Bathroom Stage 1 complete!

Stage 1 is my official sounding title for the big stuff - vanity, medicine cabinet and floors. I started by priming and painting the vanity and medicine cabinet. Since I was working with wood, metal and plastic, I broke out the really good primer - Zinsser bin. Even freezing in the bathroom with the windows open, I probable lost a few brain cells because of this stuff but it works really well. It covered everything including the rusty medicine cabinet insides. Both the vanity and medicine cabinet were in pretty rough shape and the paint didn't solve everything but it looks a lot better and it is wipe-able now.

Up next was the floor. We used TrafficMaster Ceramica groutable vinyl tiles in the color cool gray and I am really impressed by them. They are quite thick and solid feeling. If you touch them with your hands you can tell them aren't tile but I think they look pretty realistic. And they aren't as cold which is nice. I've already got another space or two in the house where I want to use the leftovers.

 I started by laying them out all nicely and marking the floor so we could put the ones under the toilet down first. I thought a staggered tile layout would look nice plus it means you have a bit more room for error when it comes to lining them up. Of course I messed up and started staggering them the opposite way from what I had planned. What can I say, it was stressful working in the tight quarters with the pressure of having no working bathroom. It ended up working out just fine but since I hadn't laid them out, I didn't know that until the end!

I was also nervous about the pieces under the toilet. The didn't seem to stick as well because the toilet was pushing down so hard on one side it was forcing the other side up. The rest of the tiles stuck nice and tight. We gave them a full 48 hours to adhere, putting a couple weights on the loose ones. The weights helped and now that the grout is in place, they all seem fine.

Grouting a large tile floor while not pregnant is about 1000x easier than grouting a smaller subway tile that requires leaning over a counter while 5 months pregnant so that part seemed like a piece of cake. Craig caulked for me and scrapped the mirror where my primer had bleed through. I used Simply Grout in Delorean gray. Everything together including the odds and ends like razor blades and painters tape ended up costing us about $115 but we used gift cards for almost all of that.

So here is where we started:

Here's the result:

I think the difference is more noticeable in person because things are so much cleaner. It won't ever be my dream bathroom but what would I pin in the future if all my rooms were perfect already?

We still need to do stage 2 which is the little things - new art work that matches, cabinet knobs, and towels, a bigger threshold and sconces to cover the bare lightbulbs on the medicine cabinet (some are on the way but they were an odd size so I'm crossing my fingers I measured correctly!).

We are towel minimalists - 2 each for Craig and I and one hooded towel per kid which means that we need new sets every few years anyway. My mother in law gave me a giftcard for Kohls so I know what I'll be using it on. I also need to do something to de-Urkle my shower curtain.

If I'm feeling very ambitious, I could make liners for the baskets but I'm pretty sure I said that back when I got them - over a year ago? Maybe 2014 is the year it will happen! Or maybe not :-)

I'm torn about whether I want to stick with only yellow, grey and white or bring in other colors. Aesthetically, I think I'd prefer only those three but realistically, this is our only bathroom and will contain froggy hooded towels, pink tea pots and little potties for at the least the foreseeable future so I probably should just embrace that by bring in some bright colors in the art on the wall. I love having Lucy's painting in here so I might have her and Jonah do whatever replaces it but I love the color inspiration of Katie Daisy's prints like this one or this one and her prints are really reasonable priced. So cute and whimsical but not kid themed. That's what I'm going for. Stay tuned to see if I can pull it off.

Update: It took me such a long time to get this post up that I'm actually almost done. I went with color. Really, is that a surprise, I can't deny myself. I just love color.Can't wait to get the last few things done and show y'all!