a wall between the bathroom and the hallway closet. But since the bathroom closet went from floor to ceiling, there was no tile under it so the sub-floor was exposed as you can see a little bit in the bottom left of the picture below:
We kinda covered it up with a cheap laundry hamper but dirty laundry is not really doing the bathroom many favors either. Oh, but there is our lovely new toilet...with lots of junk on top of it. Once I tore out the built-in bathroom closet, we lost loads of valuable storage space that was already quite limited in our home. All we had was a tiny medicine cabinet. We didn't even have a toilet paper holder or a towel ring. And that is where this whole mini-makeover started...we needed a towel ring. If you can see in the two pictures below, we hung our hand towel on the shower rod and I think we had been doing that for years since we moved in because the towel rod that was originally in the bathroom was nasty and falling out of the wall so we just ripped it out. But I never bothered to get a new one because I wanted to wait until we completely renovated the bathroom.
However, renovations cost a lot of money (just in case you didn't know that) and I had no idea when we would be able to do it. And I had a new incentive for getting a towel ring to hold our towel - Lucy. Since she was three, going on four and I had a baby on the way that would inevitably take up a lot of time, I wanted her to go to bathroom completely independently but she always needed to call me to get the towel for her so she could dry her hands. And it was probably annoying for her little friends who came to visit too who couldn't reach. So I ordered a whole bathroom hardware set online that included a towel ring, towel hook, towel rod, and toilet paper holder (Lucy also had a hard time reaching behind her to get the toilet paper which I am sure a lot of people did). But once I received my nice, new towel ring in oil-rubbed bronze finish, I didn't want to hang it up on the nasty walls. So I decided that I should paint the bathroom first because it would do wonders for it. But before I could paint the bathroom walls, I really needed to steam off all the nasty wallpaper (which I had actually started picking off when I was doing the renovations the year because I'm a picker and I kinda love picking but then I stopped because there were higher priority things I needed to do). So here are my bathroom walls and ceilings, with all the wallpaper completely steamed off (cause yeah, the previous owners wallpapered the ceiling!!!).
But then once I finished steaming the wallpaper off, I noticed that the walls, just like the rest of the walls in my house, were very nasty and one wall had this gross texture on it. So I decided to hire my texture guy to come and texture the walls and the ceilings. But since he was coming to do the bathroom, I figured that he should texture the walls and ceilings of my kitchen as well (but that is another post). Then, I finally bought some primer and paint and got that done and THEN Brandon finally installed the towel ring, the towel rack, and the toilet paper holder.
So here is the AFTER:
In addition to all the bathroom hardware, we got a new, larger medicine cabinet from IKEA and a new curtain rod (our old curtain rod that the previous owner had left was painted white and taped in the middle to hold it together - super classy!). We still need to get a new light and I also want to get a new freestanding shelf or closet for where our old built-in closet used to be but those are easy additions for later - we're kinda picky with our lighting.
It is a little plain but a vast improvement over what we had before. I'm not crazy about our tile (which you can't really tell from the pictures how poorly it was installed). but I think that it is newer and the vanity is also newer (although also poorly installed but Brandon had fixed it a long time ago). I would love to get a new tub and move the toilet next to the tub and get a larger sink and vanity moved to the door side but that will have to wait until a full renovation. I kinda hate temporary fixes but the bathroom wasn't in terrible shape but it was bad enough that I needed to do something about it. I guess my nesting instincts were really strong but I just channeled it into a bathroom and kitchen make-over instead of actually getting ready for the baby. Oh yeah, and I did this all less than a month before my baby was due. I actually meant to start at the end of January or beginning of February but because of Valentine's Day, didn't start until February 20th and finished right at the wire - on March 15th, two days before my baby was due.
When I was telling Brandon my plan, I told him that it would just cost a couple hundred bucks for the bathroom and the kitchen. We always underestimate these things, don't we? Here is my financial break-down:
Supplies (Paint brushes, rollers, tape, joint compound, caulk): $72.13
Paint & Primer: $57.66
Texture: $350
Daycare for Lucy: $176 (a couple of friends also took Lucy for free on play-dates with their children so that saved me some money :)
Medicine Cabinet: $70
The supplies, paint & primer, texture and the daycare was also for the kitchen as well so now that I look at the numbers, that's actually not that bad. But my kitchen mini-make-over really added up. That is next.
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