Master Bath - Painting Complete!

Well, it's finally done!

For those looking: I chose Martha Stewart Living's Tadpole Green, color-matched to Behr Premium Plus Ultra.  I could have gotten away with one coat and a little touch-up, but I did two full coats, and it covered beautifully. 

Before - when we moved in

After (but before I touched-up the edges)



Before - when we moved in

After - new floors, new toilet, and the new sheet-rock in place



Before - when we moved in

After

Wow, that's a remarkable improvement over how it looked when we moved in!

After - with door replaced with sheet-rock and made into a walk-through

Before - during renovations

After!

Before - After we replaced the cabinetry

After!

 Of course it looks darker because it's night-time, there's no ambient lighting (the lighting over the vanity is missing), and there's no mirror to reflect light...but trust me.  It's beautiful.  :)

Here's a shot of it right next to the tile.  You can see that it brings out all the light-greens in the tiles while still being a great complement to the overall room.

This is probably the best color-for-color shot of the green.  This is what color it looks like in person, and it looks great against the tile!  It was difficult to find a green that worked with the dark, tight space of the powder room but also warmed up the room and looked great against the large, bright space of the main bath area.

As you can see from this area, we will need to replace the baseboard trim.  :)

So, what do you think?  Sadly I get home way after dark so I can never take any bright pictures, but trust me.  It's beautiful.  :)

Now all that's left is painting and putting down baseboards throughout, building the cabinetry, painting the cabinets, putting the mirrors up (i.e. finding a mirror for the main bath area), shopping for new light fixtures, figuring out the towel-rack situation, and covering up the patio door with some kind of window blind.  Wow, that sounds more daunting than originally thought. 

Next up: Upstairs bathroom painting, and gardening this weekend.

Sneak Peek

I have to do some ceiling touch-ups (hopefully tonight) and remove all the tape/plastic sheeting before I can post an official "complete" picture, but here's a sneak peek at the bathroom!

The green is so fabulous.  Beyond words.  It looks amazing in person.

Powder room, where mirror should be

Comparison of tile beside new paint (ignore the tape separating them)

A peek into the powder room from the shower area (ignore the tape!)

More pictures soon!

Hope you all had a great holiday, whatever you were celebrating.

Getting Primed

So I taunted you all with primer pics, and now I shall deliver!

Except, pictures of white walls are boring, and there's not really a lot to say about them.  "Ooooh, they're...primed and ready for paint!  Yay!"  Boring.  Painting walls white is boring.

Before

After

Vanity

Medicine cabinet

Walk-through to powder room

From powder room - notice freshly-painted ceiling!

 After priming, I went ahead and painted the ceiling last night (Glidden Ceiling Paint - it was the cheapest, and it seems to actually cover better than a lot of more expensive ceiling paints.  It only required one coat to achieve a nice, even white).

Newly-textured area above shower

Main bathroom ceiling - looks sooooo good

 You may not remember how the ceiling in the powder room looked before I painted it, but it was pretty terrible.  I took a full hour on it with a belt-sander to mow it down to a manageable amount, but there were random chunks taken out of the wall where the original stalactites used to live.  Now it's all nice and even.  :)

Over sink

Over toilet

Today is time to slap on the green!  I'm so excited.

Two Tickets to Sheet-Rock Town!

As mentioned in my previous post, I have some free time off work with the holidays coming up, and if Husband and I don't end up going on an unplanned vacation for New Years (which, let’s be honest, is not out of the question), my intent is to spend this time off gardening.  I haven't had a lot of time to garden in recent weeks, given the weekends have been filled with trips to other cities (and states) to visit family and friends, and after work is impossible given I’m home well after dark.  I’d planned on getting started on the gardening for this weekend (since I have a three-day weekend off – thanks, Christmas!), but something kind of awesome and exciting has come up:

We just got the bathroom sheet-rocked and re-textured.

That means finally being able to paint!!  Yay!  I love painting.  I had been sitting on my paint colors for about three months, waiting for us to drum up the money (or more accurately, be bothered to call someone to come out) to get it finished.  We found an awesome guy who, unlike all of the other sheetrock guys we called, actually showed up when he said he would, and did a fine job.

To prep for his arrival, we had to rip out the door-frame that led from the powder room to the main bath, and we decided that while we liked the chair rail, it didn't go with the rest of the house (as there was not another chair rail anywhere else in the entirety of the house...why is it in the powder room?), so we ripped it out as well.  (And by "we", I mean Husband.)

