My next undertaking in our house was the guest bathroom. Our bathrooms are small, and that's something I can live with. But their tired appearance and lack of style are just killing me. The guest bathroom seemed like the quickest fix, as we want to do a whole makeover of the master bathroom when we have the funds.
The first thing that needed a refresh was the vanity. Because our home was flipped (7 years ago), everything is builder grade, less than nicely done, and very vanilla. The two bathrooms and kitchen all have the same cabinets, handles, tile and granite counter tops. Pretty uninspired. After the huge undertaking to paint all the kitchen cabinets, I felt like painting the bathroom vanity would be a much more manageable project.
I chose the Nuvo Oxford Blue 1 Day Cabinet Makeover Kit for the vanity. I felt like blue was pretty unobtrusive but also gave the bathroom some more dimension and character. I replaced the handles with these Gliderite Modern pulls, to give some variety to our handles. I also painted the white shelves of the shelving unit and the new white framed mirror with the blue cabinet paint. I also ordered a new light fixture. The one that was there was generic, but the more important problem was that it was centered on the wall... not over the vanity.
The vanity was the same color as the kitchen, nearly espresso with red undertones. The stain was applied poorly. Over the years, it had dings, chips and an overall uneven appearance.
I didn't really take any before pictures. So below are some references, one for color and the other the space.
Reference: original vanity color (the kitchen uppers)
Our very small guest bathroom, with the vanity and our linen closet
After several hours painting the vanity, and moving the light fixture I felt like phase one was a good effort.
Vanity after the blue paint and new handles
Mid light fixture move... you can see it was centered for the wall and not the vanity
Big shout out to by husband for helping with this part!!
New light fixture installed
For some reason I decided to take this photo with the giant drill bit in hand. Also, this only mirror is also not centered over the vanity.
Vanity with the light fixture in place
Phase 2 was patching the new giant hole in the wall, painting the shelves and the frame of the new mirror that I would be installing, and repainting the entire bathroom. Because the bathroom is soooo small (honestly, I couldn't get a good picture because there is no space in there), I decided to just paint the walls semi-gloss pure white. I was hoping the pure white would help open up the space as much as possible. One of the things that saved me SO MUCH TIME while painting the walls was the Shur-Line 2006561 Paint Edger Pro. I really don't like taping edges off. It frustrates me so much. This thing saved me at least 2 hours!
Painted shelf
The finished product!
I did a couple of other small things to refresh this space, including replace the toilet handle from a plain white to this brush nickel lever, replace the electrical and switch covers, and replaced the toilet paper roll holder with this more modern one.
All in all, this project took about 12 hours, over two days cost about 250 dollars. I'm so much happier with how it looks now!
