From Pink to Awesome

Our two-year anniversary with our house is quickly approaching–we settled on May 11, 2007. Over the past two years, we’ve tackled projects like tiling kitchen counter tops, installing kitchen appliances and a new sink, refinishing the hardwood floors throughout the entire house, demolishing the basement and starting from scratch, and lots of other things I seem to have mysteriously blocked from my memory.

But the room that needed the most help we saved for last. We put off the bathroom renovation for a year and a half too long. Our upstairs bathroom is our only bathroom. We share the exact same house layout with the other houses on our street, all built the same year, 1934. We’ve been inside of almost all of them. I don’t know who started the trend, but someone in one of the houses long ago turned the ginormous kitchen pantry into a half bath to go along with the full bath upstairs. Apparently the guy who lived in our house before us (whom Roscoe was named after) was not into keeping up with the Joneses, because we still have an intact ginormous pantry and only one bathroom. When you have only one bathroom, it needs to be a good bathroom.

Here’s what we started with. Behold, the PINK BATHROOM (after I made a really poor paint decision with the green).

The namesake of this blog. I tried my best with it, I really did. I kind of went with the whole pink thing and tried to make it a cute, kitschy bathroom. But that got old after a while, and my design sensibilities were quickly changing.

Eventually, we tried this look. It wasn’t too bad. This is where my gray scale bathroom fascination began. But we still had the pink sink, pink tub with pink tile walls, and pink toilet (with fax wood seat). Plus the hideous peel & stick tiles that sometimes stuck to our feet when we got out of the shower. We decided it was time for a complete redo.

We invited our friend Justin over for some socializing and oh-would-you-mind-helping-us-tear-apart-our-bathroom-while-you’re-here, if you know what I mean. And he was a trooper. We stole him away from his pregnant wife for a few nights that week (I know, we’re terrible, terrible people). After the first day, this is what we were left with. No floor (rather, plywood subfloor floor covered with disgusting black adhesive gunk), no more mirror, and no sink for Potato to curl up in. He was okay, he still had the window sill.

The flooring was frighteningly easy to peel up. That step probably only took us an hour altogether. And I was probably taking a nap when the guys were removing the sink, but that seemed to happen pretty fast too. We found out the sink wasn’t really attached to the wall. I’m not sure what kind of voodoo magic the former owners used secure, but it was kind of just sitting on top of the plumbing and a bracket.

The boys left a message for whichever lucky soul decides to remove the new mirror we installed.

The next day came the toilet. This was a very precarious situation. First, because god only knows how long that toilet had been sitting there (gross!). And second, because we had very little time to get the old toilet out and the new one in. It’s that whole only having one toilet issue again. This became even more of an issue when we discovered that the toilet we bought that proclaimed “all inclusive, has everything you need” on the package, did not, in fact, include a supply line.

This involved me going out at 8:59pm to Home Depot in paint-spattered pants and with the fear in my eyes a woman might have when she’s facing the possibility of no facilities for an entire night, finding out they closed at 9:00, and being the crazy lady banging on the glass doors that I JUST NEED ONE THING. The kid staring back at me inside didn’t seem too inspired by my desperation. Next was Lowes, also closed.

Seriously, when did major box stores start closing at 9:00? Most of the time, I’m just getting started at 9:00. Finally, I made my way over to the 24-hour Walmart who did have a supply line in stock, and I now refuse to utter another negative word about them. Because this is what was waiting for me back at home… a giant hole where a toilet should have been. (P.S. This is where I should appologize to Justin that the bottom of our old pink toilet left a little poop on his arm. Sorry, man.)

That night the toilet was in and all was well in the land of being able to go to the bathroom. The next day, the new flooring went in and the new wainscoting and moulding and baseboards went up. Jason got to use a nail gun for the first time–it was a big moment. The wainscoting, at $8 a sheet, was incredibly affordable. Goodbye fake tile, hello fake wood!

Then came about 3 days of finishing work, including caulking and painting. Potato helped by keeping our paint tray liners warm. Plus, we had these X-TREME rags!!!

We also reglazed our tub and surrounding tile. This is something I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. If you have an unsightly bathtub OR ceramic tile, it is so much cheaper to reglaze than it is to do one of those bath fitters or starting from scratch. Reglazing basically involves buying a refinishing kit you can pick up in the paint aisle for about $50, mixing it in a bucket, painting it right onto your tub/tile, and waiting three days for it to dry. If you only have the one shower, make sure you’re really nice to your friends the week before you start the project so they’ll let you use theirs. Here’s a great How-To article on reglazing.

The results are seriously incredible.

And–drumroll please–the relaxing new bathroom where you find not one spot of pink. Actually, the only color you’ll find in the entire bathroom is the soap. From one extreme to another.

Ikea frames with macro flower photographs I cut out of an ancient photography book I got for free at Baltimore’s Book Thing.

I used the Stencil 101 book to create the trees.

Since the sink doesn’t provide much in the way of storage (mostly just my hairdryer and flat iron), we went crazy on the giant cabinet storage. But check out that granite top! We officially have a square foot of granite in our house!

I love, love, love my new bowl sink. My biggest recommendation for a bathroom redo in terms of cost is to sit down, look at your money, and decide how much you can realistically spend. Then actually stick to that number. The range of quality on all the fixtures and design elements is so wide that it can be pretty daunting, and might also lead you to go over budget. For us, the bowl sink was super important. So we skimped on flooring to make it work within our budget. Definitely pick one or two high-end items and stick with the lower end of the range on other materials that aren’t going to make or break your new space.