Let’s have a little reminder of how it used to look, for all of those who’ve (understandably) forgotten:

Missing medicine cabinet that needs to be filled in

Above you can see where the door-frame and chair rail were removed, as well as the spot where the McLazies "fixed" the wall

So to sum up, we needed to fill in the hole where the medicine cabinet was removed, have the wall behind the bathtub/just right of the toilet repaired (see above), fix the area where we removed the door between the powder room and the main bathroom, and texture the ceiling and wall where Husband replaced the bathtub with the shower setup (no pictures of before, sorry!).

Because he’d have to texture the walls where he made repairs, we elected to just have him re-texture all of the walls.  This worked for me, because the wall texture was remarkably different between the two rooms.  The main bathroom area had almost no texture whatsoever (which I liked), but the powder room had that same horrifying, will-cut-your-hand-if-you-touch-it texture.  Even after I spent eons sanding it down, it was still pretty hard core and looked bad.  So he re-textured it all with a nice stomp-grind.  Here are the results:

The powder room

More powder room

Powder room, mirror side

The walk-through

Walk-through from the main bath

Medicine cabinet no more!

Shower-area ceiling retexture

Now you may have noticed something special here in the previous picture.  This was my favorite part of this whole process...the ceiling was retextured too!!

A better picture of the ceiling and wall together

I literally cannot express my joy enough at this ceiling.  SO EXCITING!  It was like Christmas morning when I walked in and saw that the horrible semi-gloss and stalactite ceiling was gone, and replaced with it was this beautiful, evenly-coated ceiling.  Pure joy, y'all.

We put a coat of primer on last night (Husband helped, and it cut down on the completion time considerably), which I will post pictures of tomorrow.  Tonight, if all goes well, I will be putting the first coat of official paint on!  Yay!

Stay tuned for primer shots!

Dost Mine Eyes Deceive Me?

No, they don't.  I'm actually posting!  One for an official "here's something we did" thing, and another will just be a little sneak peek. 

First, if I didn't say so already, the kitchen is completely unpacked and is in full use.  Pantry is cleaned out and sorted (or "sorted"); cabinets are full of utensils (except when Husband unloads the dishwasher and doesn't remember where I told him that the stuff goes, so it just sits on the counter until it magically disappears into its proper location.  Or, more accurate, just gets used and put back in the sink again); and I'm always cooking so the stove looks like a food bomb went off...every day.  Poor Husband (for he is House Husband).  I try, but most of the time, I'm like, "Eff it.  I'll clean it later."  And then later it's just magically clean again.  Must be the gnomes.

The master bathroom has received no actual renovation.  We haphazardly moved the stuff we needed from the living room into the bathroom (towels, bathroom products, etc), but it just ends up finding its resting place on the toilet we have yet to install upstairs.  The master vanity was used as a holding place for renovation materials, bathroom storage, and probably rat skeletons (I call him Skippy), while the very small powder room was being used as our primary getting-ready area.  However, given that the powder room is a) small and b) also contains the toilet, I got fed up a few weekends ago, and cleaned off all the crap items crap off the counters in the main area and decided we'd actually use the master vanity for its intended purpose: Having two people able to use an area at once to get ready.

There's not much to show, really, since this is just a temporary situation.  However, I took the mirror that is supposed to go in the powder room and gave it a temporary home in the main bathroom area.  I cannot describe to you how much that small of a mirror opens up this area.  (It's actually a large mirror - the mirror we will have to buy is going to be around 5 feet wide.)  Then I just cleaned up the rest of the area and moved our daily toiletries to the main area. 

Tada, or whatever.

It's a huge improvement over how it used to look, trust me.

In other news, Husband replaced the door to the bedroom (if by "replace" you mean, remove the door that was leaning up against this area and blocking it from our path, and actually installing a new door that wasn't falling apart).  We already had to remove the trim to put the granite in, so it's not that pretty.  Sigh.  But it will make it easier to paint this area without having to worry about painting around the trim, so I am Ms. Bright Side!

However, while this is technically considered a progression in renovation, installing this door has actually set us back.  Because installing the door meant tearing off the trim to the bedroom side as well, and motherf#$!, because I just painted it.  Grrrr.

I will attempt to maintain my calm.  Not successfully.

...

Onward to part two of my post: SNEAK PEEK!!!

Let's pretend that the area around the new (waiting-to-be-planted) pansies and Cast Irons isn't horrifying.  It will require extensive pruning, sweeping, and digging.  But I will have a SUPERAWESOME DUO helping me out!!!!!

I hope they're not looking at this picture, because they may rescind their invitation to help. 

Gulp.

