9/1/2008 Bathroom Makeover Project

Ya'll remember how I decided to redo my hall bathroom from the sophisticated yet poopy brown to something lighter and less cave-like? Well, after a weekend of hard work, would you like to see the results?

Before picture: It's brown and gold and dark blue. Definitely in need of a makeover.

The first thing I did was go out and buy a gallon of Kilz to cover the brown. Only the brown wasn't going down without a fight, and even the Kilz was having trouble covering it evenly. The original plan was just to paint the walls a lighter color (blue of course, because why should this room be different than every other room of my house?) but the unevenness of the Kilz put the proverbial wrinkle in that plan.

Enter Plan B: Wallpaper. Now, at first I was worried that wallpapering the bathroom was "out", but a quick perusal of Southern Living Bathroom edition proved otherwise. So I drug Tony and I headed off to Lowes for some wallpaper. I was all set to look through dozens of sample books, but it turned out that the perfect paper was already in stock and waiting to be purchased. It's hard to tell in the pictures, but the wallpaper is textured like Venetian plaster, with white and cream/bone/almond coloring. Bright, but still works with my bone toilet and shower.

THEN I decided that floor to ceiling wallpaper might be boring, and that we needed a nice contrast color. I hemmed and hawed over paint samples for about an hour before deciding on a lovely shade entitled "Milky Way" by Valspar. Technically, it's a blue, but it's a dark blue with a bit of green, so it's not like any of the other blues in my house. Works for me. (Tony says it works for him too, but after being stuck in the paint department for an hour, I think he would have claimed to like anything).

THEN I decided that the gold fixtures that I had with the brown just weren't cutting it anymore, so I spray painted them silver again. (I know this sounds odd, but it actually works out rather well, and gives you some subtle yet neat swirl effects in the paint. Plus it's cheaper than buying all new towel bars and toilet paper holders).

The brown cabinet above the toilet was wrong, wrong, wrong with my new look, so I took it down and replaced it with two white smaller cabinets that we had in the attic. Much cleaner looking, with a more contemporary feel, don't you think?

Lastly, I painted the oak cabinet white. The wood was all tired looking, and needed to be restained or painted or something. And since the name of my new look was bright and clean, I went with white. Looks like a whole new cabinet, doesn't it?

We still need to switch out the old sink faucet for the new one that we picked up, and I want to add some kind of chair railing to delineate the wallpaper from the paint, (I'm thinking a nice row of decorative tile will do the trick) but even I wasn't in the mood to go back to Lowes for the 5th time in two days however, so that will probably wait until next weekend. All in all, however, it wasn't a bad little do-it-yourself project. Ya'll look for it on the cover of next year's HGTV Kitchens and Baths book.

Bright, beautiful, AND budget-friendly...

New faucet: $50

2 rolls of wallpaper: $14 each

Wallpapering equipment: $10

Quart of Valspar Milky Way: $7

Quart of white paint for cabinet: $7

Silver spraypaint: $3

Kilz: $14

Not having a bathroom that looks like a cave: priceless