Guest Bathroom Reveal

FINALLY, I am ready to show you guys my guest bathroom. This project has been a royal pain in the a**! You know those women who make everything look easy? Well, I'm not one of them. This supposedly "mini" makeover turned into the most frustrating and annoying project I've tackled in a long time. Brace yourself, because I'm about to share every frustrating detail with you :)

 

It all started about 15 months ago, when I was trolling on Pinterest and came across these beautiful photos...

and I thought, "Hey, that's pretty! I'll paint the cabinets in our guest bathroom blue!"  So I did. Twice. The first color was not working for me (sorry no picture). It was like a baby boy blue and definitely wasn't elegant. So I tried again. This time, I was happy with the way the color turned out:

At this stage, I was feeling pretty good. Maybe a little annoyed that I had to paint the cabinets twice, but I thought it wasn't so bad and next time I'd just be sure to buy a paint sample first. So about fourteen months go by (which brings us to June-July 2013) and I hadn't really done much else. I'd accumulated various items (a shower curtain, a cute basket to hold towels) but I hadn't really made any changes to the room itself. So, I decided to update the art in there. I did this:

I'm not sure what I was thinking when I bought this art in the first place, actually. I knew I wanted a spa like, serene and airy feeling bathroom. But I bought this art just a couple days after we bought the house and I think I was just so giddy with excitement at the idea of decorating that I was buying everything I saw. 

Note to self, just because something is blue, doesn't mean it goes in your house.

Regardless, I had this art that really didn't fit my style, but I wanted to make it work. After I'd spray painted the frame, I felt better about it. It still wasn't exactly my style, but again I thought "not so bad, lesson learned". 

Update: This art got another makeover in February 2015.  Read about that here.

Moving along.. about one week later I was feeling restless on a Saturday morning and decided it would be a good idea to paint the bathroom. The walls were the same neutral taupe color as the majority of my house which isn't a bad color at all, but I thought a nice pale grey would be more "spa like". Also, the room is small, so I figured it would only take me one day to paint the room. WRONG. As I rushed off to the store to buy my paint, I totally disregarded the lesson I had learned with the cabinets and I didn't buy a sample. Needless to say, the color I picked was ALL WRONG. Also, I didn't realize the color was all wrong until I was pretty much done. DAMMIT. Here is what that hideous grey color looked like:

It's hard to tell in the picture but basically this grey didn't look grey at all. It looked blue. The kind of blue that completely clashes with the blue that I already had on the cabinets. It was like a big blue mess. So I called an emergency meeting with my mom, and we deliberated. We went back to Lowe's and bought about five samples of paint. Ironically, I ended up not going with grey at all in the end. I went with white. Actually the white color that we ALMOST picked for our kitchen cabinets. (Read about that here.) The color we chose is called Frost by Valspar. By this point, the day was over and I didn't have time to repaint it that day. So several days later, I finally repainted. It took like A MILLION coats of paint to get that blue/grey color covered with white and I was kicking myself the whole time for not following my own rule and buying a paint sample before I started the painting process. Finally, this past weekend I finished painting and was able to get the room put back together. But this is not the end to this long and annoying tale.

Saturday night, my lovely friend Valerie came by to visit. While there, she pointed out that I didn't have a toilet paper dispenser. (Side note: when we moved into the house none of our three bathrooms had toilet paper dispensers, which I thought was weird. But for whatever reason, I never got around to getting some and over time I just grew used to the fact that they weren't there. So, thank you Valerie, for reminding me that normal people don't set their toilet paper on the back of the toilet.) So we decided to run to Home Goods for a long and expensive quick shopping trip. While I was there, I picked up this:

We installed it in about five seconds and I was feeling so relieved that finally something in this bathroom had gone smoothly. 

The next day (Sunday) my sweet hubby said that the room looked great, but he thought new switch plates and cabinet hardware would really finish off the space nicely. Never one to turn down an opportunity to spend money, I enthusiastically agreed. We hopped in the car and were off to Lowe's (for the 15th time since I started this bathroom). 

He was definitely right about the switch plates! They were a quick and inexpensive update to the space:

However, he was 100% wrong about the cabinet hardware. When people say that hardware is a quick and easy update, they are lying. I seriously thought those damn handles were going to be the death of me. In the process of installing those stupid cabinet pulls, we succeeded in doing several things:

1) breaking a handle

2) breaking a screw off inside of a handle

3) scraping the paint off one of the drawers

4) breaking my husband's drill bit

5) wasting about 30 minutes trying to figure out why to drill wasn't drilling (turns out we had the direction going backwards. yeah, we're smart like that)

6) having to buy new screws because the ones that came with the hardware weren't the right length

7) installing one handle totally lopsided, which sadly, cannot be fixed in any way I can think of

8) breaking a nail (don't ask why we were using nails) off inside of a drawer

9) using a hammer to get the nail out

and last but not least...

10) creating an entire new vocabulary of swear words

Seriously guys, I will NEVER (and I repeat, NEVER) do this again. Are they pretty? Yes. In the end did they work out? Yes. Does it look better with the hardware? Yes. Was it expensive? No. But seriously, it was totally not worth the THREE days that it took to install them. You'd think a couple who'd remodeled their kitchen, rewired light fixtures, painted everything (EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD), built a patio and stayed happy and in love through it all could accomplish a simple task like installing cabinet pulls. Turns out, this one small project was the worst one we've attempted so far. 

SOOOOO... After all this drama, you'd think we'd have a complete and finished bathroom. NOPE. I noticed that the silver finish on the evil cabinet pulls and the new switch plates was a brushed silver, and the silver on my newly installed toilet paper dispenser was a shinier finish. So I decided one last trip to Home Goods for a new toilet paper dispenser would be the last purchase. I moved the shiny dispenser to our down stairs half bathroom (so now two out of three bathrooms have toilet paper dispensers!) And I bought this:

However, I didn't install this one in 5 seconds. This one took A LOT longer. I have no idea why because the mechanism used to hang it was almost identical to the other dispenser's, but for what ever reason it was not cooperating. I'd say I spent about 30 minutes getting this one hung.

After all the blood, sweat and tears (OK, there wasn't actually any blood. Or any tears, come to think of it, definitely some sweat though) we were done with our "mini" makeover! Yippee! Feast your eyes upon the biggest pain in my a** ever guest bathroom:

Though it was a pain, I am happy with the way it turned out. It does have a "spa like", serene feeling. Of course, one day we hope to do a "major" makeover (new floors, new light fixtures, new counter tops without the seashell sinks, framed mirror, new faucets and a new toilet), but for now we are happy with it.

What about you? Have you had any small projects turn into huge headaches? Was it worth it in the end? 

Thanks for stopping by!

-Jesse 

Update:  We got a new floor in here. Check it out.