Bathroom Update

Our downstairs bathroom is probably the 2nd most important room in our house in the morning after the "useless room".  (I'll give more details about that in a future post.)  It holds all the church clothes for everyone, Dorrel's work shirts,  and is the shower everyone but mom uses.  It is also the only way to get to the laundry room where William and Miriam's shoes live.  It was finally time for an update.

The thing that was holding me back from doing anything were the harvest gold bathroom fixtures. How do you make them look a bit less dated? Swapping them out wasn't really an option because while there are lots of white toilets out there, finding a white urinal that would match up with the installation holes of our current one was impossible. (I love the urinal for its easy to clean aspects and can't give it up.  If we ever build a house, there will be a urinal.)  A few weeks ago I replaced the light over the mirror with a new one that gave off a lot more light. The room felt cold and sterile.  It was finally time to change the wall color. I had an almost full can of paint left from the hall re-do (hall re-do) and decided that the yellowish cream color would coordinate well with the harvest gold fixtures. (My official paint shirt is a worn out church shirt of Dode's.  You can see the evidence of past painting projects splattered across it.)

When we moved in, the vinyl floor was terrible.  Here's a patch of it in the closet which we never covered. It might have matched the gold bathroom fixtures but that's about the only good thing I can say about it. 

We'd bought a large piece of vinyl flooring for the kitchen in the house we'd lived in before but never got around to putting it down.  Before we moved in to our current house, Dode replaced the vinyl floors in all the bathrooms with "our" vinyl.  It cost us nothing and was a great update.  We also replaced the cracked and discolored sink in this bathroom with a new top and I installed a closet rod in the closet for our clothes and this bathroom remained that way for the next five years.

 Once I repainted the walls, it was time to work on the sink cabinet.  The hardware on the cabinet had been painted and was very dated so I'd removed them and planned to put in new ones.  Unfortunately, the 40 year old cabinet did not have the standard distance between the holes on the hardware and I couldn't find any new knobs.  I absolutely refused to put the old hardware back on so we lived without knobs and handles for five years. 

I'm a big believer in faking it when it comes to home improvement and decided that I'd just fill in the old holes with fix-it-all (a just add water spackle mix), sand them down, and drill new holes that would match up with current hardware.  I made a bold move and painted the cabinet black with paint leftover from the popcorn machine table top.  We also made the bathroom safer by changing out the ordinary outlet with one that has ground fault protection.

The shower stall had a hard plastic folding door that was so hard to clean.  We have hard water that turns everything brown.  Scrubbing that off takes harsh lime removers that give me an asthma attack every time.  The children also weren't the most patient with opening and closing it and it had developed cracks.  I bought a plastic shower curtain and shower rings.  When it gets dirty, I can just throw it in the wash.  If it doesn't survive, I'm only out $2.97.

 I also replaced the boring frameless mirror that was showing water damage along the bottom edge with a fancier mirror.  I think the bathroom turned out pretty well. 

I think it looks even better in person!

Of course, no home project would be complete without a set back.  When we took the old mirror down, we found that they'd wallpapered the room around the mirror.  There were seams all around the edge of the mirror.  Our new mirror wasn't the same size so it took several coats of fix-it-all (and several days of waiting for those coats to dry) to cover the seams before I could paint.  The kids complained about no mirror in the bathroom and the dust from the fix-it-all everyhwhere. 



Is the bathroom now perfect?  I am resigned to living with harvest gold toilet and urinal.  Maybe it will come back in style some day!  But, what kind of torture is it to give a mother of six children a WHITE bathroom floor?  It's a nice quality vinyl with no signs of wear, but it's white, as in shows every speck of dirt.  It only takes one trip through with a dirty bare foot that's been playing outside to leave marks.  At least when people come over they can see for themselves if the bathroom is clean or not.  Someday I just know Dode will surprise me with a new bathroom floor in the delightful color of dried mud.  Until that day, I will continue to cast distainful looks at my bathroom floor.