Bathroom Makeover: Chapter Two (Shades of Grey)

I will warn you that this may be one of those epic books that has about 700 chapters. Hopefully not. I mentioned yesterday that taking off the door to the linen closet (To be clear, I’m not talking about the actual bathroom door. I’m open to a lot of things but no bathroom door is definitely not one of them!) was a huge turning point for us. It instantly went from a giant unconquerable task to something that we could manage one step at a time. Why did we think it was such a turning point? See for yourselves.

Before:

After:

Doesn’t that feel a million times more open?  Imagine Peter and me sitting on our bed a about midnight on a Friday night. I say, “It’s just so cramped in there. That door gets in the way.” And then Peter exclaiming, “Let’s just rip it off!!” Here’s an action shot just for fun.

Unfortunately, removing the door left us with huge slits and holes in our door frame from where the hinges used to be.

The holes can be easily patched using wood filler. I put some in each hole, making sure to pack it into the small crevices in the back.

After letting the wood filler dry for about 24 hours, I sanded off the excess, and then repeated the process. If I was going to do this over again I would have put an insane amount of wood filler over the hole so that when I sanded it I wouldn’t have to add any extra. The reason being that making wet wood filler attach to dried wood filler is much more difficult than when it is all wet. I ended up battling the bits that were falling right off onto the floor.

When the holes were patched and the door was off for a few days, Peter and I couldn’t bare to look at the awful wall color any longer. For some reason, the linen closet was painted a terrible yellow color. You’d really have to see it to understand just how bad it was. I’ve attached a photo below but it really doesn’t do the color justice. If you want to get an idea imagine urine mixed with whipping cream and then covered it with high glass paint. It was really that bad!

Anyone who knows me well knows that grey is my absolute favorite color. (I remember asking a friend of mine if it was OK to paint my entire house in different shades of grey. The short answer is no but I still believe I could make it work.) After a trip to Home Depot, we brought home a few paint swatches and taped them inside the closet to get a better idea of what the paint would look like.

Wondering what we chose? You’ll have to come back to find out, but since I forgot to take pictures when we first removed the door, the after photo at the top will give you a sneak peak of what’s to come.

What’s going on in your bathrooms? Many of you are probably following Meg’s bathroom reno. Heather wrote in yesterday saying that she has an embarrassing bathroom as well. Does anyone else have anything to share? Or does anyone else just want to help me encourage Heather to post her bathroom photos? (Misery loves company.)

Bathroom Makeover: Chapter One

We’re friends, right? So you’ll completely understand when I say that sometimes something is so bad that you decide you’ll pretend everything is okay and work on something easier instead. Have you ever done this? That is the story of our master bathroom. No one ever sees it and we have 1.5 other bathrooms. So when I moved in I looked at it, got overwhelmed, and decided to focus my efforts on something else. Finally, it was no longer avoidable. To be clear, we have no budget for a full bathroom makeover (goodbye fantasies of a fabulous bathtub), but it was finally so bad that something had to be done. Here is a glimpse of the disaster area that we’re working with. I’m not hiding anything here, so if nothing else, please appreciate my honesty.

You can already see the clutter that is piling up on the counter space, but worse was our linen closet. It seems like every forgotten item was pushed in here.

If you look at the photo above, you’ll see that we have a huge mess of things in here. I kept throwing dry cleaning on the bottom shelf because I didn’t want to leave it on the floor but the dry cleaner that we go to seems to only be open during the hours that I am at work. We have extras of everything as well as beauty products and vitamins that I bought at some period and then disliked or found something better. At the top of the closet was the extra toilet paper and a few clean towels that I would have to jump to reach. It was a mess.

But that’s still not the worst part. I’m pretty embarrassed to show you the state of the shower area.

You can already tell that it’s going to be bad. For some unknown reason, the person who owned the condo before us decided that it was a good idea to put wooden blinds with a metal top in a shower. Why would anyone ever think that was a good idea? The result was rotting blinds with rust mixing into the rest of the ick. Let’s see a close-up of all this.

You may be thinking, “How on Earth could you live  for one moment in a house with such disgusting grout?” Well, instead of cleaning the grout like a normal person might do the previous owner caulked over bits of the grout that looked bad. He got mixtures of caulk and grout on the tiles and everything just looked gross.

Now obviously we didn’t just have issues with caulk and grout. The tiles were stained from hard water and just generally gross. Take special note of the floor of the bathtub. The grip of the floor had actually worn off in places, making it somewhat dangerous to use. Thankfully we have another full bathroom, and aside from the time we had a dinner party and paraded all of our guests up to the bathroom to see what a mess it was–I’d hate for people to ever think that we are without fault–no one ever saw it. Until now. I’m sharing it with you.

Peter and I were debating about what to fix in the condo: the dining area so that everyone would think that we were that much more fabulously put together, or the real issues of the bathroom. While sitting in our bedroom, staring with terror into the bathroom, we decided to take off the door to the linen closet. Immediately we had a bit of hope and we were committed. It is a pain and we’re nowhere near done. This weekend, albeit very productive, left us screaming and cursing at this horrible room. Go ahead, judge us, but stay tuned for the cathartic removal of the blinds, re-caulking, plumbing woes, and lots and lots of bleach.

Best.Find.Ever.

