Master Bath Reveal AKA Look But Don't Touch

When I was a little girl, I had this habit of setting up really elaborate houses and villages for my Barbies, Strawberry Shortcake dolls, Little Ponies—you name it—and as soon as I had them arranged to my seven-year-old satisfaction, I'd walk away. I didn't want to play because everything looked so great, I didn't want to mess anything up.

This was exactly the way I felt when we got the master bathroom to a state of near finish last week.

It's been a long time coming...

When Mr. W told me he planned to inaugurate the shower last Friday, I immediately wanted to seal the door and only allow people to look into the room through the windows from the backyard.

I knew the shower had hit its peak and would never, ever be the same after it had been used. Which is why I took all of the pictures below before Mr. W put his dirty body in there. 

I might have also watched while he squeegeed it naked to make sure he did a good job. Seriously, I was only overseeing the squeegee job....while drinking a glass of wine...and smiling.

Anyway, we still have some sanding and painting to do on a few spots on the wall, and Mr. W is in the process of building the drawers and cupboard doors for the vanity—but for all intents and purposes, the bathroom is fully functional.

We've had some major ups and downs with this one (as with all of our projects, I guess). We initially bought a totally different slab of marble that had all sorts of issues when our counter top installers went to cut it, so we had to buy a completely new piece. I love the new one, so it was probably a blessing in disguise, but not a blessing for our bank account.

The cute little hexagonal tiles in the shower were also super problematic. We had a hard time getting the grout just right—which surprised me because these are timeless and you see them everywhere. Apparently the people who were laying them in the 1930s and 40s had way more skills and patience than we do.

Did I mention that the glass for the shower was also cut wrong when they first came to install it? Yep, kind of one thing after another with this room. But like Leo in The Revenant, in the end we triumphed.

Sorry if I just ruined that movie for you.

Here are the winners of Best Supporting Bathroom in a Musical or Comedy:

I took my first shower in there Saturday morning and I have to say, it's pretty freaking awesome. Well worth all the long work days and long wait for it to be finished. It's a beauty. Can't wait until we finish the vanity and I can reveal its gorgeousness, too.

Stripe Tease

Sometime last week I got it into my head that I needed to snazz up our small bathroom. It could have been the full moon, or the fact that Mr. W uses that bathroom daily, so it looks like a locker room most of the time, or it might have been the influence of one of my latest reads—Styled by Emily Henderson. Whatever it was, I got a wild hair that I couldn't shake.

I had to do something to improve the aesthetics in there.

Every time I walked down the hallway, all I saw was a toilet and a big white wall and I just couldn't take it any longer. So I started messing around in Photoshop to see how I might be able to break up the space.

First, I tried a wire magazine rack (Mr. W does seem to do an awful lot of reading in there...)

Next, I tacked in a vintage Guinness picture to match the one we have hanging over the toilet.

Then, I tried on an accent wall treatment. 

Searching for inspiration, I Googled "black and white bathrooms" and found a large number of them with striped walls, so I decided to give that a try.

A lighter variation seemed better—and was clearly the winner among the Photoshop mocks.

A quick search through our paint closet and I found a shade I thought could work perfectly in the room. While Mr. W went to Santa Barbara for a golf lesson, I set to work taping up the wall to create my stripes. I measured out my stripe widths and then used Mr. W's laser level as a guide to set up my tape lines.

I cannot tell you how many times I drop the f-bomb when I'm doing projects like this. Let's just say, I'm very glad we don't have children in our house. They'd be getting detention a lot at school if they existed.

If you're not a crazy DIY blog reader like me, you may not know that the trick to getting crisp paint lines for these kinds of projects is to paint over your tape with the base paint color first. So after I got all my stripes laid out, I went over each area I planned to paint grey with the existing white color of the bathroom.

Once that was dry, I went to work rolling on the grey and tried to busy myself with lunch-eating and cat-petting in between coats. Of course, I forgot to take progress pictures, but when it was all done, I nearly died of joy overload. I think it turned out so cute!

The entire time I was working on the bathroom, Mr. W was outside building the vanity for our master bath. He only came inside bleeding one time. Which I suppose is pretty good when you're operating a table saw... Very excited to get this guy in place and finish that bathroom too!

