I spent this past summer tackling our primary (master is apparently out) bathroom, which was in desperate need of something...anything. This is what it looked like the day we moved in:
It wasn't the worst but upon closer inspection the paint job on the cabinets was almost literally slapped on, leaving drips, drops, and brush marks everywhere, the ceiling light was old and corroded, the floors were stained, the paint on the trim was worn and stained, and the color palette wasn't A+. We scraped and painted the ceilings but that's the extent of what we did in here for at least a year. But then things just got worse because I noticed marks on the walls that looked like someone had started ripping off wallpaper, not finished, but just painted over their attempts to cover it up and move along. And when I say 'looked like', I mean that's exactly what they did. Yay. So, instead of just leaving it as is until we could take the time to rectify the wrongs, I started peeling in a few places...and then it stayed like that for years. (Eek...that was embarrassing to write.) Our kids treated our bathroom as if it were a part of a dungeon and stayed away (which wasn't the worst thing in the world). I just turned a blind eye but I know it bothered Anthony because "we need to do something about our bathroom...I wish you hadn't started peeling stuff off the walls" was a regular stream of words that slipped out of his mouth. Yep sweets, me too.
I jumped into this mini-reno without taking a before picture showcasing where I had ripped off paint/wallpaper (it was probably subconscious embarrassment that made it slip my mind to document) but I did take a picture after I put one coat of drywall mud over those ripped wall areas and it doesn't look much better than where I had started so you can kind of get a picture of how bad this room looked.
But this summer I was in the mood for a "little" project and decided to zone in on this bathroom. Originally I figured we'd reno it big time and that's when we'd see the end of the peeled walls but we don't have time for that kind of big project right now. So this is a mini/phase one/temporary renovation but one that turned out so good that phase two might be kicked down the road for awhile longer. The goal was to use what we've got (I'm talking about you 50 year old countertops) but make it look 2026. The other goal was to not spend more than $150 to get from A to B. I'll let you know how I did on that in a minute. Right now, scroll down a smidge and see if you agree with me that it looks a whole lot better...