Last night we drove to Lockhart, Texas and back all because of a little ad on Craigslist. It started when I got bored at work and read this article about a mom and daughter design team. The two were talking about decorating the daughter’s first apartment and how so many pieces were found at thrift stores and then fixed up. I asked myself, ‘Why don’t I ever find anything on Craigslist?’ (Yes, I’m weird like that.) And I decided that the answer was that I don’t frequent thrift stores and Craigslist enough. So, I turned on some happy music and started flipping through the tens of pages of furniture that was posted today. And that’s when I saw this fainting couch for only $30. At first I dismissed it thinking, “Oh, we don’t really need that,” but I sent the picture to Peter anyway. Then I decided to email her, just in case but my email turned into telling her that we wanted it. Then I realized that she left a phone number and probably wanted us to call, so I called Peter and asked him to call her–I was at work after-all. Time ticked by and I hadn’t heard anything from him. I started searching for other fainting couches and the prices were popping up at $600, $1000, $3000. After a slight panic attack, I realized that I was already attached. Peter had no luck calling, but the moment we stepped off the elevator to get into the car, I made contact! After driving awhile into a somewhat dreadful neighborhood we found it. The girl was so sweet and even helped us load it into the car. To be clear we drove for about an hour like this, except imagine the rope slightly more secured.

But when we got it home, we decided it was definitely worth the $30. (Yes, sorry we’re normal people and our house is a bit of a mess.) Let me shut up for a second so that you can get the full effect.

Of course the dogs checked it out for us to make sure that it was OK.

The last picture gives you an idea of just how ugly the fabric really is. It has some slight wear. Plus, let’s be honest, it was never an attractive fabric to begin with.  Luckily, I was able to look at the ad and see past the ugly fabric and see potential in the great legs and beautiful tufts. I honestly don’t think I would have done that a year ago when I wasn’t so home blog obsessed. The best quote of the night was when Peter and I were driving home trying to maneuver that car around (very safely, of course Mom!!) and he said to me, “It’s never a dull moment with you, is it?”

$30 later a brand new project is born. I’ve never upholstered anything before, but I have some ideas.  This may be a tough project to start with but I have a few books on upholstering things upstairs and I feel like we did so well with the price that even if I mess up a couple of times, it’ll be alright. Maybe I should recover the little cushion on our dining room chairs just to build some confidence. What do you guys think? Is this the totally amazing find that I think it is or should we have passed it up? And for those of you who actually have upholstered something before, do you have any advice? I’m all ears right now.

IKEA Curtains

True story: When Peter and I first moved in together one of the first things we did was hang the curtains that I brought with me. I hated the curtains to begin with (they had some weird print on them) but Peter was so thrilled to have them because the space looked “homier.” I wish I had a picture of this. Anyway, the curtains were WAYYY too long for the windows, but Peter was so excited that we decided that we would leave them until we had time to hem them. Fast-forward a couple of nights. I woke up to go to the bathroom, my foot got caught on the huge pool of curtains that were laying on the ground, I tripped and pulled the half the curtain rod out of the wall. Peter woke up and immediately asked if I was OK. In the morning he had absolutely no recollection of this happening and wondered why the curtain rod was hanging from the wall.

It was a discouraging moment. We took the rod down and pretended that it never happened. Instead we focused our decorating efforts on the living room. But when Peter bought me my Mongstad, it was painfully obvious that we needed curtains.

(Do you see all those white spots? Those were from the previous owner and then from my aforementioned experience.)

We wanted something that felt airy but could still block out some light if we wanted to sleep in. The first curtains that I found were made of a beautiful white piqued fabric but as Peter quickly pointed out, they wouldn’t block out any sunlight. Then he came up with the brilliant idea to layer a thicker white fabric with my pretty light one. For less than $30 we were out of the store and on our way home.

IKEA’s curtains are great because they come with that special iron on hem. I’m interested in learning to sew but sometimes it’s just nice to do things the simple way. All we had to do was pin each curtain to the desired length.

Then iron an even crease. In my opinion this helps avoid ironing in the hem and then figuring out that you folded the curtain kattywompus. Lay the ironing tape toward the base of the crease, fold the fabric back over, and iron.

After you’ve finished ironing, trim the excess fabric above the crease.

Peter and I then hung both curtains together by alternating loops as we put them on the curtain rod.

Here’s the much more refined after. Yes, I realize that we need to find some matching paint and paint over the little white spots.

(It is easiest to see the pique if you look toward the bottom of the photo.)

I think the curtains add a bit of textural interest and without a doubt make the room look homier. What do you think? Do you like the white or would you have gone airier?

Do I Live Under a Rock?

OK, this may be really old news to all of y’all, but it’s new to me: Hobby Lobby carries some of the exact same decorative pulls as Anthropologie!!! I’m not saying very similar or good knock-offs, I mean the EXACT same. You can imagine how my heart sunk when I saw a different colored version of what Peter and I really wanted to use for a hutch that we were fixing up a few months ago. (I never posted after pictures but I plan to do that shortly.) Our color wasn’t there when we went but it looks like they used to have it and for a fraction of the price. This is the color they had:

And this is what we wanted:

We tried to order them online, but they sent us the wrong ones and then told us that they were out. But they’re still listed on the website, hmmm. Now that I know that they’re at Hobby Lobby for $4 instead of $8, I couldn’t bring myself to order them.

So tell me: is this old news or is it new to you too? (If you’ve known about this for a long time, then please try to let me down gently.)

Images courtesy of Antropologie.com