The Plan: Mini Bathroom Makeover

I've been totally into planning updates for our house lately. I've been checking out a lot of home decorating/renovating blogs, and I've found it to be very inspirational. My favorite is a blog called Young House Love. It's a young couple blogging about all the updates they've done to their home. Since starting the blog, they've owned three homes and they've done SO much work in all of them. I am totally in awe of the vision they have. They can look at a room and just know what would make it look 10x better. I wish I had that.

Anyhoo, like I said, it's been very inspirational for me, and now I have a long list of things I want to get done around the house. But making a list is infinitely easier than actually doing the things on that list. So this coming week, I'm going to start doing. And I'm starting with the bathroom.

 

Ok, so it doesn't look that bad in the picture. But I think it really needs a facelift. At first, I just wanted to paint it. We decided on a color called Upward by Sherwin Williams.We need a light color because we have no natural light in our bathroom, and I don't want it to feel like a dark dungeon.

Upward by Sherwin Williams

Before I continue, I have to take a moment to stress how incredibly terrible the previous owners of this house were at painting. I like to call them the "One Coat Wonders" because they obviously felt  that one coat of paint was enough, no matter how it looked afterward. They also must really have had something against painting tape, which is fine if you can take your time (they didn't) and have a steady hand (they didn't). Needless to say, the trim in our entire house is covered in paint. They literally just slopped the stuff on the walls without regard to anything they might get paint on, the trim, the floor, the counters, whatever.

See, I told you it was bad.

So I'm going to be painting the trim in the entire house white (I've always had a thing for white trim)  and I might as well start with the bathroom, since I'll be painting in there anyway. And if I'm painting the trim white, then we'll need to get new doors that are white. So we decided to just replace the closet door and leave the entry door for the time being (until we decide to replace all the doors, which is on the list for the future). 

Then I mentioned to James how I thought a nice frame around the plain ol' builders grade mirror would look great, and he figured he could probably make one pretty easily. So we searched a bit and found a few good tutorials on how to do it.

 

Then I took a good look at the vanity, and I said to myself, "Self, this vanity needs new hardware STAT!" But you see, it has those pesky little plates attached to the doors/drawers under the handles that were oh so popular in the 70's. And for some crazy reason that I can't comprehend, the builders stained the cupboards after they put those plates on. So there is no stain under it. So if I want new hardware, I need to either try to match the stain, or paint it a different color. So I'm thinking I'll paint it a nice deep brown, and paint the mirror frame to match. Sounds like a "fun" little weekend project. (I really hope you can sense my sarcasm.) 

In my head, it looks something like this, only less black and more brown:

And that, my friends, is how a simple idea to paint the bathroom snowballs into this list:

• Paint the walls
• Paint the trim
• Paint the vanity
• Frame the mirror
• Change vanity hardware
• New door for linen closet

Wish me luck!