Before and After: 1st Floor Bathroom

I feel like it was only yesterday when we started this project. This is the fastest we’ve completed a project in this house!

I think we finished so fast (at least, fast for us) because we had a very clear plan, had our budget ready (thank you, Christmas money!), and ordered everything at once. Plus, this bathroom is really tiny.

We swapped out the mirror with a round West Elm beauty that we bought on sale and kicked the ugly builder lights for a great fixture at a great price. We also loved a lot of things that we saw at Anthropologie and bought the yellow towel and towel hook from there. The (still empty) soap dispenser is from Target.

The rug is also from Anthropologie and has all of the colors in the bathroom. I love that rug! The simple curtain is from Amazon and it is supposed to be wrinkled. It’s the newest fad, don’t you know?

A better shot of the rug. My purty dear.

Doesn’t this vanity look so much better in black? It was a pain to paint and paint and paint (even though Nick did all the painting, it was hard work nagging encouraging him to make progress), but the result is so worth it. Even if we still have to do a few touch-ups to make it perfect. I also really love the knobs. It’s hard to see the detail here, but they’re glass and full of bubbles.

You can see the light fixture a bit (slightlyyy) better here and also the shelves. I’m not satisfied with the arrangement at all, but I’m sure that in a year or two we’ll find the perfect set-up. Gashh. I stole a frame from the kitchen and I like the scale, so I’ll pop in a small frame on there later. Please ignore the current art in the frame right now. It says “Coffee Time”… definitely not art for the bathroom. Oh, wait…

Ah, here you can see the ugly stripes that we considered and kicked to the curb a while back. I like the whale art much better. The towel hooks (from Hobby Lobby, spray-painted white) are very cute and much more user-friendly than the cheap builder towel bar that was there before.

This shot is just to show you the yellow ceiling. It doesn’t really show up well in photos, but we really like the yellow on the ceiling! It’s fun and unexpected and it’s not too in-your-face. It just works with everything in the room.

1 down, 13 spaces in the house to go. We’re almost there! Yay!

A Peek at Our Progress – 1st Floor Bathroom

Before:

Now:

You can see that we’ve primed our vanity and now it’s waiting for it’s first coat of paint. Hopefully we’ll be able to finish up the vanity this weekend and get started on the cabinet doors!

Did you like how we decorated our lucite shelves with a roll of toilet paper? I just HAD to put something up there and it was the only thing around. At least it is white, so it matches!

You know we just had to paint the ceiling…

We had some paint already laying around (I just love it when people say, I just had this laying around.. I picture the “things” laying around on the floor, lounging in their PJs), so we painted swatches of five different paint colors on our ceiling…

The teal paint was left over from our office, the gray is from our guest bedroom, and the sky blue was a test paint sample we got for our office but decided was too bright. We loved how the teal paint looked with the dark gray. We felt the light gray looked good, but was boring and predictable. The sky blue paint proved to be too bright, again. I don’t know if we’ll ever use up that little paint sample.

The light gray paint is the same as our living room and the yellow paint is the one we tested out as stripes on our walls but hated. The light gray was MEH but the yellow was surprisingly looking good.

Our top contenders at this point was the teal and the yellow. Then we held up our devil whale art (it is even better looking in person) and our rug to see how they looked with the two colors. The devil whale art has some yellow in the clouds (you can’t really see it here) and of course the rug has all the gold yellow, so they went perfectly with the yellow ceiling.

Last weekend, we tackled the ceiling and I think I might have a paint splotch still stuck on one of my (thankfully disposable) eye contacts, but it is all done! We also painted the walls dark gray as well. Done, done, done! I think it will be MONTHS before we tackle another bathroom because all the taping and tarping were driving us crazy. Such a small space, so much prep work!

Of course, Tala helped us out, as usual.

Seriously, that cat likes to snuggle up in the weirdest spots. The weirdest ever was a colander… here’s the proof.

Considering…

…this acrylic shelf for the first floor bathroom, above the toilet, to hold… stuff.

In the picture in my head, there would be two of them.

We have a gift card to CB2 and I would love for it to go to something for our bathroom.

I’ve always wanted something acrylic in our house.

And this gives us reason to buy even more little cute things for the bathroom. A most perfect plan.

Bathroom lighting: ideas, choices, and indecision

Now that I’ve bought the mirror and the whale art, and the rug, shower curtain, and knobs are on their way to my house, the next thing on my mind for our bathroom revamp is… well if you’ve read the title, you already know. Lighting.

Our current lights:

This is actually from our master bathroom, but you get the idea. Gorgeous, it is not. Our first floor bathroom is just like this, but with three bulbs.

I would LOVE to put in scones…

via lonnymag.com

…or a ceiling light…

…but I don’t feel like calling an electrician just yet, so we’ll stick with a wall light.

I like the clean look of the lights in this photo:

via The Estate of Things

Some options we’re considering:

via Lights Fantastic

via Lights Fantastic

 

via Lights Fantastic

All of these come in two lights or three lights. I’m not sure which we should go for, two or three? What do you think?

Just for funsies, here’s another animated GIF to see it all in action.

I’m still not sure… Do you have any better ideas for bathroom lighting?

All lights are from Lights Fantastic –  because there’s a store in Austin and there’s a great coupon that I plan to print out and use, if we buy from them. Find the coupon here, if you’re near Austin or Dallas!

The internet is our best friend.

I recently found out about ShopStyle.com‘s sale alerts feature – you choose the stores that you like and they’ll email you whenever they have a sale and they’ll also tell you what items are on sale. So of course I signed up and chose several stores, including West Elm.

Yesterday, I got one of these emails from ShopStyle and there was a cool mirror on sale:

That would be perfect for our first floor bathroom! So I eagerly clicked over to West Elm but lo and behold, the mirror was all sold out.

I called the local store and asked if they had it in stock. They did! But it wasn’t on sale… I told them that it was on sale online. They said they would honor the sale price. We rushed right over and they were also having a 20% off sale on all sale items! We picked up a few other tiny accessories and I thought the 20% wouldn’t apply to the mirror because technically it wasn’t on sale in the store. But it did! So we got the mirror for around 60 dollars. Niceeee.

This wasn’t the first time – when we bought our spiffy trash can, I looked at the price in the store and knew it was cheaper online. I found it online on my phone and showed it to the store worker and she honored the price. Always check the price online!

A secret for you – these cool pillows are on sale online and sold out, but aren’t on sale in stores (at least, at mine). If you need new sofa pillows, consider these:

I guess I won’t be a millionaire…

Whoa – just a day after I posted about my first floor bathroom plans, I found out that West Elm had beat me in my quest of overtaking the shower curtain business. They have many GREAT new items and I am drooling all over my laptop. Especially over their bathroom decor.

From shower curtains…

…to bath mats…

…and bathroom accessories.

I don’t think we’ll change our bathroom plans, but these are great items to keep in mind for our other two bathrooms!

Check out more new goodies at West Elm. You won’t be sorry.