A New After

Of all the changes we’ve made to the house on Penny Lane over the last couple of months, we’ve come away with only one more mostly finished after: the master vanity.

Need a refresher on the history of our master vanity? Well, you can start here, where we attempted to remove the wallpaper. Then, move on to here, where we, again, attempted to remove the wallpaper. And finally, end here, where we decided to just paint over the wallpaper. I won’t go into much detail about the time between our last update on the vanity and now, but let’s just say we undid everything without the convenience of the edit command.

Two weeks ago, we had new tile installed which meant removing the old vanity to make room for the new floor-revealing, space-expanding vanity. A new vanity meant a new sink, which meant a new faucet and a new mirror. Suddenly, everything in the vanity area became new… except for the light fixture… But that’s ok, because somehow, that old, gold 70’s light fixture looks… how did you say it, Mark? Sprezzatura?

The sink and vanity are from IKEA. The faucet is from Overstock.com, by a company called Kingston Brass. The mirror was found at an antique store in Dallas (Dad, Ali? What was the store called?). I’d like to strip the paint off of the mirror to expose the dark wood frame, but Rob wants to leave it white. The wall paint is Sherwin Williams Worldly Gray.

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Bright White

I thought I should bring you an update on the progress of our master bathroom.  On Friday, I went on my own little paint shopping spree.  First, I visited a local mom-and-pop paint shop for some paint samples for our living room.  I had hoped to support local businesses by purchasing the bathroom paint from them, but since Home Depot had mixed Sherwin Williams’ Worldly Gray so well, I thought it best to return to them for the remainder of that paint color.

At Home Depot, I went paint supply crazy, purchasing 1 gallon of primer, 2 gallons of Worldly Gray in eggshell (for the master bathroom vanity area and the master bedroom) 1 quart of Worldy Gray in satin (for the steamy master bathroom water closet), a small jar of custom mixed sample paint, 2 bottles of spray texture, a package of paint rollers, painter’s caulk, and plastic liners for sealing off the room for texturing.

I bought the painter’s caulk to try out a technique I had heard the professionals use.  When taping off trim, they leave a small sliver of whatever they are taping off exposed.  They then squeeze a thin bead of caulk over the exposed sliver and overlapping onto the wall.  The caulk will provide a paintable paint-tight seal over the tape which allows for cleaner paint lines.  We’ll see how it works out.

Friday night we got to taping off the room, sealing it with caulk and spackling any holes or bare gyp board that needed to be covered.

Saturday morning, or rather afternoon by the time Rob got out of bed, we painted our base coat of primer.  As soon as that first coat was dry, we began taping plastic over the door frames and openings, mirror and cabinet in preparation for the mess that is spray texture.  I quickly sprayed down the vanity then thanked my lucky stars that it was the last time I would have to subject myself to that stuff.  For anyone wanting to attempt spray texture, I would recommend a heavy duty mask that will keep you from breathing in too many chemicals.

Sunday we took a break for the Super Bowl party we were hosting, but believe me, I showed off our half completed bathroom makeover to whoever was willing.

Monday we painted one more coat of the primer.

Here’s how it looks now.

What a dingey ceiling!  Don’t worry, I’ll paint it, too.  Doesn’t the crisp white primer look so much better than the before?

Here’s the water closet.  It currently has 2 coats of primer over the original dark green paint. Neither Rob nor I are convinced that 2 coats are enough.

Thursday, we’ll pick back up on the painting.  The vanity only needs 2 coats of Worldly Gray, while the water closet needs another coat of primer in addition to the top coat. Surely we’ll be finished by the end of the weekend.

The process hasn’t been so bad, we’ve had a great excuse to use our guest bathroom exclusively.

Vandalism-Chic

Ever since this post, we have been frustrated by our master bathroom.  At the same time that our guest bathroom was getting a much needed face-lift by way of wallpaper removal, re-texturing and painting, our master bathroom sat one-third wallpapered, one-third bare, and one-third exposed gyp board core.  The reason?  Someone really wanted the wallpaper in the master bathroom to stay put.  It was like one of those price stickers that comes with your new CD.  You can get a piece of it peeled, but sooner or later, it’s going to separate from the rest of the sticker.  You’ll keep peeling and peeling, but you’re just going to end up with lots of little sticky stickers stuck to your fingers.

Frustrating.

After 2 hours of inch-by-inch peeling and only a square foot cleared, I was convinced that our master bathroom would remain vandalism-chic for longer than I could stand it.  That’s when Rob came up to me and said, “Why don’t you just paint over it?”

So here we are, on the brink of another bathroom makeover.  This one should be even more simple than the last considering it has about half the wall space as our guest bathroom.

Here’s a good “right now” shot and what we have been living with since October.  It seems ridiculous just saying it.

And here’s a good “before” shot, complete with the previous owner’s furniture.

You’ll notice that the bathroom vanity is open to the bedroom and the toilet and shower are separated by a wall and door.  At first, I thought I wanted to tear down that wall and put a door between the bedroom and vanity, but having lived with it for 5 months now, I think we can agree that the set up works for us.  I can dry my hair in front of the mirror while Rob takes a shower and I don’t have to worry about the dampness counteracting my efforts.  I do, however, hope to install a sliding barn door between the bedroom and the vanity for that much more privacy when we have guests over.  Something along the lines of this:

You’ll also notice that the water closet is one of my least favorite colors – hunter/forest/dark green.  I’m hoping I’ll feel energetic enough to paint over that at the same time as the vanity.  Double the results, right?

John says hello.

One of the very first things we did after moving in was replace the toilet seat in the master bathroom. It was old, rickety, and stupid. We really thought there was going to be a lot to research going into this, such as “what size do we get?” “How do we know this is compatible with our current camode?” “Do we get white, whitish, or mostly white?” But it turns there’s just round lids, and elongated lids. So we chose the cheapest round lid, then said “let’s splurge!”, and ended up going up a step to get a slow closing one. No slamming the lid for us!

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