Our New House: Bathroom Updates

It's almost been six months since we moved into our home and I have a big six months in post in the works but I thought I would do a few posts to hightlight the bigger projects that we have completed.  Our first big project was the dining room.  I hope to post on this soon but when that was finished we moved onto the bathrooms.  It started with just one bathroom but I got kind of anxious to start peeling the wallpaper off in the bathroom upstairs and one thing led to another and we had both bathrooms going at one time-the upstairs bath WAY less work intensive than the downstairs.  I am waiting for John to hang a picture up there so I will post on that separately. So this is mainly about the downstairs powder room.

Before starting any of our projects we decided that when we work on a space we will always paint the ceiling, walls and trim.   These rooms are pretty small so the ceilings were done in a flash.  It amazes me how much a fresh coat of white ceiling paint does to freshen up a room!!   Right now our trim is painted but it is a very cream color, we don't have any touch up paint, and  we had a good feeling in the past it was painted with oil based paint (we found some dried up cans in the basement) so to make sure that our paint job held up we picked up a gallon of multi porpose latex primer which the Sherwin-Williams sales person said would do the job-then we could use their trim paint on top of that and won't have any problems so we are having to do three coats of paint on all the trim.

Here are some before pictures of the bathroom and our initial list of what we hoped to do in this space.

We are hoping down the road to totally change this space in some way, remove the shower/washer dryer area and add that space to the kitchen so we hoped to not spend a lot of cash in this room.  

• Remove Wallpaper
• Paint Walls
• Paint Tile
• Remove carpet and replace with new flooring (we found some vinyl planks that look like wood that we are going to go with for this project)
• Change out vanity/sink 
• Change out bath fixtures (faucet, towel bars, and toilet paper holder)
• Change out light fixture.

 AFTER:  

I will admit, the space is hard to photograph because it is off a small hallway, has not natural light, and the overhead light casts a really warm glow.  Also, The wall is definitely not this blue.  I see it as more gray than it appears in the photo.  You can click the link below and see a better depiction of the real color.   Here are the two paint colors used in this space:  Sherwin Williams Greek Villa (the photo above on the right shows the best representation of the color) for the trim, cabinet, and wainscoting and Sea Salt for the wall color.  We actually are using Sherwin Williams Coastal Cool to help us with our paint palette for our house. And it happened accidentally.  Here is the link to the Coastal Cool Color Palette.  We actually had coastal plain (lving room/hallways/stairways) and accessible beige (we painted this in our new dining room) in our house already and I kind of like the cooler grays and blues so we just went with it.  We were debating between Sea Salt and Comfort Gray and after putting both samples on the wall, John wanted Sea Salt so we went with it.  

Here is an image I found that shows the two colors we were trying to decide on.  

Our original intention was just to paint the original blue tile but John really wanted to try to do the picture frame wainscoting that carries out through the rest of the house.  He actually used a lot of scrap pieces that he found in the upstairs of the garage that was used when the rest of the house was done which kept the cost minimal.  We took off the mesh screens on the cabinet on the wall and John used wood to fill the in the frame so now we can store some things in here.  It took him a LONG time to tear off the wall tile and we discovered this beautiful tile underneath the carpet :)

(Room after tile was off the walls and the original floor tile)

For the flooring we decided to do the floating vinyl planks.  I mentioned earlier that in the next couple years we hope to renovate the main floor including this bathroom so we chose not to invest a lot of money.  The flooring was like $40 since it is such a small space.  We had to spend money on the fixtures (faucet, toilet paper hold, towel ring),  flooring, and a few odds and ends with the trim work.  As for the old shower area that was converted into a small laundry area we removed the washer/dryer combo and we painted the tile in there, hung a curtain panel that I had leftover from our old house, and will use that space to store cleaning supplies, broom, etc since it can no longer be used as a shower. I did buy some new hand towels and rug but our art was an IKEA purchase back in 2007 when we bought our first house originally and had just been sitting in storage.  Our new pedestal sink we got lucky with and Dale and Bev had it just sitting in their basement.  The trim paint was leftover and the wall paint was some untinted paint I purchased in 2013 right before we decided to put our 17th Street house on the market.  All in all, I think we made some big changes with very little cost. 

So one more time a before and after: