Blue Bathroom

This has been, like, a month in the making!!  Remember last month when I threw those swatches up on my bathroom wall? (You can see more of that process HERE.)

{lighting is awful on this pic}
[Swatch colors - Top row, Left to Right: Yellow Magnolia, Gabardine, Cement Gray. Bottom Row, Left to Right: Rattan, Salvia, Zinc. All are Martha Stewart paint colors.]

Well I finally got on the schtick and painted it!!!  Here she is now…in all her dark, dark blue glory!

So if you don’t recall…I asked Craig which swatches he liked…THINKING he was going to pick a certain on…and he ends up picking the blue (aka Martha Stewart's Gabardine).  Not the one I wanted.  He got frustrated and, to paraphrase, “Why do you even ask, you’re going to do what you want anyway!”  Awwww….so…feeling bad….I went with the color he wanted.  At first I thought I made a HUGE mistake….but….I have to admit….it’s definitely growing on me.  I think it looks so good with the paint in the bedroom, and in the daytime it adds the right amount of richness, while at night it provides the perfect “goodnight” moody atmosphere.

There’s still a few things that need to be done (besides the obvious decluttering!).  You can see in the pic above that I moved the small cabinet in between the vanities.  I actually like this little fix because that empty space was just a dust collector.  It’s supposed to be a vanity, but it’s a 36” high top and just feels super awkward to me as a vanity.  If it was dropped lower, that’d be a different story.  But since we do this here on a budget and like to “work what you got,” getting a new countertop right now or buying a new cabinet just isn’t happening right now. Anyway…we want to paint the cabinets AND that center piece, and we want to frame out the mirror.  Maybe in a cool grey stain.  Ooooo!  One thing we have to do tout suit is get a window covering for this window.  right now we are giving the world a nice little show everyday

I’m thinking frosting the window and doing a pretty window treatment.  (Actually already made the window treatment, mis-measured, so frosting is a MUST.  ha!) Also have to put stuff up on those walls!!!  Get it done!!!  Overcome fears!!  yup…I’m actually dedicated to decorating this room!

Spoiler alert: pot shot ahead.  Don’t mine the cleaning products on the back of the toilet…Changes are coming!

You may have noticed all the lights out in our lighting fixture…and the main reason for that is I hate this light fixture so much that I am refusing to spend the money on light bulbs.  I’d rather put that money towards a new fixture.  Seriously…hate hate hate it.

Also hate this one…I like to call this our crack light.  It’s dingy and awful and make me feel like I’m living in a dirty place not suitable for children or adults.  This is getting replaced too, because this is the light that Craig like to use the most.  Ug.  It’s seriously ugly and gives off the worst light.

Lots of stuff still to be done, but I’m really loving the way the paint totally changes the room throughout the day.  I just can’t wait until it’s all DONE!!!!

More Toilet Talk…

Are we talking Master Bath’s all around?  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…Heather and I seem to always mirror each other’s lives without even knowing it.  I called her last week and it went something like this
Me: Hey what’s up?  What are you doing?
Heather: Painting my Master Bath..you?
Me: Hm!  Painting my Master Bath!  Jinx!
Maybe it’s because we knew we’d be going back to work and knew time was short….but something lit a fire in us to be doing a bunch of projects around the house!  Since doing the tile I knew that I wanted to keep going with the bathroom and finish it to completion.  And although this sounds like a novel concept, it’s actually a hard concept for me to grasp.  So anyway…

Clearly I couldn’t decide which way I wanted to go.  This was the first time for me to do test swatches, and I have to say, it still didn’t make it any easier.  I love this color scheme of grey’s, blues, a little greeny teal, and yellows….but just didn’t know which one I loved the best on the wall

[Swatch colors - Top row, Left to Right: Yellow Magnolia, Gabardine, Cement Gray. Bottom Row, Left to Right: Rattan, Salvia, Zinc. All are Martha Stewart paint colors.]

That’s the view that best depicts the bedroom wall color.  It was really difficult to get both rooms accurate.  After about 3 days…I thought I knew which color I wanted.  I wanted to go with Martha Stewarts “Cement Grey”…the one on the upper right.  I asked the husband….99% sure that he would also pick the same color.  After all…it was the one he chose out of the swatches.  Which does he pick???  The dark blue in the center.  WHAT!  I was floored.  Then after about 15 minutes of me trying to pull him the other way…he says “Why do you even ask me if you don’t really care which one I like?”
Awwwwwww…….
So after much debate (mostly internal), I decided to go with what the husband liked.  After all he’s right…I do always ask him which he likes and always do what I want anyway.  So…I figured, I am going to get a sewing room since we combined the kids bedrooms….so shouldn’t Craig get a room of his own too?   
So I went dark….pictures to be posted soon….mainly when I can get some in the daylight so it doesn’t appear to be a black hole!