Once the master is done, we may finally finish the laundry list of stuff we have to still do in the small bathroom (read: demo and re-tile the shower, build a concrete countertop for the vanity, install the new sink and faucet, make a new frame for the mirror, caulk the floor trim, and repaint the door casing). Until then, I will distract myself by enjoying it's charming and adorable stripes.

Renovation + Relationship Balance...in the Bathroom

Several weeks ago I was recounting the harrowing story of our master bath tub installation to a friend (it's very heavy and had to be cemented to the bathroom floor, which required many, many rounds of lifting it out of its wooden frame and putting it back in...anyway...) when she remarked that Mr. W and I must work really well together on this sort of stuff.

Yes. And No.

I cannot tell you how many times he has banned me from his workspace. (I ask too many questions and point out too many issues that aren't important in the moment.) And I can't tell you how many times I've nearly beaten him in the head with whatever object I just painted that he scuffed.

Typically, he is all about process and precision and I am all about speed and good-enough aesthetics.

Oftentimes, his by-the-book way of doing things leads to me whining in a pool of salted caramel ice cream, lamenting the fact that we're STILL Under Construction—while my corner-cutting drives him to lecture like Al Gore and curse like Amy Schumer. And then he usually bans me from the room.

But sometimes when the stars are aligned just right, our dueling approaches come together in marital renovation perfection.

For example, during the bathtub installation.

Although Mr. W had a bizarre Rainman-esque talent for applying wood veneer in our other bathroom, when it came time to install the veneer around the tub deck, we hit a wrinkle.

Literally, the veneer wrinkled. And so did Mr. W. He crumpled into the bathtub in total and utter defeat.

Cue my good-enough pep talk. I assured him that we could just cut out a bit of the extra veneer with a razor and flatten it into place and it would look like any other line of wood grain—no one would ever know we had popped a big bubble right there. He begrudgingly complied and you know what? It looks great. And no one will ever notice the line when they look.

The next snafu came when we were trying to get the tub lined up to perfectly sit in the deck hole and nestle just right between the floor joists so that we (haha who am I kidding with this "we" stuff—I meant HE) could connect the plumbing. The only problem was that there was a huge 4" x 4" beam just east of where the drain needed connect through the floor.

Mr. W had to cut the tub deck hole bigger so we could shimmy everything around and Doh—we accidentally ended up with a gap between the deck and the lip of the tub.

He put his head in his hands. I thought he might cry. After all the hard work with the veneer, now there was a stupid gap that couldn't be repaired.

But ah—wait a minute—this corner-cutter is also an expert problem solver.

So saddened by my poor husband's broken renovation spirit, I sprung into action and grabbed an extra piece of quarter-round floor molding. This is where we balance each other out perfectly, my friends. When the perfectionist is near tears, I use my ingenuity to bring him out of it.

"We'll just cut a piece of molding, paint it, spray it with high gloss and it'll look like it's part of the bathtub. Plus, it's on the backside so NO ONE WILL EVER SEE IT." (We say this a lot in our house.)

The clouds parted in his eyes and a little sunshiny ray of hope broke through.

So that is the secret to our renovation success. Picking the other person up after they've fallen (either on their own or because we've knocked each other down). It seems to work pretty darn well.

That said, do me a favor, would you? Don't scrutinize the bathroom when you come visit us.

An in-progress shot of the shower. Mr. W finished tiling, we just have to grout and find a shelf solution for inside the shampoo nook.

I'm in love with the hex tile in the shower floor. We're still installing the final little halvsie pieces (I think Mr. W cut about 85 of them today) but it's going to look great once it's grouted.

Still working out some kinks in the veneer. Need to grout the floor. Oh and then there's the whole building of the vanity and installing the sinks shtick to deal with...

What We're Making: Sconces from Leftover Pendant Lights

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about our half bath half remodel—which features a new pair of DIYed sconces. When we first started making plans for this bathroom, we thought we'd go with a more conventional over-mirror light.

And then we remembered the two leftover pendants we had from the kitchen remodel.

Which would cost us $0 to use in the bathroom.

We were sold.

