Master Bath Redo

What started as a simple painting project for our master bathroom ended up becoming much more and taking three weeks.  I wanted to wait until we’re 100% finished to share the pictures of the finished room, but who knows when that will be.  Since we’re about 90% there, I figured that was good enough.

Here’s what we started with.  The wall color, baby blue, while not hideous, just didn’t match anything in our house.  Plus, it was sloppily done and didn’t look good.

Most of the issues that we had with the bathroom were cosmetic.  Of most concern to use, besides the crappy paint job, was the lack of storage space, the awful light and the tiny mirror/medicine cabinet.  I’d originally bought an over the toilet shelf to try to gain more storage space, but as you can see, it just looks messy. (This was once we’d already started the project; it wasn’t quite this messy normally.)  We started out with a pedestal sink.  I’m guessing that it was installed to make the room look bigger, but it just compounded the lack of storage space issue.  Plus the drain was broken.

Our first order of business, however, was paint.  Jason and I do not have the same taste when it comes to color palettes. I prefer warm colors like oranges and yellows while he likes cooler or neutral colors.   It took us a while to agree on a color and when we finally did, we came up with a lavender-ish purple.

Our intention, I think, was to make the room look brighter and therefore bigger.  We painted the entire thing (mind you, it’s small) and I decided I hated it.  Oops. Aside from not liking the color, I also didn’t like the semi-gloss finish, mostly because it looked like one of the bathrooms at work.  It was lighter than it looks in this picture.  We didn’t have the bathroom light installed at this time.

We decided to sleep on it and see if the color grew on us the next day.  It didn’t so we did a lot of googling and a co-worker lent us a Pottery Barn bathroom book for ideas.   We decided we needed more of a neutral color and decided on a yellowish cream.

The next weekend we painted over the purple. It seemed like we were almost done with the project.  There was only one thing making the new setup look bad. There was a soap dish and a toothbrush holder glued to the tile above the sink.  You know, those old school kinds.  It wasn’t that they looked bad themselves, the problem really was that with the new sink, they were not centered which made our OCD minds go into a panic.  (We don’t really have OCD.  If we did, our house would probably be a lot cleaner.  I digress.)

The problem was that we couldn’t tell if the soap dish and toothbrush holder (which no toothbrushes ever fit in, by the way) were just glued to the tile or part of the tile was taken out to when they were installed.

Since it took us three weeks to complete this project, I bet you can guess which it was.  Jason attempted to take the soap dish off and it completely broke, leaving behind a horrible looking piece of half soap dish, half old glue and no tile.  It looked like the wall had a disease.  Seriously.

I went into sort of a panic.  Our house is old and there is no way that they still sold the tile that’s in the bathroom.  Fortunately, it was only one horizontal row that was affected and it was at the perfect height to make an accent row, so we took out the tile in the entire row.  And when I say we, I mean Jason.

(This is after the wall disease, which wasn’t really a disease, just nasty glue, was removed.  I’ll spare you.  It looks like worms or poop or something.)

Another Saturday morning was spent at Home Depot looking at tile.  We decided on one we liked and got to work.  I didn’t really do anything more at this point.  The entire tiling process was all Jason. It’s nice to have a handy husband, right?

And the finished product!

We still want to put up a cabinet over the toilet and a few other things, but I cannot believe how much better it looks.  The accent row really adds to the look and compliments the granite countertop.