Bathroom Reno

I fell in love with our house the first time I saw it. I loved everything about it - except for the bathroom. It was tiny and cramped and although it had nice tile halfway up the walls and an over sized tub, it had little storage and ugly, green colored walls.

Our bathroom before we started the renovation

When we first moved in I made do with the little bit of space we had in the medicine cabinet, the weird "cabinet" above the toilet and the one underneath the sink. I bought those little plastic stacking bins from The Dollar Tree and was surprised at the amount of space it freed up.

We lived like that for about a year before both my husband and I started to wonder how we could make better use of the space. There's a tiny section of wall behind the bathroom door that we thought we could turn into shelving but it turns out that's where our chimney is located. So, back to square one! Jordan came up with the idea of building a medicine cabinet from an old pallet and adding a sliding barn door (because I love all things 'farmhouse'). By doing so, we could gain a few more inches of space by having one shelving unit instead of two separate ones.

While my husband was building the medicine cabinet from scratch, I started painting. Our vanity was a dark espresso color and although I didn't hate it, I just felt like it was too dark for the space (considering almost everything else was light & bright) so I chalk painted it in Annie Sloan's Coco. I felt that the softer color made the space feel bigger and it matched the accent tile on the wall perfectly.

The vanity painted in Annie Sloan’s Coco

The next thing I did while we waited for the barn door hardware to come in the mail (Yay for Amazon!) was paint the wood trim white. One of the biggest things I loved about the house when we first looked at it was the color palette the previous homeowner's chose for the walls. Almost every room had painted white trim, except for our bedroom, our son's bedroom (which we ended up painting) and the bathroom. I give tons of credit to the previous homeowner's on their painting. The wife showed up the morning of our closing with paint all over her hands. Not only did she fill in the holes on the walls, but she also painted over them too.

Once the trim was painted and the new medicine cabinet was built, we took the old ones down and my husband painted the walls in Sherwin Williams' Gracious Greige. With the the walls being tiled halfway up, we were limited on the color choice for the walls. But luckily, my favorite color is gray anyway and this color matched perfectly with the hints of gray and beige in the tiles.

Gracious Greige by Sherwin Williams

When the walls were dry and my husband hung up the medicine cabinet, everything came together perfectly. Our tiny bathroom now looked a little bit bigger and brighter. There was just one little problem... Our oak colored blinds stuck out like a sore thumb now. It's so true when they say one thing leads to another! So with $14, I made these DIY Roman Shades!

I love the way our bathroom came out and although it was stressful at times, all of our hard work was worth it and by DIYing it ourselves, we saved a lot of money!