Finished Half Bath

Yes that's right I said finished. Now, that being said, in a dream world full of lots of money we wouldn't be finished. For now we are very happy with the result. With a little money, lots of paint, and a little elbow grease I have an official before and after for you. Lets take a little walk. 

When we moved in it looked like this. 

We removed some (3 layers) of wall paper, removed the chair rail, and painted. We still hated this room. It was dated and had ceramic everything that was tiled into the walls. 

         

Check it out. Ceramic toilet paper holder, soap holder, toothbrush holder, and on the wall was a huge towel rack (with no shower??).

So after removing the ceramic holders, replacing the hardware, replacing the light fixture, and painting everything we have our after. Oh so refreshing.

We finally like the way that it is looking. Painting the vanity makes a HUGE difference! We painted the vanity with Sherwin Williams ProChoice paint color matched to Benjamin Moores decorators white (that's a mouthful). The walls are painted with Sherwin Williams Harmony (eco friendly) in Sea Salt. The counter tops were painted with Rustoleum counter top paint in Clay. As far as the hardware goes we found the light fixture and faucet at Home Depot (on sale) and the towel and paper holders as Ikea. The knobs on our vanity are actually our old knobs that we spray painted with Rustoluem Universal in brushed nickel. The art is a little homemade shout out to our beloved ocean. Loving the way this turned out :)

Chalkboard Drawings

Since painting the chalkboard wall in our kitchen I try to keep it fun with new drawings. Sometimes they are festive, but usually they relate to whatever is on my mind. Here are two fairly recent drawings that I did. 

Inspiration for the spontaneous life I live being married to Brian.

Cinco de Mayo chalkboard (inspired by this blog). 

Island Time

We have a kitchen island!I have finally found the time to put all the finishing touches on the island, and I love it. Our kitchen had some unused space (it basically could be a dance floor) so we decided to add a little extra counter space. We love the rustic look so we went with a shabby kitchen cart design with a butcher block top. The top matches our dining table so it all ties together. It is about 3'x2' and has two shelves for storage. Who doesn't love a little extra storage! 

Check out our mason jar

 light hanging in the window :)

Looking forward to styling up the shelves a little but we really want them for functional use. I love having things easy to grab when I'm cooking. 

Our kitchen is getting there. Love DIY :)

It's the little things...

As we have been updating our home we have been looking for little details that could use some love. Something that caught our attention from the beginning was the light fixture in our family room. It is a fan with some funky pendants over the lights. The fan is fine (sits a little low) but the lights gave off the weirdest disco affect. 

We decided to replace the pendants to give off a softer light without the affects of a discoteca. 

So much better. We also wanted to update the fan/light pulls that hang down. The ones that were on there were broken and pretty basic and we wanted to add a little fun factor. The new pulls have a picture of a fan and a light bulb. I thought that was so cute. 

As we make our way around our house we find that these little details make such a difference. One thing at a time right. 

Painting Laminate Countertops

Hands down the best part of DIY is looking at before and after pictures. Even though I don't have a complete after picture for this project I have some SERIOUS progress going on. We are busy over here and I FINALLY have some things to share with you. We actually have a deadline for our projects (more on that later), so hopefully I can keep more up to date with it on the blog.

Our house is very 1986. It was built in 1986 and has not been updated AT ALL. Well, unless you count layers of wallpaper covered with paint updating....which I don't. All of our counter tops are laminate, our floors are laminate, and our mirrors are builder grade. Don't even get me started on our light fixtures and hardware. We would love to do full overhauls of the kitchen and all 3 bathrooms but that is not in the price range right now. We decided to find ways to update our house without breaking the bank. First we are starting with our half bathroom. Remember when we moved in and it looked like this?   

Then we took off 3 layers of wallpaper, removed the chair rail, took of a huge towel rack, and painted the walls. Then it started to look slightly better, looking like this. 

We laid out our plans and it went a little something like this:

-Replace light fixture

-Remove all ceramic fixtures and replace with brushed nickel hardware

-Paint vanity

-Paint counter tops (ooooh yeah)

-Frame mirror

We are well underway on our budget friendly overhaul. First up is the counter tops. Well we actually started with an explosion of stuff (please ignore the mess, I am a messy DIYer). Oh and yes that is a GIGANTIC soda...no judging. 

