Thursday, March 31, 2011

Forget "Design on a Dime"

We're designing on a nickle! We have this pretty horrendous bathroom in our new house. To refresh your memory:




Ceiling fan? Lolwut.


Sorry for the bad picture quality. Not only was it monsooning in Baltimore that day but we only had the iPhone because I left the camera at home.

I know some people go gaga for the old bathroom look, and while I'm not a fan of brand new, soulless bathrooms, I pretty much hate subway tile and (at last that kind of) basketweave tile. For the time being though, I'm going to leave it alone (SIGH) and just concentrate on making it pretty, until we can invest a good weekend in just the bathroom.

First thing, first: Paint. I've had about 15 different paint ideas for this room, and thankfully it's small enough that if we really hate something, we can easily change it. I think we have finally settled on a pretty mauvey-lavendar that we found for $5 in the cast-off paints at Lowes, my favorite place to shop for paints.

Because there's so much black and white, we're going to try to go for the whole Hollywood glamor look. I have an aged mirrored mirror (I'm sure there's a term for this but I can't find it), that looks very glamorous, is about the right size for that room and was only $25! We're also building a copper pipe towel rack and I may spray paint it silver or gold. I guess it just depends on what it looks like when it's complete, and we compare it to the mirror and paint. From the extra bits we're going to build a hand towel rack as well.



The mirror kind of looks like this, only it's aged with pewter not gold.

Finally, we're going to bring West Elm into the loop with this beautiful, reasonably priced bathmat (sadly, replacing my beloved Anthropologie one that is just not the right color).



We'll be getting black. With two dogs, two cats and two humans that don't mind getting dirty (did I mention we'll be gardening) it doesn't make sense to go with white.

Unfortunately, there's no shower in the bathroom, so we're going to try this nifty extension that Amazon sells for $13. I have a feeling it's not going to be the best thing ever, but installing a built-in shower system is probably going to run us about $200 and we will probably wait a couple months.

In addition, there's no storage. We found a cool under the sink storage system for pedestal sinks and we'll be adding in shelves. I have a fondness for West Elm's lacquer shelves but will probably splurge for the boxed mirror shelves to replace the medicine cabinet, reflect more light and get more storage. Because we'll have so much to do right at the beginning, the shelves will probably wait with the shower system.



Also, that ceiling fan has to go. I have no idea what I want to replace it with, besides a chandelier. I'll probably craigslist one. Maybe something super girly to annoy Steven! Sadly, purple doesn't do the trick because Steven loves purple. It makes him feel royal or something. I guess, in the end that's ok though because I love purple just as much.

So, if we break down the total costs of what we're buying/implementing right away it comes out to:

Paint: $5
Shower extension: $13
Bathmat: $29
Towel racks: $50
Spray paint: $3
Mirror: $25
Under sink storage: $30
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Total: $155!!!!!!!!!!!

Yay savings! And that's definitely a total I think Steven can live with, even if I'm dragging him to West Elm after work today to buy that beloved bathmat.

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