So, at the end of the last post, I said the lesson I learned from our last house was to go ahead and do the changes you want to do to your home while you actually are living there. So, I took our extra cash from the sale of our last home and rolled it into making the changes I wanted in our new home. There were a few things I wanted to change right away. The first was the master bathroom wallpaper.
These are the pictures from the listing. Floral lattice was definitely in style back in the 90's when our house was built. It kind of gave me a headache though when I took my first shower in our new home. I saw a crack that was kind of peeling while I showered. I tugged at it just to see how easy it would be to peel and by the time I was done with my shower, I had all of the wallpaper in the shower peeled. After I dried off and dressed, I recruited my 4 year old son to come help Mommy peel the rest. He loved it!
In an hour we had all of the wallpaper down. It was the easiest wallpaper I've ever peeled. Probably because the steam from the shower had loosened it over the years.
Here are some pictures of the bathroom after we peeled the wallpaper and before we did any additional renovations:
Before
After
So, already a pretty big difference!
We lived with white walls for several weeks until around Thanksgiving when we hired a contractor to come and completely redo everything. First, he gutted everything.
Down to the bare bones.
Then, they did our floor. Tile from Lowes called Futuro White which is kind of a faux marble. It was a dark teal color before with square tiles and patterned in straight lines, similar to graph paper.
After they gutted, I washed the walls with hot water, primed with oil based primer to seal up any wallpaper glue, and painted with Behr Pensive Sky color. It's kind of a light gray/green/blue color.
After the floor, the first thing we changed was the shower. Originally, our shower was very low (not good for those of us who are 6 ft. tall). It was also a pre-fab shower that just set into the opening for it. The problem was, the cubby for the shower extended out another foot, so if we tiled it in, we could add a foot of extra shower space!
Notice in the above picture how the shower doesn't come out to the wall all of the way? My arms were actually hitting the shower door as I washed my hair. I know, first world problems...but, since we were changing everything, we might as well make our shower the best it could be.
Now, thanks to our contractor, the shower extends all the way to the cubby designed for it and he centered the shower head, raised it up, and put in a rainforest shower head with a separate shut off valve so you can choose which shower heads you want on. He also added the cubbies for our shampoo, the shower bench, and the basket weave accents with black and white marble.
The glass panel to the right of this picture is stationary and the glass door swings in or out.
After I did the shower, I decided I really wanted to redo the bath tub. I wasn't in love with that step, for one thing. I also didn't love the jets, the ivory color, or the brass fixtures. We decided to just start over and go with a white soaker tub. The contractor was able to place the chrome fixtures to the far side of the tub so that the boys can't just walk up to it and turn it on, which is what was happening with our old tub. He also added the tile surround to match the floor.
The vanities were probably the biggest challenge. You can get some amazing deals if you are flexible in the size you need. I was trying to fit a specific space of wall though. So, they had to be custom. We probably could have pieced together a few different ones and done it a little cheaper, but I didn't want it to look thrown together. We had called several different places and just when I was going to give up, I saw a cabinet makers T-shirt on a guy at the bagel shop one morning. I asked for his card, and we ended up using them!
So, again to remind you, the vanity before stretched all the way across to the wall. We didn't have a linen closet.
So, I added one! I knew that Nathan wouldn't use all of that counter space anyway, and this way we could build up instead of over. The bottom part of the tall cabinet is actually a pull out hamper for our dirty clothes.
I found the mirrors at Home Goods and I put the more masculine mirror over Nathan's vanity.
Before and after of my vanity on the opposite side of the bathroom. I got the more feminine Venetian style mirror. And you can see how the vanity pretty much had to fit the existing nook.
This is the slab of granite that they used to make our vanities. I loved the purple accents. They were careful to use the more interesting parts of the granite for the vanities.
My favorite part of our bathroom is my birthday chandelier:
It's a Venetian style chandelier from Sam's club that I found online and my parents bought it for me for my birthday. We already had a chandelier hanging in the bathroom, but it was brass and I wasn't a big fan. As I was picking finishes, I always kept this chandelier in mind.
Honorable mention is the toilet closet. Nathan is a huge fan of toilet closets because it creeps him out when toilet droplets could land on your toothbrush or other things in the bathroom if it didn't have a door you can shut. Our toilet closet had some pretty dizziness-inducing stripes when we moved in:
And now, it doesn't. This wallpaper was MUCH harder to peel than the floral. You can tell in the picture how much work it took to get off. But, it was worth it! We took down the curtain and leaf curtain rod they had up and decided to do a window film instead. It lets in lots of light during the day, and it actually looks like we bought a new privacy window. I was very pleased with how easy it was to apply the film. This picture was taken at night, but during the day it just looks like a blurry window.
Now that you've seen my toilet, I think I'll call it a night.
