master bath transformation

Well this project is all but done, but I am so excited about it, I felt like I had to share! 

I really disliked this bathroom from the start.  It used to look like this:

Peachy-Tan is not a pretty color.  This is the color my skin turns when I burn and then it turns into a tan.  It's just pink enough for me to not be a huge fan.  In February I up and painted the walls grayish brown. 

A definite improvement, but not wonderful. So I did some research, and despite everything my mother and others said about painting tile, you can.   So I went to Home Depot and bought some primer that is specifically designed to adhere to extra smooth surfaces. It's called 1, 2, 3 primer.  It worked really well!

Above is my friend Emily helping me paint the tile.  On the right is after the one coat of primer.  You might be able to see that it's covered, but you can still see some peachy-tan is peeking through.  Which is really perfect, because I still had an enamel layer to paint on.

While we were painting I pulled off this horrid stuff.  It's vinyl shoe-molding.  It was probably nice when they put it up, but it's very yellowed and dirty. The issue with this being up is that they glued and caulked it on.  So the glue and caulk were partially left on when I pulled all this off.  

You can sort of see where I didn't paint all the way to the bottom.  I also opted to try painting the tiled in hardware (tp holder and towel bar).  I worked wonderfully.  While it's drying this paint levels itself out, which is wonderful!  It dries very glossy and beautiful. It looks just like enamel tiles with white grout.  There is ONE single spot (that I've noticed) that has some little drips. :( but everywhere else it looks great.  Jeff even told us he forgot that it was pink before. Win.  

 We used this groutable tile and white grout.  After reading reviews and seeing pictures from the website about this Traffic Master vinyl tile we decided to grout it, so it would look more like actual tile. We also used the piping method.  It was really hard at first, not sure if the grout was a little too dry or the bag not right or it was just lack of experience, but I eventually let Daniel do all the grouting.

I didn't let him have all the "fun" jobs though.  I marked the tiles for cutting.  Which was pretty cool actually.  I used some math skills that I thought would never get used. Hooray! It's not perfect, but it will work. The hardest cuts were around the toilet and in the doorway.  Daniel did the actual cutting with a exacto knife and a heat gun.  when heated this tile cuts like butter.

 

Whole floor and a closeup.  (for reference, the tiles are 2 square feet)  It's an oddly small, yet spacious bathroom.  It was remodeled (the only one in the house to be before we moved in) to be used by the handicapped.

This is what the top of the walls looked like before we added the crown molding.  The blue tape marks where the studs are.  You can't see it in this picture, but some places in the ceiling really need sanding down and retaping over seams, but we didn't want to tackle that so as best we could we covered it up with Large crown molding. 

I thought I had a picture of it with the molding but I don't, so I'll update it really soon with the picture. So make sure you check back!!

Love,

Sarah

Cabinets

 Just to recap, this is what the kitchen looked like before.  It was COVERED in that orange-y wood.  It was everywhere. Even the walls. It was a little bit charming, in a woodsy cabin kind of way, but not for us.  We removed the two horseshoe shotgun holders that were above the door and we began to see potential.

Let me give you a brief recap on what happened.  I don't have pictures of all of this unfortunately.  :-(

My parents took the doors off (we didn't label them!) We used this stuff called citrus-strip on the doors to take off the finish.  This was grueling labor.  Fifty year old Varnish doesn't come off easily.  We probably should have done two kinds of varnish/stain remover or two passes of the citrus strip and a washing with mineral oil in between but I was so very over it that  I didn't.

After the counter-tops were in I knew I wanted the cabinets to be gray too.  I sort of hated to cover up all the wood, because it was beautiful, just too much pine.  So my thought was to do a gray "whitewash."  Well my friends, it seems that this is not a common choice because there was very little to choose from.

I really wanted to use a product like the ones below because I thought it would be easier, but alas, they didn't have any in Gray.  :-(

We ended up with a water based tinted gray that was really dark, a white wash that was called pickled white and a clear sealer.  I was impatient so I sort of blended them together.  to get the look I was after.  These were some of the samples that I tried on an inconspicuous area. (As a side note: we didn't get the wood that clean, that is untouched wood that was previously covered by the laminate backsplash and the inside of a cabinet.) 

Another reason that this was a bad sample of what it would look like later is that this was raw wood and almost everywhere else had been stripped, but still had a slight stain to it. 

This is how they turned out.  for some reason there is a slight pink/orange hue.  It is probably because  I didn't do the whitewash before I did the graywash. But who knows.   I think they look pretty cool.  Daniel likes them too.  (We spray painted the hardware: first with a metal primer in white and then in a oil rubbed bronze, two coats, more on that at another time!)

If I had it to do all over again I would do a few things slightly different:
1) I would be more patient. (Ugh, yes I was VERY impatient about getting it done, but now I wish I had taken more time.) 
2) I would do a whole coat in the whitewash, then a whole coat in the gray-wash, then a whole coat in the pickling whitewash. (That's why I was so impatient, I sort of smeared all those together in 1 coat)
3) I would have also done the inside of the doors.
4) While we are on doors, I would have labeled them from the start. Big mistake!
5)  I wish I had known more about Chalk paint.  I think I would have considered it. (Maybe it isn't off the table)


Well next time I'll show you the floors and then what the kitchen looks like now!

love,

Sarah