But (hopefully) seriously!  I have the parents coming into town this weekend, and I'm totally going to put them to work.  Muhahahaha!!  They have offered to help me "plant some stuff in the front yard" which in their language probably meant "plant some stuff in the front yard", but to me meant "pull weeds, dig up gross ground, pour new soil, plant, and mulch." 

Moms can't read the internet, right?

Crap, I think they can.

Tile and Grout and Counter Me, Baby

So...

The bathroom granite is in.  A makeshift (clearly temporary) cabinet has been made for the master bath.  Most excitingly, the tile is finished...which means the shower is finished!  But perhaps most importantly (but not most excitingly), the toilet is also in.  Yawn, but whatever, it's a necessity.

So, pictures?  Yes.

Before

After!  (But before the granite guys had cleaned it off)

Granite + New Faucets and Sinks = Awesome!

One of our good friends built this cabinet in like, twenty minutes.  I love that in addition to being dual sinks, it sits higher up (comes just above waist level on me, and i'm about 5'8).  I've always hated bending halfway over just to wash my hands, and it also gives it a feeling of being firmly seated in the ADULT category.  I can't imagine any three-year-olds coming in here to wash finger paint off their hands.  (And thank goodness for that!)

Here was the model that our buddy had to work with:

Husband make good drawing

Anyway!!  Onward with pictures, right?  Who cares about drawings of cabinets.

New flooring (pre-grout) in the powder room

Powder Room Before

Minus faucets that were later installed

This is actually a photo of the upstairs bathroom, but who cares?  It looks the same.

Before

After

There's actually a lot of drama about this one.  I wanted a dual-flush toilet for the ever.  I hunted, searched, price-shopped, read reviews, etc etc.  Found the perfect one (as you may have remembered from previous post).  Except, it didn't fit.  It was a 12" rough-in, which is a standard size on like, 90 bagillion homes.  Except no, the 12" rough in standard toilet that is the only thing sold anywhere ever?  Doesn't fit.  This is a 10" rough in.  Which means I had to special-order this sucker and get it shipped.  It's still a pretty awesome (high-efficiency) toilet though, it's just a regular-flushy toilet instead of the cool "push a button" toilet.  Le sigh.  But that just means that our guests will get to use the awesome dual-flush toilet of awesome.


I'm stalling on purpose, because I know this is totally the moment you've totally been waiting for, AMIRITE?!  Without further adieu, I bring you.....THE MASTER SHOWER!

Before

And now....

Fully installed in all its amazing glory - check out that ceiling!

This one shows more of the flooring and the step

How awesome is this border?  This (in addition to the bronze squares in the kitchen backsplash) was another small point of contention between Husband and I.  I liked this, but i liked other stuff better.  I thought this was a little too girly.  (I mean, c'mon, it has flowers.)  I wanted a rope-looking Greco-Roman distressed border, but it just hung out too far from the wall and, given how clumsy I am without the addition of slippery, watery surfaces (the bathroom floor is in no way slippery, but this baby giraffe will still find a way), we figured we shouldn't install anything that I could potentially knock myself unconscious with.  There were plenty of other selections, but this was the only other one that had that Greco-Roman Ruins look to it and it matched everything perfectly, so we went for it.  Glad we did, because it looks amazing. I also love that it bifurcates the straight-tile and the diagonal tile.  It's such a classy look to me.

Here's a shot of the shelf.  I don't know why they didn't install two, and I think it looks weird without the second one, but I guess Husband didn't think to ask when it was being installed and like the sink, they probably didn't come fully prepared and just hoped we didn't say anything.  It's still big enough to put the stuff we need on it and I kind of like that we don't have a ton of shelf space to put a whole bunch of crap.  Keeps it looking nice.  :)  I also totally love that the shelf has that unfinished surface-feel to it which is supposed to detract from soap scum, hard water, and other shower-ailments.  Score!

And can I just say?  The tile guy was spectacular.  Not only did they install this stuff and kind of go the extra mile, but they went out of their way to give everything such a seamless look.  Witness:

Yeah, they cut the tile to look like that.  It gives the overall look such a polished and clean appeal.

I know I've said it a lot already but, I've found my new favorite item in the house.  It's so amazing to just be in love with so many aspects of your home and be excited to come home and play with it.  :)  Here's hoping the newness doesn't wear off anytime soon.

And after us trying it out together last night (minus glass door, of course - that's in the purchase queue), I gotta say, I don't think I'm going to hear anymore complaints from Husband about not having room in the shower.  Totally. Freaking.  Awesome.

Y'all are all welcome to come over and shower!  Just pitch in for the water bill. : )