Master Bath Rehab

What do you do the day before you start a new job? Paint your bathroom, of course! Lani did a fabulous job telling you about our new jobs last week, but I have to tell you… my stomach was in knots. It still kind of is. Hard to believe it has been almost 3.5 years since I worked full time. Crazy how time flies! So while Will was attending his first day at preschool (only a half day to get the gist of what we were embarking on), I prepped my master bathroom for paint because I didn’t know what to do with my 3.5 hours of free time except go to Target… The best way for me to get my mind off of something, is manual labor. Usually I’m cleaning the kitchen top to bottom, or organizing something totally absurd like pictures or bills. On this day in history, I chose to paint.

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane to see how this bathroom as evolved in the last 5 years…

 
Glorious, isn't it? Ugh…those shower doors were barf-tastic. This is how it looked when we bought it.
Hubby donned this lovely look after we removed the shower doors not long after moving in, and refinished the whole tub/shower.

It’s a good look for him.

We then painted the bathroom a khaki color, or what was supposed to be a nice khaki color…
 
It’s not Ralph Lauren’s fault. Outside of this bathroom with no natural light, RL’s English Tan is a great color, and his paint goes on like buttah. But it turned very yucky and muddy and baby-poopy in here. After living with it for 4 years, it was time for a change.

When I picked up the paint for our Living Room, it was Memorial Weekend and Home Depot had a $5 mail-in rebate for every gallon of paint you bought. So what the heck… I picked up a gallon of Martha Stewart’s Driftwood Gray for the bathroom & probably kitchen… It had since been sitting on our balcony waiting to be used… and waiting… and waiting.
Love at 1st sight. This is also a good opportunity to talk about this hideous tile floor that the previous owners put in here. This 6”x6” cloud looking tile is no where else in our house. In fact, they did a decent job picking neutral travertine-esque ceramic tiles for our tiny entry & in the kitchen. I have no clue why this is in here. It is a pain in the butt to keep clean, too. The English Tan paint accentuated it’s fugly-ness, too. Awful. It will get replaced before we move out. Oh yes. It will. Thankfully, the Driftwood Gray paint tones down the fugly.


You might have noticed a few things…
1) This bathroom is tiny. 5’ wide x 7.5’ long. Our guest bathroom is a mirror image of this bathroom. T.I.N.Y. Our 1st apartment’s bathroom was bigger. The nice thing about having an itsy bitsy bathroom is that it takes no time to clean.
2) Yes, I used a small roller. We had the regular sized ones, but this tiny roller let me get in all those tiny spots. And I didn’t feel like if I mis-stepped that I was going to swing a big roller & paint something I didn’t mean to. Accidents happen and I’m a bit of a klutz.


In about 3 hours, I was done. It would’ve been a faster process, but tiny bathroom also = ridiculously hot box with no ventilation, so I took ample water breaks and also some check-on-the-3-year-old-who-is-way-too-quiet breaks.




This shot (above) makes me laugh because it truly captures how small this bathroom is. You can see the towel bar & the end of the counter in the mirror reflection.
The shower curtain is new-ish… I picked it up a few months ago from Goodwill, but it was still in the Target packaging. $10. I switched our toothbrush holder from a cream coffee mug to a mason jar, and the Q-tips are also in a little mason jar, switched from a crystal candle holder. I like easily washable containers for things like this in the bathroom because gunky bottomed containers I can’t clean totally gross me out. Especially when it holds something that I put in my mouth everyday (That’s what she said.).

Mather Bathroom Evolution:
   

Will also approves:

Apparently this bathroom is light saber wielding worthy…

Next on the list of improvements in this bathroom:
- A wall cabinet over the toilet for some extra storage. I’m thinking espresso color.
- artwork or some kind of wall décor above the towel bar
- Way down the line… new vanity, countertop, faucet, and flooring.

Smack up, lay it, grout it down…

The tile is DONZO!  So that also means good news for you….it means last and final annoying tile post!!  Woot!  Margaritas for everyone!  SO we left off here, with having just laid the last of the tile

Ah…still a lovely pic every time I look at it (eye roll barf face anything that says I’m totally being sarcastic).  Anyway, so my dad and I were eager to get the grout rolling, especially him because he was leaving 2 days later and wanted to just relax!  I don’t blame him…he comes to visit his grandkids and I throw tile at him. 

I don’t know how other’s do it…but in an all white (or off white) room…I had the hardest time getting my white balance just right.  So forgive the off pics….

Anyway..the grouting probably took us a good hour…maybe a little more.  It’s a small space so it wasn’t crazy hard, but it was really only a one man job…so I just watched while my dad quite literally broke his back.  Oh man were we all sore after this job.  My back still isn’t right!

