Bathroom facelift

A while ago I posted about painting our master bathroom yellow and the dramatic change it made for us. To remind you, here is a picture of what we started with when we moved in. Not awful, but nothing nice. A few things you can't see are the metallic linoleum, the oak and gold light, oak and gold towel bars and toilet paper holder, and the non-flushing, corroded toilet.

For me to use this bathroom at all, we decided early on to get somewhere to put our towels, upgrade the hardware, and paint. The paint cost us $12 for two samples of Sherwin Williams Banana Cream, the shelves were $20 each, from target. Our hardware on the vanity I took off a desk I had refinished years ago and we were getting rid of. The toilet paper roll and towel bar were free from my parents left over. We did have to buy 1 18 inch towel bar to match and that was $31 from doorcorner.com. We went with Dynasty hardware's Sonoma collection in brushed nickel. I would definitely recommend this over what you can get at Home Depot or Lowes.

The light switch plate was $10. The curtain we had from our old house and matched the shelves perfectly. This took the bathroom from my least favorite place in the house to a room I liked a lot. It was bright, more modern, and felt more of our style. We planned on this getting us by for years and we were both okay with that.

This past week I decided to take the bathroom reno one step further and paint the mirror/medicine cabinet and stain the vanity. We hadn't talked about further changing the bathroom or had any plans off doing anything. I was brushing my teeth looking into our oak and gold medicine cabinet and realized that if I were already going to be using primer and white paint (deck painting), I might as well just touch this up. Once I painted that, I realized it wouldn't be too hard to fix the vanity also.

I looked at a few blogs to do the vanity, but wish I had just gone straight here: http://www.monicawantsit.com/2012/02/staining-oak-cabinets-espresso-color.html

The reason, was that the other blogs did not specify that you DO NOT WIPE the stain, you let it sit. After much anxiety about it not coming out how I wanted, once I read this, it was a game changer. Here is what I started with and what I end up with.

One coat:

Because I wiped the stain, 2 coats got me this streaky mess:

3 coats looked about the same giving me a very depressed feeling. Then I read to not wipe and got this:

Gorgeous!! Honestly, I was so proud and excited at how this came out. I was happy to have these two new changes get us through more years in this bathroom. But, seeing how excited I was about the vanity my husband surprised me for our anniversary with a new counter and light. Which turned into a new faucet, counter, light and toilet!!! It was obvious with the new counter we couldn't put our gold chipped faucet back on, then once we were that far, I just said forget it, lets do the toilet and call this project done (minus floors and shower door).

Yay! Full bathroom reno!!! I keep reading how the return on bathroom work is high and I think we nailed it with this. Either way, we love it and that is all that matters!!!

Ta da!!

This project wasn't without its headaches and I will post on the troubles installing the new sink/counter/etc :)