Master Bath Upgrade

So back in September I shared our newly carpeted, painted, furnitured and decorated master bedroom/ my office.  It’s taken me almost 6 months but I’ve finally completed the master bathroom.  Ta-da!

Part of the reason it’s taken so long is that I wasn’t even sure what to do, if anything, beyond the floor.  My hope was that replacing the gross brown ceramic tiles with the gray flooring back in late August would tone down the rest of the brown in the room.  I actually think it did, for the most part.  And yet, the white walls were still wearing on me.  The master feels pretty pulled together now but the bathroom seemed undone, even after I replaced the light fixtures, replaced the interior doors, and painted the picture frames and my jewelry holder black back in November.

For a few months Matt and I talked about replacing the counter-top and shower tiles but ultimately, I didn’t have the stomach for that level of work.  We already have a long-enough house to-do list and I didn’t want to add another big item.  But even if we weren’t going to replace the shower, we definitely had to take care of the cracks that had formed along various corners and edges.  It’s been over a year that we’ve been talking about it and I started having panic attacks as I dozed off to sleep that we were going to wake up to a leak below the shower from all of the water seeping through the cracks and potentially overflowing the pan.   

After some failed attempts at getting a handy man to help, I took the bull by the horns and did it myself last Monday.  It required drying out our shower for almost a week but the taping (a tip for you caulkers out there- taping turned out to be unnecessary and a complete waste of time) and caulking took less than 2 hours.  I actually did part of it while on a conference call.  Multitasking?  Yassss!

After the shower was done I got a spurt of inspiration and decided to go a little further.  Matt was on a business trip until Wednesday and I wanted to surprise him with something nice/ do what I want without asking him.  ;)

I got the extra paint left over from when I did the bedroom and hallway, ran to Target, picked up this removable wallpaper, and went to town!  I papered the South wall of the toilet room and bathroom between calls and work on Monday, then taped the other walls between calls and work on Tuesday.  I squeezed in the actual painting (I used the same Benjamin Moore Sidewalk Gray from the master bedroom & upstairs hallway) after Jason went to bed on Tuesday (he goes to bed by 6:30 most nights) and by the time I went to bed Tuesday night the paint was dry, I took down the tape, and I screwed all of the electric cover plates back in.

I don’t think Matt cared at all (when I told him I was working on a surprise project in the bathroom his only concern was whether it involved something he might hit his head on) but I’m quite pleased with the results!  The brown is neutralized even more by the gray walls and the whole room feels more modern than it did with brown floors and white walls.  I like the understated contrast between the wallpaper (which has a metallic weave in person) and the lighter gray walls too.  It’s not my dream bathroom by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not driving me crazy anymore either.  I find the gray really soothing at night too.

Here's the original bathroom from when we bought the house.  It actually doesn't look so bad in the photo (and the person who took that photo has much better camera skills than I do) but I was over it.

 

 We’re getting CA closets done at the end of the month so I’ll have more fun house pics to share then!