Being the smallest room and most in need of an update, we started with the guest bathroom in March. It was the one room that always seemed a bit too plain and boring--nothing terribly wrong, but just lacking in personality. I don't have too many "before" and "progress" pictures as I'm terrible at remembering to grab that camera, but here's a few I did manage to capture:
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| just a plain bathroom... |
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| builder grade oak vanity getting a paint job |
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| after a coat of light grey color on top, the bottom half eventually got the beadboard wallpaper. |
Being a diy project and being the cheap frugal people that we are, our goal was to spend as little as possible while improving its overall visual appeal, which meant pretty much everything stayed--the builder grade vanity, the floor, the tiles. After doing a lot of research for ideas and pinning on Pinterest for inspiration, I set out to give the room a cosmetic makeover.
One of the first and the toughest hurdle to cross was the removal of the ugly, oversized builder-grade mirror. Now, It would've been so much easier to just put a frame around it as I've seen done by many in similar situations with great results, but unfortunately ours had a quirky little design flaw of an existing outlet embedded within the mirror (with a matching mirror outlet cover!) and adding a frame would've made it only even that much uglier. Who does that anyways? My guess would be that the last contractor wasn't thinking when he ordered the mirror and forgot about the little outlet.
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| All taped up and ready to go! Note the odd embedded outlet within the mirror. |
After doing a quick look around the web and deciding it to be a doable job, I first took some time protecting the mirror in case of a shatter, by putting a clear Contact vinyl sheet all over and then some duct tape on top for an extra measure of precaution. It took some 40 minutes of careful prying with a crowbar to free the mirror away from the wall. It probably took a lot longer than necessary as I spent the first 30 minutes of it experimenting and trying to figure out how much force to apply and basically just trying to get comfortable working with a giant slab of glass that can decide to shatter any minute and send me to the ER. However, once I figured out a method that worked for the first corner, the rest started to follow pretty quickly after that point and when it finally all came off, it was the biggest relief and a huge sense of empowerment!
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| yay, it's off! |
The rest of the renovation was a lot easier...relatively speaking. After a lot of trips to the local hardware store and after many hours of painting, wall-papering, and some carpentry work later, it finally all came together, and when it did, we were quite happy with the end result and with the choices we've made.
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| painting the vanity dark set the color scheme for the whole room and balanced out all the whites & neutrals. |
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| elevating the shower curtain made a huge visual impact. |
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| beadboard wallpaper with a chair rail turned out awesome. |
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| what replaced the once ugly giant mirror...and look, we now have a normal outlet! |
The bathroom is still not quite completed as is evident by the blank picture frame in the photo above. There's still some final decorating touches to be had in order to pull the room together, and I'll probably update this post when it's all said and done, but for now, we are quite pleased with the transformation!
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