AND DONE!!!! Isn’t it pretty!!!  

Now I do have to be honest and say that I made one rookie mistake. I had grout on hand from another thing I did…and since I got white tile, and had white grout…I figure it’s all good right? WRONG. The grout is a bit whiter that the white tile…which makes the tile now a bit…pinky? Beige actually. It’s not crazy noticible, in fact….in the daytime it all just looks pretty and white.  It’s when the lights come on that I can see the tint.  Hopefully once the walls and cabinets get painted and the lighting gets changed it will all work itself out.  But I still love it!!  Now we’re really on a roll with everything and I can’t wait to do more to this bathroom!

And The Tile keeps going…

I apologize for the delay in the tile posts….but my family took a little siesta to go to the beach!  Our annual Ocean City, NJ adventure (you can see others here and here).

But now back to business.  We had laid the cement board, made some mud and slapped sown the whole tiles.  Time to do some tedious cutting and laying.  This actually happened on the Fourth of July, so I have to give Craig some serious props that on the day he had off from work, he chose to do a bunch of tiling.  You see lots of blogs on here where the husband is all about home improvements, but my husband only gets one day off a week, so I don’t really blame him when he doesn’t want to take his only day building/painting/sawing/fixing something.  So it’s a fun and rare treat when he dives right in.  And he’s really good at it too.  Let’s all pray he finds a 5 day a week job, people. 

My dad decided that the best course of action would be to put the tile saw in the shower so they didn’t have to run up and down the stairs for every cut they had to make.  As much as it was an ingenious idea (it really was….probably saved them 3-4 extra hours of work)…it left a nice mess for me to clean.  Not complaining…not complaining…..

It was a lot of backbreaking labor in a tiny room for two grown men.  I fel bad just standing there snapping pics…but somebody had to take care of the kids!  The guys did such a good job with cutting that this is literally all the waste we had..

Yup…60 square feet and we have one little bucket full of tile left over.  AWESOME.  I love a good puzzle!!

The next day it was really about repeating day 2 with mud and laying.  My dad tried to show me how to take the pieces off “in order” so you just put it back and don’t have to search for pieces….and he ended up getting tiles confused and I had to come to his rescue to put the puzzle back together.  I will never let him live it down.  But we were able to work in 2 different areas of the bathroom so this day went really fast!  The last tile was laid before the kids woke up from nap….which meant a glorious 3:00 beer! 

Isn’t it fantastic??  I love!  All the tape is just so we know where not to step. oh and the picture above with me making the cheesy pose…this is actually a good tip.  See that 12x12 tile lying next to me?  We used that every time we laid a sheet to make sure that all the individual mosaics laid level.  It was quite handy, actually!

The only thing left to finish is grouting, sealing, replacing the threshold between the bed and bath, and getting a new vent cover.  We decided that this project doesn’t stop with the tile…so we and going full steam ahead with curtains, paint and everything else from soup to nuts!  I said it earlier that we hadn’t done a single thing with this room for 7 years….so it’s about time for her to get herself together!

Smile! It’s time for tile!

Woohoo!  Time for Phase 2 of bathroom redo!  Wow…that was a whole lotta rhyming, right there.
So cement board is down, time to lay the tile.  My dad (bless him) spent 2 hours figuring out exactly where to start the tile so that we maximized our tile (no waste!) and things ended against the tub and the door jam with whole tiles.  I really don’t know how he did it…but it worked.  First things first, after we he marked everything, we laid down our chalk lines.

See where the blue lines meet?  That’s the corner where all the tile gets started from.  Then it was just a matter of mixing the thin-set and laying down the first tile!  The thin set should be about the consistency of peanut butter….but we found that we liked it just a little bit thinner than that.  The big joke between my dad and I is that I’m extremely literal, so I asked “chunky or smooth peanut butter?”  I think it was a valid question…there IS a difference.

We also learned that if you are doing mosaic tile, it is ideal that you use a trowel with 1/4” grooves or less.  The one my dad is using is 1/4”…but we both agreed that 1/8” would have been better.  There was a lot of mud to clean out of the grooves.
I didn’t get a shot of the 1st tile because I was laying it, but I snapped a few quickies of my dad laying some others, hence the out of focus.  Oh and I just realized that I never showed a pic of the tile before!  Well here it is! It’s Daltile’s octagon and dot from Home Depot. 

Then Hunter thought it would be a good time to wake up.  He sat on my bed and ate some Teddy Grahams for a bit…but being that he is my son…he really wanted to get in there and help.  He became the tile handler, and he was serious about his job too.

We managed to finish all the whole tile sheets that day.  Wahoo!  A full day ahead of schedule!  Next up is cutting all the tiles!  Phew!