KG's Hideaway

(... but I contend its the bedroom) Anyhoo...

I finally got around to taking pictures of the front bathroom. The pictures aren't great, but I think you'll get the point. The colors don't look quite right in all of them between the lighting in the bathroom and the flash of the camera. It makes the tile look almost tan rather than a very light grey and the walls look REALLY blue, but they're actually a very soft, pale, light blue. (More on that in a sec)

It never even crossed my mind to take "before" pics, so there aren't any of those. However I will tell you that when we bought this house (built in 1970) it was really just old fashioned looking. We didn't know what we wanted to do at the time and didn't want to do anything major until we decided, so we just went with a rustic decorating style that is insanely popular around here right now. The man that built this house, LITERALLY built this house. The vanities and kitchen cabinets were all handmade, and not in a good way. The second owners did alot to update it but it still needed alot. We THOUGHT that was what we wanted... and we thought we'd have time but then Ryan started playing sports and we haven't been home since)

The vanity was triple wide ( believe it was 73"long- now its 52) , painted white, with a single sink that was really rusted and crappy. (surely the original with the house) The countertop was also white laminate that was in really crappy shape. (Sensing the crappy theme yet?) There was a MASSIVE mirror that went from the floating ceiling to the vanity and went ALL the way across. The ceramic tile on the floor and around the bathtub was new so that wasn't an issue. But the crappy looking linen closet in there was in even worse shape than the vanity. To top all of that mess off, there was this really old (rusted looking) wall heater that no longer worked. I have no idea why it was put into the wall and not the ceiling, but whatever. The light switch was gargantuan because the timer for the wall heater had been on it at one time. (Let me just tell you that I hated this bathroom enough that I actually stuck the damn cat litter box in there when we had those two hellions here for about 6 months. Thank God the box AND the cats are gone- the smell left with them!)

SO here's what we did. I thought that since we don't want to spend the extra money to have the doors for the linen closet cut to match a new vanity, we could cut down the triple vanity to about 2/3 its size, paint it and then replace the vanity top, sink and faucets. It saved us about $450 and I was able to spend that in other places. Craig was VERY nervous about cutting this thing, but I had faith. Plus, the worst he could do was ruin it and we'd just buy another one so we really had nothing to lose. It worked out and allowed me to just paint the linen closet the same color. We replaced the old HUGE mirror with a framed mirror that is 52"x 36" (half price from Garden Ridge normally $99, got it for $49) We also bought new recessed lights but when the housing from the old ones didn't sync up with what we'd bought, Craig just ripped the whole surface of the floating ceiling out and rebuilt it around the new lights. I could have killed him, but he put the sheetrock in within about two hours and by the time I taped and bedded it we were both pretty freakin' happy with it!

Then there was the issue of sheetrock. We knew we'd have a hole in the wall from the heater and we also knew there was some sheetrock softening going on, but we did NOT want to replace sheetrock since we're already doing that in the livingroom and hallway. We decided that wainscoting would be perfect to cover the blemishes. We got that up then I blew the texture on the walls. Then the new toilet.

It was at this point that the colors were chosen. We used a paint color card from L@we's by V@lspar. (the blue is MS234 Cake Stand Blue and the white is MS188 White Picket Fence) There is another color on the card, a brown but I wanted black just so it would stand out. Behr makes a standard black that H@me Depot sells off the shelf that you don't have to have mixed so that's what we went with.

Shower curtain is from T@rget. I think it was only like $35. Towles from T@rget and K0hl's.

We repainted that shelf above the toilet black (used to be red) and rehung it, plus put the plantation blinds in.

So here are the series of pics. Some of them are the same, but oh well. The pics that look the darkest actually show the truest color of the blue paint so I've included them... even though it changes the look of the tile. C'est la vie!

Oh yeah... please ignore this trashcan. It goes between the toilet and the vanity and I have no clue why its by the shower here!

This is where the pics start making the walls look REALLY blue. They're not.