Budget Bathroom Make-Over

For 2 weeks, my bathroom Bland wouldn't stop moaning about how jealous she was of Hip the hallway. Finally, I gave her a make-over, so she would shut her lid.

The Make-Over:

• Sewed a new shower curtain.
• Gave the molding and doors a new coat of white paint in high gloss.
• Replaced the cabinets with new hardware.
• Replaced blinds with matchstick roman blinds.
• Hung some wall decor.

The break-down:
Everything, but the hardware was on sale. It took some time to shop for these things.

• Hardware $2.57/piece - Lowe's.
• Matchstick blind $17.99 - Walmart.
• 3 set of mirrors $14.99 - JoAnn's.
• Paint leftover from living room $23-27 - Home Depot.
• Magnolia picture $1 - The Goodwill Store.
• Fabric $6.38/yard - JoAnn's.

From this picture: The new knobs really give the old cabinets a face-lift. The matchstick blinds give privacy, yet allow a lot of light to get in. The glossy white molding is super shiny and easy to maintain.


This set of mirrors mimic the Celtic pattern that is in the fabric of the shower curtain.


Installing new hardware is easy and takes 2 seconds. Hold the screw from the inside of the cabinet and twist the knob on. While the hardware is off, give your cabinets a thorough cleaning with some non-toxic wood cleaner.

Sewing the shower curtain:


My make-shift pin cushion.


(right edge is top of curtain) The back of the curtain. I sewed 2 pieces of fabric together to give it the width I needed.


When I sewed the 2 pieces together, I was careful that the pattern met up in the same place, so that it looked continuous. I pinned it and sewed slowly.


To give the curtain a crisp corner, I folded the fabric back on an angle. This helps keep the curtain from flaring out when it's hung.


For the top where the curtain rod would go, I folded the fabric over by 4.5". I sewed a line 1" from the edge and then again 3" apart. The 1" is for a little ruffle. The 3" is for the rod. This allowed enough room for the rod to sit comfortable.

The finished curtain is 68"Lx90"W. I should have gone maybe 75"L, so that it could sweep the floor a little and conceal the bathrub, but I made the mistake of not factoring in the extra deep rod pocket space (4.5") when I bought the fabric. Also, 90"W was perfect! Store bought curtains are 70x72 which doesn't give enough "scrunch".

What isn't seen here is that I diligently took off all the hardware on the bathroom door and cleaned the old paint off them. It makes a world of difference in appearance in my opinion.

I have a couple of more things to do:
Sew a tiolet seat cover and mats.
Replace the TP holder with something nicer.
Add more hooks to the back of the door.
Eventually replace the medicine cabinet and put up crown molding.

Super Mario

My half bath is becoming a reality. We found a reliable person to do the plumbing for the toilet. He'll be over this weekend to check things out. I'm so excited! We're on our way! While he's there, we're also going to see if he can also do the plumbing in the basement as well for a future full bath.

Things to do now:

• Remove counter top and cabinets in room.
  
• Pull up the linoleum floor.
• Remove the wood paneling on the walls.
• Repaint old door in attic to use for bathroom.
  

Purchase:

• Toilet, sink, tile, putty, primer, paint, fixtures.
  

Future things to do:

• Remove cabinet for dishwasher.
• Buy new stove and relocate fan and cabinets.
• Remove rest of linoleum.
• Have tiles put down.
• Repaint walls.
• Put up ceiling.

1/2 Bath

We have a back room attached to the kitchen that the previous owner added with the intent on putting a 1/2 bath there. It was never realized because they didn't have a big family (not because there are a problem). Since we only have one bathroom, it's necessary to add at least a half bathroom. This will also bring up the value of the house. Since we're working on the kitchen anyway, it only makes sense to do the 1/2 bath as well since we have to pass through the kitchen to get to the bathroom.

Here is some inspiration from HGTV.







Here are 2 floor plan options. We lack a storage closet or pantry in the kitchen and since the room is rather large for a half bath, I'd like to incorporate a closet. Here, the storage closet is inside the bathroom. I was afraid it would look too busy from the kitchen to have so many doors in such a small space.

Here, the storage closet is part of the kitchen. The wall from the kitchen to the storage closet is a load bearing wall, so we don't want to modify it. Also, the light switch to the bathroom would be on the outside.


Just for perks, I looked up some prices to get an idea of what we're looking at. Here's what I came up with.

Product	Brand	Cost
Toilet	Kholer	262
Vessel Sink	Pegasus	335
Vanity		350
Faucet		100
Mirror		100
Side Splash		20/FT
Door		120
Towel Rack		30
TP Holder		23
Bifold Doors	24"x80"	40
Tax/Misc		272
		$1,632

Does anyone have experience with vessel sinks? That's the bowl shaped sinks. They look really nice, but I noticed that a lot of water gets splashed onto the counter top because of it's height. I wonder if that's really practical? How child-friendly is it?

Little Additions

Install a shower door - DIY here

Replace shower head - DIY here

Every home owner will agree, there's always something to do. The awful thing is when we want to do one thing, we think well, we might as well do this then and it's an awful domino effect. By the summer I was hoping to repaint the bathroom and accessorize, but....

We wanted to add a new shower door onto the bathtub because water tends to escape and in the past has seeped through the floors into the kitchen below. We also wanted to change out the 80s shower head which sprayed water all over place which didn't help the situation. We went to Home Depot to price out the door and it's $369 - more than we expected and intended to shell out right now. This one on their website is $240 and looks exactly the same.



For something nearing $400, we thought we better wait until we could afford to change the tub too. The tub is perfectly fine, but it has those 80s floral non slippy things at the bottom which is wearing away and makes the tub look old when it's not. We're still undecided about that. We could get one of those Bath Fitters things.

So instead we just got the new shower head. It was cheap and easy enough. We just picked one based on look and function. This was $23 at Home Depot. It's easy and screws right on. No installation of any kind. It seems with this new shower head, the water isn't spraying all over the place and onto the floor.




I guess we will look into the finishing the bathroom again after we've finished the kitchen. Honestly, I hate to seal up the bath tub with a shower door because I'd like it to be open for giving bubble baths. I used to give my baby brother baths and the track would just hurt my underarm when I leaned over it, but I think it makes more sense to protect our home from water damage. Also, what if someone collapses in the bathtub and the door gets in the way to get them out. Anyway, that's the engineer in me preparing for the worse case scenario. Decisions decisions?