Right before Labor Day weekend, my husband says to me "Hey, We've got a long weekend ahead of us, why don't we re-do the kids' bathroom?" Now, I've been talking about this exact project for quite a long time, but we've just never gotten around to actually deciding on doing it. Luckily I've been researching what I wanted to do in there, so when he suggested actually doing it, I jumped right on that bandwagon!!
Here are a couple of pictures of the before:
Totally uninspired. And messy. And just plain gross When we were building this house, my children were ages 7 and 4, so we purposefully did not add any upgrades to their shared bathroom. We figured that to do so, we would essentially be throwing money out the window, since there was no doubt that our small tornadoes....er, I mean children...would destroy the tiny space. And we were right. But now that we've been here almost 8 years, I was really itching to make it start looking a bit more sophisticated. About time, right??
The first thing to do was to pick out a color scheme. I started by picking out the shower curtain, and the teal blue color in the shower curtain really drew me in.
I love color on my walls, so I decided that the walls would mirror the teal. In fact, the wall color I chose is called Venus Teal. And I love the crisp contrast of white accents, so I knew that I wanted to work that in somehow too. One of the projects I've been researching for months was how to paint bathroom cabinets, so I was excited to take our old, drab-looking, builder's grade oak cabinet and paint it a clean, simple white.
I was so nervous, but after seeing so many great tutorials, I figured I really had nothing to lose. I started by removing the drawers and doors, as well as the faceplates on the front (and learned how simple those are to remove!! Who knew?).
After sanding everything down to remove the varnish that protected the wood stain, I then primed it all with an oil-based primer. I had read that oil-based would cover the wood grain a bit better than a water-based primer. I primed one side, let it dry, then turned it over and primed the other side. I lightly sanded everything again, with fine-grit sandpaper, then painted with a white semi-gloss latex paint (repeating the "paint-one-side-let-it-dry-flip-it-over-then-paint-the other-side" routine). I should note that I used a high-quality brush to cut in the paint in the crevices, but I used a foam roller for everything else, so I wouldn't have brush stroke lines.
Here is the finished project:
A quick trip to Home Depot to get some new knobs, as well as a trip to Target for the sink accessories and new linens, and things were coming together.
Then we got to the towel holder. My kids are notorious for not using the towel rod that the builder installed. Too much trouble to actually fold the towel, and place it over the bar. Much easier to just shove it in there. So I figured we would go with something that had hooks. Home Depot had some really pretty hooks, which were an epic fail, as the towels just slid right off of them (there was a big round ball at the end, and the towel just couldn't "grab"). I really had something specific in mind, and no matter how hard I looked, and how many stores I went to, I just couldn't find what I wanted. So I just decided I would make it. After trolling the aisles at Home Depot (AGAIN!!...I was there 5 different times in the space of three days, LOL), I found these things near the crown molding section. They are called plinthes, and are meant to go at the bottom of a door frame to finish off molding, so one end is unfinished and one end is sanded and routed. In this picture, they are placed unfinished end to unfinished end.
I thought I could glue them together, paint them white, and use some hat hooks. I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with the final results.
Long post, but here's the before and after pix. I know the lighting is terrible, sorry!
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