Drawing on Inspiration
My 90’s style bathroom gets a simple renovation.
We’ve all been there. Flipping through magazines, searching through Pinterest, surfing the internet, watching TV, walking through someone else’s house, and we see a room that we love, that gives us warm fuzzies, makes us want to live there. I have a Pinterest board called “Beautiful Rooms” where I pin the unattainable. Just breathtaking rooms that are beyond reach that most of us would never be able to afford, or would be totally impractical to live in. Then I have other boards for beautiful rooms that are within reach. Rooms that are attainable. Maybe not exactly, but the idea is attainable. These are my inspiration rooms.
Some rooms just stick with me. I find one and I keep coming back to it. I’m not one to fall for trends. I like some of the trends, I may even incorporate some of them. But I find that if I design a room I love, with classic hard finishes, and colors that I love, I will love it a lot longer.
For example, my favorite color has always been blue. Any blue. Blue gray, blue green, cornflower blue, navy blue… if it’s got blue in it I love it. So, if the trend is blue, I will still love it when the trend is over. When we had a yellow and gray trend a while back, it seemed so fresh and different. If I had jumped on that bandwagon, I would have tired of it pretty quickly.
Another example of a trend that I won’t get tired of is the rustic trend. I love old things and antiques. I loved old stuff long before the farmhouse trend. I have a lot of it mixed in with newer things and finishes. As the farmhouse trend fades out, I will still love my old stuff. But I digress.
When you find a room you love, and you know it’s one that you will love for a long time, why not use it as your inspiration? I found a bathroom a long time ago on Pinterest and it is one of the most beautiful, serene bathrooms I have ever seen. I decided I was going create a similar master bathroom in my new build.
Inspiration Photo Saved from Pinterest
In the house we bought the bathroom vanity looked like this:
Before
This was not at all what I had in mind for my dream house. This was a dream killer. And how could I ever make it remotely like the bathroom I had in mind without spending thousands of dollars? The kitchen remodel, paint, and fence were at the top of my priority list, but until this point I had only had a master bathroom for five years out of the 30 we have been married, and four of those years, it barely qualified. And I had big dreams for my master suite.
I had already bought a double vanity for the house we were going to build, and it just happened to be the right size, so as soon as the bathroom was painted, before we even moved in I had it installed. So even though I couldn’t afford to completely remodel the bathroom, with the new vanity, some paint, lights, and mirrors I was able to come close to my inspiration bathroom and I now have a space I love.
I found some perfect mirrors at Pier 1 Imports and put them on my watch list months before, but then I slacked off and they went on clearance and were gone before I realized they were closing their stores. I cried, and then I searched and found the mirrors from the photo (or some just like them) but they were $500 each and my penny pinching heart just couldn’t do it. Plus, I would spend the rest of my life imagining my grandma during the Great Depression making her children’s clothes from my grandpa’s worn out overalls, every time I looked in them, which is multiple times a day. I found similar mirrors for anywhere between $160 and $600. Then I came across some at Lowes for $75 each that looked almost exactly like some I had seen on Wayfair for three times as much. The mirror is attached to the frame, instead of the frame coming over the mirror, which would be nicer, and if I look closely I can see a couple of minor imperfections in the frame, which would normally bother me because I obsess over little things like that, but it’s a mirror, so when I’m looking at it I’m pretty focused on my own imperfections. This is probably why they are less expensive and I wouldn’t choose them for a client, or a five star hotel, but they are still beautiful and no one sees my master bathroom but me.
Because my space is narrower than the one in the inspiration photo I had to use overhead vanity lights instead of sconces. If you have the space, sconces are actually better for putting on makeup, etc, rather than having the light shining down on you.
I found these gems at Lowe’s also. This was one of those instances when I didn’t wait for a steal. I found the lights I loved, they weren’t overly expensive, I got them for 10% off, and I saved so much on the mirrors, I didn’t feel like scouring the world for a cheaper alternative because they were perfect. The cut glass and little crystals at the top add just a little bit of sparkle. I changed out the satin nickel knobs on my vanity for crystal knobs that echo the shape of the crystals on the lights.
