Last year we redid a bathroom.
Oh my gosh, the sink in the downstairs bathroom was small. And very, very green. So we ripped it out and some other stuff. K wanted a dark, contrasting blue wall (we chose Valspar Deep Twilight Blue). So we made that happen, too. After a few weeks of work, we were done.
Before, it looked like this:
I have mentioned that the people who owned this house before us loved their white walls. And apparently, tiny green sinks. So we started with paint.
The white on the walls wasn't, in fact, white-white. It was a yellow-white. So we painted over it, too. Valspar Possibility. Yep, awesome name. We chose it because we painted the piano room (is it really a piano room? We're not sure… we just haven't come up with a better name for it) and the sitting area-slash-Sefton's play area the middle swatch, Valspar Stony Path.
Of course, nothing is as easy as it seems. It all started because (besides not really liking the tiny green sink and really tall, narrow green mirror) we found a vanity and sink in the as-is section of Ikea for $30. Well, it was a great find. It was just a matter of getting it to fit. Installing sinks isn't as easy as buying a new piece of furniture and plopping it in a room. After all, it has plumbing and stuff.
Rule #1: Plumbing sucks.
Rule #2: Plumbing never just works.
So I had to redo the plumbing. In the tiny green sink, the drain was pretty high. In the new, bigger sink it would have to be lower. Which meant cutting out and redoing the drain line. Which meant cutting into the wall. Good times.
Thankfully, I could do this in my sleep because I had done much, much more with plumbing (including this exact same operation) in our last house. I remember my mom telling me, 'Your first house is your practice house.' True dat. I even still had a bunch of spare PVC and ABS parts I could pillage. In short order, the drain was in place and good to go.
Luckily, we'll never see this hole so I just used those sheetrock clips to secure the piece I cut out. Boom. Something I appreciated about the previous work: they insulated despite it being an interior wall. On the other side is a bedroom (we use it as an office-slash-guest bedroom). The insulation helps quiet between the two rooms. When we gutted and redid the jack and jill bathroom in our old house, I did the same thing because our bedroom was on the other side of that wall (the insulation can be seen above the cement board).
I may give the previous owners a little grief here and there, but they seem like good people. Case in point: they left some of the 1" tile in the garage. Thanks! So we used it to create a simple backsplash.
Then I secured the vanity to the wall, which took some ingenuity and scrap wood on my part.
That was pretty much, well, that. Another wall that is no longer white. A couple things about the vanity now that I'm reminded of looking at the photos:
Before, it looked like this:
I have mentioned that the people who owned this house before us loved their white walls. And apparently, tiny green sinks. So we started with paint.
The white on the walls wasn't, in fact, white-white. It was a yellow-white. So we painted over it, too. Valspar Possibility. Yep, awesome name. We chose it because we painted the piano room (is it really a piano room? We're not sure… we just haven't come up with a better name for it) and the sitting area-slash-Sefton's play area the middle swatch, Valspar Stony Path.
Of course, nothing is as easy as it seems. It all started because (besides not really liking the tiny green sink and really tall, narrow green mirror) we found a vanity and sink in the as-is section of Ikea for $30. Well, it was a great find. It was just a matter of getting it to fit. Installing sinks isn't as easy as buying a new piece of furniture and plopping it in a room. After all, it has plumbing and stuff.
Rule #1: Plumbing sucks.
Rule #2: Plumbing never just works.
So I had to redo the plumbing. In the tiny green sink, the drain was pretty high. In the new, bigger sink it would have to be lower. Which meant cutting out and redoing the drain line. Which meant cutting into the wall. Good times.
Thankfully, I could do this in my sleep because I had done much, much more with plumbing (including this exact same operation) in our last house. I remember my mom telling me, 'Your first house is your practice house.' True dat. I even still had a bunch of spare PVC and ABS parts I could pillage. In short order, the drain was in place and good to go.
Luckily, we'll never see this hole so I just used those sheetrock clips to secure the piece I cut out. Boom. Something I appreciated about the previous work: they insulated despite it being an interior wall. On the other side is a bedroom (we use it as an office-slash-guest bedroom). The insulation helps quiet between the two rooms. When we gutted and redid the jack and jill bathroom in our old house, I did the same thing because our bedroom was on the other side of that wall (the insulation can be seen above the cement board).
I may give the previous owners a little grief here and there, but they seem like good people. Case in point: they left some of the 1" tile in the garage. Thanks! So we used it to create a simple backsplash.
Then I secured the vanity to the wall, which took some ingenuity and scrap wood on my part.
That was pretty much, well, that. Another wall that is no longer white. A couple things about the vanity now that I'm reminded of looking at the photos:
- We swapped out the crappy, plastic pulls that came with it for these chrome ones we found online for like $4
- I bought a $5, 1" dowel and made wooden legs from it because the crappy, plastic legs that came with the vanity sucked (and wooden furniture legs on Etsy were stupid-expensive)