But we didn't want to be matchy-matchy with the lights in the kitchen. That may be fine for couples who go to Disneyland together dressed in twin Hawaiian shirts, but not for us.

So I got the brainy idea to try to turn them into sconces kind of like these:

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Mr. W loves a good challenge, so he assessed the situation and decided we could run some sort of metal tubing from the base plate thingee (technical term) to the dome part. So off to Home Depot we went in search of the perfect metal tube. We found some copper pipes we thought would work and then, while wandering past one of the plumbing aisles, I found these perfect hollow rods with cute little finished capped ends.

Here's the thing no DIYer ever wants to admit: I have NO idea what the rods are for.

I looked through (literally) 30 pages of plumbing products on the Home Depot website and I can't find them. Could they be fancy float rods or toilet risers? No clue. (And I have no idea what either of those items are, either. Good thing we weren't actually searching for plumbing parts.)

Anyway, it doesn't matter. What matters is that they worked perfectly for our pendants-to-sconces project.

Mr. W rigged them all up and figured out the wiring. Then I tried to spray paint them glossy black...and failed. But Mr. W swooped in and gave them a sanding and tried again and now they're great. Why he has to be better than me at everything other than organizing closets, I'll never know.

I'm pretty darn happy with how the lights turned out.

Mr. W doesn't love them because he thinks they look DIYed, but I think they add just the right element of character to our "new" bathroom—like shiny black earrings dangling over the mirror. And anyway, perfection is overrated...

Half-Remodeling the Half Bathroom

 

There's nothing like impending houseguest visits to expedite a remodel, and thanks to a scheduled stopover from Mr. W's best buddy from Portland, our half bath revamp got put on the fast track. We spent the last days of 2014 plastering, sanding (I'm beginning to loathe that word), painting, and prettifying the little bathroom we'd turned upside-down.

Last time I showed it on the blog, it looked like this:

The toilet looked lovely in the shower, but it was even better sitting in the hallway for about 3 weeks. Thankfully neither of us is a sleepwalker—we might have ended up with a tragic accidental peeing-into-the-hallway-toilet episode.

Prior to moving the door from the laundry area/kitchen to the hallway, the bathroom looked like this:

Not terrible but not our ideal with the 80s oak cabinetry and grimey (no matter how much I scrubbed) linoleum flooring. Even worse, when we opened things up in the new kitchen layout, you could see right into the bathroom, and I don't know about you but I just don't want to look at a toilet when I'm making stir fry or taking a fritatta out of the oven...

So we moved the door into the hallway and reconfigured the half bath layout.

All was going well until our plumber accidentally cracked a tile during the toilet installation and we didn't have any extras. (Yes, everyone has lectured us on how you should never buy tiles at Costco because you won't be able to replace them if you break 'em.) Through some miracle, even though our tile was no longer available at Costco, Mr. W tracked down a tile display at one of the stores and was able to unglue a piece from it for us to use in our bathroom. Crisis averted.

Though we wanted to make this bathroom nicer, we also wanted to save some money so we made quite a few thrifty choices. We opted to recycle the sink cabinet and upgrade it with a new front panel and doors (courtesy of Mr. W's mad woodworking skillz) and extra hardware we had left from the kitchen. Eventually, Mr. W will build a concrete countertop for it and install the more modern sink and faucet we bought.

 

We also saved money by using the extra pendant lights we had left from the kitchen and turning them into shiny, black sconces. Stay tuned for a follow-up post on how we did it.

We were planning to reuse the old mirror that was in there but both Mr. W and I accidentally cracked the corners of it on two different occasions, so we had to buy a new one. He plans to make a sleeker new frame for this one in the coming weeks.

The one big thing we have left is to re-tile the shower. After the pain of doing our other bathroom's shower, Mr. W has vowed never to do bathroom re-tiling jobs again. We'll likely hire someone to do the tile (after we demo it) when we're working on the new bathroom add-on. The plan is to go for a look like this with white tiles and dark grey grout:

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We'll also be replacing the old crank-out window in there when we have new windows installed for the addition. So although it feels like a whole new room, we're really only about halfway done. Which is just fine by me. I look forward to having the hallway plaster dust-free for a few months!!