Our New Bathroom
Our bathroom has been bothering me for some time. It is the only room in the house that hasn't had a major decorate. It is also the room in the worst condition. This is an ex-council house and the bathroom had been poorly kept so the walls could all do with plastering and the tiles replaced. It is not as shocking as I make out, it's just that the tiles are wonky, but they look fine when they're clean. I suppose as we have worked hard on the rest of the house, you want all rooms to the same quality. It always looks clean though. It is just white and the fittings are basic but it has done us for 5 years and we like spending money on other things so it is still this way.
Until this weekend when I decided that I would totally re-do the bathroom and not spend any money on it. I have a house full of paint, fabric and pots. so I knew I had things to make this space better.
To start, I wanted to make it look more countrified so the windowsill was my first task. I made a wooden cover that sits on top on the tiles and makes it look like we have a wooden windowsill. I used 3 planks of pallet wood and a small piece of beading to hold them all together. This is nailed onto the top at both ends and I made sure I had a bit of overhang so I caught the plank that went behind the taps.The result is 100 times better than the tiles. I am so pleased with how it looks and the cost was nothing!
I then changed the curtain that sits around the sink from the patterned bright one to a plane beige one. This was made out of a table cloth that I have had sitting in the cupboard for about 6 months. It has a beautiful trim so in my design I used that as a feature. I cut the table cloth in half, folded over the top and sewed a channel for some string to go through. I then cut and hemmed the desired length. It looks really cute and used up something that was just sitting around.
We then replaced an old small wicker storage unit with Rob's new Pallet wood shelving unit. You can see he basically used pallet wood to make boxes then using 4 upright pieces screwed them to the edges of the boxes. I am sure he will do a blog post about it so look out.
It is big, but as a family of four, we have a lot to store on it and it's nice being able to store things more out of sight.
The last big thing I did was paint the bath and pipe boxing. It was a blue/green colour before so it always stood out. Repainting it added a whole new freshness to the room. I used my Annie Sloan ''Antoinette'' chalk paint and it covered it all in two coats. The pink allows this room to have a sense of calm and with the wood features it feels very in-keeping with the rest of the house.
I took this lovely step stool from mum's garage and used her Annie Sloan soft grey paint and found that it matches in perfectly.
Then using some chalk board paint I painted inside the photo frame making it match and added a few painted clip boards as signs that I had sat in a cupboard.
It is amazing what you can achieve if you have a good think about it. I love the look of this room now and as far as spending money goes, it could not have been a cheaper project. There was only one thing that I had to buy but most people probably wouldn't and that was a new shower curtain as ours needed replacing. But if you are lucky, you might not even have to do that!
The trick to completing this was using things I already had. It took me a while to think about where things were going to come from but once I started and when we had the shelves up, it all began to fall together.
Post by Emily