My mirrors and lights are a champagne/antique silver color, which is a warmer tone, so I got satin nickel faucets. Nickel is also a warmer metal. I wanted to go with a timeless white vanity, instead of the blue-gray vanity in the inspiration photo so if I ever decide to change my bathroom color scheme, I can do that. Instead I painted the wall a soft blue-green gray to add that little bit of color and I can always repaint if I get tired of it. Although I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon.
So let’s break this down. $150 for mirrors, $200 for lights, a gallon of paint, and $30 worth of knobs. I already had the vanity, and I can’t even remember where I got it or how much I paid for it. It seems like I got it from a store that was closing down. So about $400 plus the price of a clearance vanity. Oh - and a little help from my friend Beth who arranged my flowers. It doesn’t even look like the same bathroom. Here’s a reminder of what it looked like before, next to a picture of what it looks like now:
Of course if I was starting from scratch I would choose different tile for the floor, and I would have had room for sconces on either side of the mirror. I also chose my paint color to go with some other tile around my bathtub, instead of the bluer gray I wanted, but that’s another post. In the end I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out. It’s not exactly like the picture, but it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve put my own little stamp on it and made it my own little sanctuary.
Why Decorate When No One Else Sees?
Today I’m going to share with you a little hallway that comes in from my garage. But first I have to whine. Just a little bit. Due to the fact that I have never had a mudroom, or even a decent back entrance, my six kids have spent their lives coming in through the front door and dropping everything right there - by the door, or in my living room, or on the stairs - depending on where we lived. I would nag at them to put it all away and because they weren’t afraid of me or my nagging, we would have piles of shoes, because of course they never wore the same shoes twice in a row, or put the ones from yesterday or last week away in their closets, and it was a constant irritation. (I have a friend who can just look at her kids and they hop right to it or stop whatever it is they are doing. I was not blessed with that motherly gift and if I tried to give my kids a “look” they would laugh at me.)
I tried in our last house having them come through the garage, and I set up little cubbies for them and it worked for a little while, but because we didn’t have a lot of storage space in the house, the garage became that place and so they had a hard time navigating their way through the obstacle course that was our garage and soon started using the front door anyway. I was going to solve this in our new build by having an awesome mudroom with its own front entrance with little cubbies for their backpacks and shelves for their shoes, but since I didn’t get to build after all, I now have a side entrance into my laundry room with room for some hooks and a bench. But I also have lots of storage in this house and a detached garage for my husbands projects, so we actually get to park in the attached garage, so those little cubbies are actually accessible just before they come in the house from the car.
So just inside the door from my garage I have this little hallway with a closet. It’s a perfect place to hang our keys and to put a bench where we can sit to put on our shoes. Between the side entrance and the garage, we never come in the front door and I never have shoes and backpacks in my living room. Happy day! I came across a blog post that I had saved a while ago where someone had done a super cute entrance and the idea was perfect for this hall.
Inspiration from mindfullygray.com
I fell in love with the color I painted my upstairs bathroom and decided to use it again for the lower half of the wall. Of course I painted all my wood trim white like the rest of the house. Then I stained a 1x6 to match my closet doors and hung it with some hooks for jackets and purses.
About 20 years ago we lived in a house in Germany with a big picture window that looked out onto a field with some fruit trees and hills in the background. It was gorgeous in every season, with the flowering trees in the spring, the fall foliage, and then the sparkling ice hanging from the tree branches in winter. I have pictures from that window from all four seasons and I’ve always wanted to do something with them so I framed them and hung them above the hooks. They aren’t professional photographs by any means, and they are from the days before digital when you took a picture and then six months later took your film in to be developed and crossed your fingers that some of the pictures turned out ok, but they are meaningful to us and they are hanging in a back hallway so they work here. In one of them my two oldest girls are standing in the field when they were little, which makes it even more nostalgic.
Here you can see my “four seasons” photographs. It’s a narrow space so it was hard to get a good view. I also found a rustic bench and I used dark bronze coat and key hooks.
I decided to go a little more rustic here since this is a back entry into the garage. I took down the old generic light fixture and added a dark bronze lantern to match the finish on the hooks. It just felt like a great place for a lantern. My lower wall is Benjamin Moore’s Dartsmouth Green 691, and the rest of the walls are Ballet White OC-9. Ballet White is a light beige with a green undertone and a high LRV so it brightens things up and goes really well with all the green in this room. This may not be a highly visible room in my house, but it’s now a little bright spot that brings some joy as I come and go throughout my day.