One Room Challenge Week 6: Vintage-Inspired Bathroom

It’s finally week six of the One Room Challenge, and I get to show you my finished bathroom. Are you ready to see how it turned out? We absolutely love it!

If you’ve just arrived at DIY in PDX via the ORC blog, welcome! I’m Rachel, and I blog about everything DIY, from fixing up my old house, to making accessories and decor, to growing plants and cooking. For the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge, I’m sharing the gut renovation of the most-used bathroom in my house.

I know I’m not the only one who finds before-and-after pictures incredibly satisfying, but they’re THE BEST when they’re of your own house. Sometimes I look at the old real estate listing photos of my house just so I can compare how it was then to how it is now. It makes all of the money and hard work worth it. This bathroom is especially fun to compare, because the before was SO BAD. And it’s fabulous now.

If you haven’t been following along since the beginning, there are a few things you should know: We hired professionals to remodel this bathroom this summer. So we didn’t do the One Room Challenge in real time, and the full remodel took eight weeks.

Hiring a contractor was 100% the right decision for us and this bathroom. Even in the middle of the pandemic, our contractor was great to work with, and the bathroom turned out just as we pictured. There is no way we’d have had the time or skills to produce a bathroom this well-done. Maybe in a year of slowly chipping away at it we could have managed, but between having a toddler and this being the only bathroom on our main floor, we didn’t have that kind of time.

If you’re in Portland and in a similar boat, I’d highly recommend our contractor, Maxwell of Green Light Construction. He’s the first contractor we’ve ever hired, and we wouldn’t hesitate to hire him again.

I did do a few things myself in this bathroom. Like adding shelves above the toilet. The space looked empty without them, and it gave us a place for plants and extra toilet paper.

I found the wood board at the ReBuilding Center, then cut it into shelves, sanded, stained, and sealed them.

Then I went to hang the shelves on brackets from Cascade Iron Co. And I hung them the wrong way.

Steven and I had talked about putting the brackets up the opposite orientation, but when we went to do it, we both totally forgot. Oops. I blame the sleep deprivation that comes with living with a toddler.

They can go either way, so it could have been fine, but we both wanted them flipped, with the vertical parts on top. So I took the screws out of one set of holes, flipped them, took the anchors out of the wall, drilled new holes, and filled and repainted the extra holes.

I like them much better this way, so the extra work was worth it to fix it.

The other projects we took on were changing out the hardware on this vanity, painting the outlet covers, and switching the light switches for push-button ones. Here’s what the outlets and switches looked like before:

The electrician totally could have done the push-button wiring, but when I went to buy some at Rejuvenation, they didn’t have any in stock, and had to order them. So we didn’t have them in time.

For the outlets, I originally wanted to use white porcelain outlet covers to match the porcelain light switch cover. But they were impossible to find! Believe me, I scoured the web. I have some in my kitchen that Rejuvenation used to sell, but they stopped selling them. So I gave up and painted some metal outlet covers with a foam roller and the wall paint. They’re kind of quirky and I wasn’t sure about them at first, but now I really like them. What do you think? Are you pro- or anti-painted outlet covers?

I’m STILL waiting on a storage piece I ordered in July to arrive. It’ll go behind the door, and give us a place to store towels and other stuff that doesn’t fit in the vanity. But given how hard it is to photograph a small bathroom, I might not have even gotten pictures of it anyway, so I’m calling this bathroom done.

Overall, we love this bathroom, and we feel so lucky that we got to remodel it. Everything about it is an improvement over the original. I’m not joking when I tell you that I feel way more attractive in this bathroom–the lighting is a million times more flattering. I guarantee it’s not life with a toddler during a pandemic that’s making me look better, so it must be the lighting. 🙂

If you’re looking for sources, I’m going to put together a list which I’ll post soon. But in the interest of getting this reveal out there while Juniper is still napping, I’m going to wait on it. Leave me a comment if you’re wondering about anything in particular in the meantime.