We started with painting the vanity a nice shade of white, decorators white by Benjamin Moore color matched to Sherwin Williams Pro Classic paint to be exact. Well you can see that painting the vanity white really brought out the awesome shade of nasty in the counters. 

I did a lot of research on painting laminate counter tops and have read great things about Rustoleum counter top paint. After a lot of thought we decided to go for it. They have 16 different color selections and we ended up going for a charcoalish color called Clay. Well we LOVE it! It turned out better than I expected! See for yourself.  

What a difference paint can make!

The process was pretty easy. I started cleaning the counters with a surface cleaner and followed that with some love from the magic eraser. After letting them dry I taped off the sink, walls, and mirror. I don't normally tape but I wasn't sure what the consistency would be like so I wanted to be safe. I am very glad I taped because it was thick and not easy to remove (like when I ran into the door frame with my roller).

I used both a roller and a high quality angle brush. It went on thick and dried fairly fast so I had to work quick. I did notice that I had brush marks but I could no longer see the marks as the paint started to dry. I also read that it is best to remove the tape while the paint is still wet to prevent from pulling of paint with the tape. It really did turn out with a nice smooth finish. 

Yes that is a new faucet...more on that later.

I have a few more touch ups and some caulking to do but I have to wait 48 hours to touch up. It takes around 72 hours to dry before we can even touch the counters. Oh and also it is smmmmeeelllly. But the result is totally worth it. Budget friendly DIY all the way. 

Next project on deck. Finishing up the vanity doors/drawers. Now if the paint would just dry in this humidity I might actually get somewhere. 

Coming Up...

We are hard at work on our next project. Our kitchen is a decent size with a lot of dead space. There isn't a lot of counter space or cabinet space but a lot of floor. Like I have said before we would like to redo the kitchen from floor to ceiling but in the meantime we are gonna keep tweaking until we can rip the whole thing out. We have decided to make a small rustic style kitchen island to go right in the middle of the room. We got the design from anawhite.com again and altered the plans to fit our specifications. 

In progress kitchen picture. 

The design is very basic and we are still deciding on a color for the actual island. We are going to stain the top planks to match our farmhouse table and then paint the bottom a color. The kitchen has A LOT of white and also avocado green walls so we need to work around those. We are thinking of a charcoal grey color possibly. What do you think? 

As you can see we are still in the early stages. It will have two 2x12 planks on top and then the two bottom shelves will have horizontal planks sitting an inch apart. Can't wait for it to be finished and I can get to styling that baby. Any input about color is much appreciated...as I am the most indecisive person around. 

Half Bath Update

We are continuing to do projects over here but we seem to be  failing at completing any of them...Brian has been working A TON so I have been left to work on these projects by myself. Me working on projects alone + hanging out with the baby and dog + all other wife duties = slow home progress. 

One project that is very far from done is our half bath. We are not fans of this room AT ALL. It is a half bath and it is HUGE! It takes up so much unnecessary space. Considering our living room is so small the half bath really could use a downsize. In the meantime we have given it a little face lift. It wasn't horrible before, just not really our style.  

Unfortunately I only took one before picture. It had a chair rail with some yellow striped wall paper with a pale yellow on the walls. There was also a huge built in towel rack (which makes ZERO sense for a half bath, built in toothbrush holder, and built  in soap holder.  

Here are our in progress pictures. 

We haven't done much...but it has been A LOT of work. When we started pulling off the wallpaper we found 2 more layers of wallpaper that had been painted over. It took me days to get all that wallpaper off. I did figure out that if you spray wallpaper with Windex (yes I'm Greek) and grab a paint scraper it makes for a much quicker job. We took off the towel rack which required drywall patches and a lot of sanding. We painted the walls (same as the hallway & dinging room) and added some decor we had hanging around the house.

To Do list for this room:

-hang the pictures/painting

-new light fixture

-paint the vanity (charcoal grey distressed??)

-frame the mirror

-window treatment

-remove built in soap/toothbrush holders

-hand towel rack

-possibly paint counter tops

-new knobs (or paint knobs)

Long term list:

-gut!!!!

-cut the bathroom space in half

-open up the hallway

-new Vanity, floor, toilet, mirror, etc. 

Sometimes when I make my lists I feel like a masochist. We signed up for this right??