bathroom reveal

Happy Monday!  Did you all have *wonderful* weekends?  I hope so.

Jason and I spent our first weekend together in our house in nearly a month.  It was pretty awesome, as we had a chance to explore Kalamazoo more with new friends!  We also got lots of stuff done around the house, so I’ll have a lot to show you this week!

First up on our agenda was the bathroom.  Its been tiled and functional for over a month now, but I just got around to painting it last week (all surfaces required 4 coats of paint – it was a bear!).  We hung up shelves over the weekend and now it’s *almost* finished.

Do you all remember the nasty pink carpeted before?

How’s this for after?  We removed the bulky cabinets and lightened up the space by choosing white tile/toilet/sink and light gray paint (Gravity by Valspar).  We opted for open shelving (purchased from Ikea, same as in our kitchen) to keep things airy. (Ignore the hole in the wall – we need to drill holes in the tile and replace the vent.)  We  chose a charcoal-colored grout to add sort of a modern touch to the vintage-shaped hexagonal and subway tiles.  We’ve also been in enough white bathrooms to know that white grout (especially on the floor) will turn yellow/grey/tan/black with wear, so we hope to avoid this problem with our dark grout.

We inserted a black tile piece around the border to give it a bit more “custom” look and to mimic the black hex border in the floors.  And I love the big glass vase with toilet paper sitting next to the toilet.  Here’s to never being without TP in your time of need!

And the other side of the bathroom?  Well, the before featured a pink tub, big mirrored tub doors, floral wallpaper, old yellowing linoleum floors, and more dusty nasty pink carpet walls.  Here’s where I point out that the previous owners had wallpapered the ceiling AND the window/door trim!  Yikes!

Our happy after features a white tub, white and black hex tiles, and white subway-tiled walls.

We added all new shower apparatus in brushed nickel.  (We still need to pick up a pretty shower curtain, and I’d like to get a wall-mounted shower rod, but a plastic curtain and tension rod will do for now!)

We’re still missing a mirror, though, and I’d like to do something to hide the ugly white PVC pipe under the sink.  Methinks we should have installed a shiny chrome drain pipe (maybe we will someday).  I’d also like to get a few pretty bins to sit on the shelves and hold our frequently-used toiletries, since the single metal bucket currently sitting on the shelves isn’t quite meeting our storage needs.

For now, I stocked the shelves with things we already had laying around the house – towels, a plant, other odds and ends.  This is my favorite little vignette – I stuffed q-tips and cotton pads in two beakers, added a glass lab jar, and set it on a mirror.

So far, we’re really pleased with it, although it will be nice to get a mirror in place.  We spent a few hours yesterday hitting up local stores for a plain-ish oval-shaped mirror and came up empty handed…  any suggestions as to where I should be able to find one?