My not so renovated bathroom...

y bathroom... needs work.  Yup, this is where the tour of my house begins to get a bit less interesting since this is where we started to run out of money and energy :)  Actually we never had money, just energy.  And then we lost all energy.  Anyways... bathrooms are the most difficult room of the house to renovate for many reasons.  First of all, they are expensive to renovate-- you're not just dealing with paint and flooring, but tile, lighting, plumbing, and more!  Secondly, changing your bathroom requires commitment.  You have to really REALLY like the tile you choose since you'll be stuck with it for a while.  And lastly, the bathroom is the most inconvenient room to have out of order-- you can always wash your dishes in the bathroom but you can't... I'm not going to finish that sentence.  You get the picture.  So I've made a few cosmetic changes in our upstairs bathroom to make it a little bit prettier, but it still needs some work!

Here's the bathroom when we moved in.  Not too bad-- actually painted a normal color!  With one exception-- stenciling around the window.  You can't really see it in this picture, but it's there.

And here's the bathroom now.  Let me show you what I've added and what I still want to change!!

As you can see we painted it a bit of a lighter shade of blue to brighten it up a little.  We also added crown moulding-- we had a few left over pieces sitting around in our garage.  They were too small for any other room in the house except the bathroom.  A few months ago, Doug and I were sitting around the house one Saturday afternoon when Caleb was napping and were feeling a little bored-- suddenly I came up with the idea to put up the crown in the bathroom.  Within an hour or two Doug had it up and we were starting with the painting.  We tend to be spontaneous renovators.

 

Eventually I would like to make a few changes.  First on the list, tile the shower.  The surround is okay, but there are a few cracks appearing here and there.  Tile would be so much nicer.

The bathroom floor definitely needs an update-- the lino is beginning to show its age.  I'm thinking that we'll tile the floor too.  I'm feeling excited to start a tile project-- in our condo I tiled both bathroom floors when I was 6 months pregnant with Caleb.  As can be imagined, I was sore for a few days after a weekend of laying tile, but it was a lot of fun :)

I've made a few simple (and cheap) changes to update the bathroom in the interim.  First of all, I swapped the pre-existing plain jane mirror for this one that was in the downstairs bathroom.  It was too big for the small downstairs bathroom and looked much better up here.

I put up a few fun pictures.  As some of you may remember I took these pictures a few weeks ago when Caleb wanted to show off his new toothbrush to Auntie Trish.  They were so cute... and I thought they would make fitting artwork for my bathroom.  Caleb approved.

I also put up this cute little picture of Caleb in the bathtub when he was just a wee little boy.  The frame used to be ugly.  I whipped out a can of spray paint one day and was transformed.  Spray paint makes me happy.

There are no towel bars in this bathroom except for one small one that only holds a hand towel.  To solve this problem I put up these cheapo Ikea hooks on the back of the bathroom door and also on the back of all three upstairs bedroom doors.  Problem solved!  Now there is no excuse for wet towels left on the floor... right?

One of my favorite bathroom updates is this fixed roman shade I made.  I ordered some cheap but cute fabric online and had my Mom help me figure out how to make it.  It was really easy.  The best part is that the panel is attached to the window with velcro.  If it gets dirty, all I have to do is rip it off the window, throw it in the wash and stick it back up.  Brilliant!

It doesn't exactly keep out a lot of light, but it sure looks pretty!

I also made a few of these cute little roman shades for my kitchen.  I'll show you those in a later post!

And this is my bathroom... for now.

[Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hirsche]