Mini Bathroom Makeover

Before:
bathroom before
After:
bathroom after
I kind of can’t believe that we’ve lived in this house for a year, and until a few days ago, we hadn’t done anything to the upstairs bathroom. It felt like until we could give it a full makeover, why bother? Now it feels a thousand times better to be in the room, though. The bathroom has a lot of issues, but the easiest one to fix only required half a gallon of paint.

This is only a mini-makeover, instead of a full makeover, because the bathroom eventually needs more than paint. The biggest problem is that there is no storage whatsoever. (So the thing I left out of all of these photos is the messy cart with all of our bathroom necessities on it.) The best solution would be custom built-in cabinets, but it doesn’t seem like it would make sense to put those in before we replace the tile floor. And the bathtub plumbing needs some re-configuring to add a shower-head. So until we tackle those big projects, we’ll live with this.

But we can certainly make it better in the meantime. Like, there’s no reason that just because there are no towel bars near the sink, the best solution is to clip a towel onto an old roller shade bracket on the window frame. And while there used to be mirrors stuck to the wall that fell off one day after we moved in, hanging a mirror I happened to already have over their paint outline didn’t do much to help.

I like to think of the tiled sink area as outsider art. Meaning it was clearly done by a non-professional who had no idea what they were doing. The bathroom tiling downstairs is clearly the work of the same “artist.” Actually I think the sink tile is just leftover scraps from the downstairs bathroom. Pfft, who needs tile spacers? Not my tile artist. They didn’t have a matching corner edge tile, so they just used one they decided was close enough. Tiling is all about improvising, right?

Right now I’m trying to decide if I should live with the tile as-is, try to paint it white (yep, tile paint exists), or cover it with concrete. I’m leaning toward the concrete option. What would you do to cover up this terrible tile?
Before:
bathroom before
After:
bathroom after

You know you live in an old house when you go to a replace a light fixture, and you’re grateful to find an actual electrical box. Yeah, some of the ceiling lights in our house don’t have them. Even with (relatively) modern electrical work, though, the lighting situation still presented some challenges. The main one is that the upstairs ceilings, even at their highest point, are only a few inches under 7 feet high. When your husband is 6’3″, this means that your lighting options are rather limited unless you want him to be in danger of smacking his head on a glass fixture. Yikes, nope. So we measured the top of his head relative to the ceiling, and determined he’d be out of the danger zone with a fixture 6″ or shorter. Which means that most of the retro schoolhouse styles, like the ones from Rejuvenation or Schoolhouse Electric that we put in other rooms, weren’t an option. That left us with the low-profile boob light, which we definitely weren’t excited about. So although we try not to rely on Ikea too much for our decor, now both our bedroom and bathroom upstairs feature the 5″-deep Vanadin light. I think it’s actually really pretty and works well with the vintage vibe of the bathroom. And you can’t really beat the $40 price tag.
bathroom after 3