Home Renovations: Guest Bath

One of the major selling points for us on this house was that even though the second bedroom was tiny, it has two full baths.  As a family of four with two teenagers, we needed two bathrooms or there was no way everyone was going to be able to get ready in the mornings.  So, the guest bath immediately became the girls' bathroom, and I think it's safe to say they have totally trashed it.  

Over the years I have attempted to keep it clean, once even spending an entire rare and precious day off work just cleaning out the mess under their sink.  My organization system barely lasted a week before they had destroyed it again.  If the décor wasn't bad enough, and it was, my children have added to the nightmare with their total disregard for cleanliness.  They've stained the walls with make-up and the floor with hair dye. *note that the handles on the doors are cock-eyed.  it's not just the angle of the photo, someone built this house this way.

Mr. B and I may be partly to blame for this attitude because they saw that I hated the house and we kept saying that we weren't going to live here forever, so maybe we instilled this feeling of, "it doesn't matter if we trash the place."  Some of it was not my children's fault.  You see, all the fixtures were screwed into this 1/4" thick drywall but were not anchored to anything, so they all immediately fell right out with use.  The toilet also sweats and has caused the baseboards to swell and disintegrate, so in addition to disrespect, there's all that going on too.  Whatever the cause, whatever the case, this bathroom is most decidedly trashed and in desperate need of a makeover and a thorough decluttering.

In and ideal world, and maybe this will happen one day, I would remove this horrible cheap plastic shower kit and install something nicer with shelving deep enough to at least hold a bar of soap or bottle of shampoo and at long enough for a person to not have to curl up fetal style, but I don't think Mr. Bleu is ready for that drastic of a make-over, so we'll just have to press on and work with what we have.

It's kind of amazing what a couple of rolls of vintage wall paper and a few coats of paint can do. 

In addition to wallpaper and paint, we added this wood border to the room so that we could properly anchor these vintage brass fixtures to something that they wouldn't immediately fall out of.    The border was both glued and nailed to the wall, just to be safe.  The flooring is basic vinyl sheeting that we will likely need to cover over with new flooring in a just a few years.  

I added some wood appliques to the cabinet doors, but since they came to us with the handles askew, I decided to leave them askew.

I chose a nice shower curtain (Laura Ashley or Lauren Conrad?) to cover that mess until we can get it sorted, and we retiled and recovered the counter top.  We also added a new border to the mirror as we did for out bathroom and I love the look of it so much more. 

In addition to that we changed out the bare bulb lighting at the sink for a nice fixture which we got from the Habitat Restore for $3.75 and I painted it to match the mirror.

I also found a set of ornate vintage brass fixtures and painted them all to match the rest of the bathroom.

So, much like the other bathroom, I have a few more changes to make in here, but overall, I love the transformation and I thought I'd better snap a few pics before the girls get in here and every surface is covered in make-up, hair care products, and dirty laundry.