Monday, March 8, 2010

My New Bathroom

Maybe the desire to overall my bathroom was hereditary.  Over the years that my parents have owned their home, I think they’ve redone every bathroom (and trust me, there’s a lot of bathrooms).  With mustard toilets and avocado sinks, I can’t say I really blame them.

In the beginning, it was simple things, like removing the carpet.  Carpeting is probably the worst thing you could possibly have in a bathroom with a potty-training toddler.  By the end, they were hiring interior decorators and completely redoing the wood work.

I certainly couldn’t get that fancy.  For one, I can’t afford an interior decorator.  Besides, I rent, which means whatever I do has to be easily undone and scars need to be easily repaired.  Sucks, but hey, it opens the door for more creativity ;)

Disguising the Enemy

Somewhere in this blog, at some point, I must have complained about the bathroom here.  Don’t get me wrong, it has some redeeming qualities, like a speckled counter and real tile.  But it also has the one bathroom fixture I hate more than any other in the world: shower doors.

My bathroom growing up had shower doors.  It’s a strange tub, accessible from both sides, a separate bathroom off each exit.  Somehow, I always managed to knock those shower doors off their tracks, get them jammed, knock them out of the tub.  It was bad.  When my parents decided to reglaze the tub from orange to blue, they removed the doors on my side of the tub.  To this day, if I’m home and I want to take a shower, I walk all the way around to the side of the tub without the shower doors.  I hate them that much.

In addition to my inability to use them properly, I detest shower doors for a number of much more logical reasons as well.  They are evil.  (See, very logical reason.)  And like most evil things, they are out to harm you any way they can.  Trying to shave?  Dropped the soap?  Bang!  There’s a pretty fresh purple bruise for you.  Want to get out of the tub?  Sc-raaaa-aape.  Oops, looks like you didn’t quite lift your shin high enough to get over those extra inches the rails add.  Hope your towels go well with blood red.  And the worst when you’re trying to get out.  SMASH!  Why are the rails for shower doors so much lower than curtain rods?! Really, I mean is there any reason I should have to duck just to take a clean myself?  And lastly, quite simply, they are ug-ly.

Seeing as how this is an apartment, I can’t do anything other than duck, be careful, and keep band-aids on hand for most of those problems.  But I could do something about the ugliness.

new shower curtain

Isn’t that fabulous?  It’s a decorative tension rod, no damage to the walls at all.  The branches on the curtain blend through several different shades of blue.  ugly doorsAs you’ll see, it coordinates well with the rest of the decor.  :)   Thank you Bed, Bath & Beyond.  Of course, the ugliness is still behind there, but this adds so much.  As a bonus, it keeps the cold air (from the window in the tub that is designed not to close, aka our ghetto-fan) in the tub instead of the bathroom proper and the hallway.

A Lil’ Color

The bathroom tub, sink, tiles, walls and ceiling are all white.  Nothing wrong with white.  White tile floors are way better than black, orange and yellow shag carpeting like my first my-own-bathroom had.  But, it was just too much white, dreary, no fun.  I fixed that.   Can’t paint?  Enter wall decals!

The tree theme carries over between the wall and the shower curtain.  I blended decals from two companies, Flair4All and Dali’s Decals.  Dali’s allows more customization, but I prefer the ones from Flair4All (reusable and easier to put in place).

wall decal sample

No More Cold Toes

old rug When Mr. Trizzle and I first moved into the apartment, the bathroom included a small bluish-turquoise-ish round bath rug.  With it’s short, prickly texture, it looked like it should be for a dog and it shed like one, too.  But it was a rug, and we were glad it was there. 

new rugsI ditched the old rug, put it in storage to put back when I leave.  I replaced it with two beautiful, light blue, soft, squishy, luxurious rugs.  One for the tub, and one to stand on at the sink so my toes don’t get cold while I brush my teeth.  :)  The blue goes nicely with the blue in the flowers of the Wall decals.

Wrapped in Warmth

Now, what good are warm toes if the rest of you is freezing?  Enter, beautiful, soft towels  Light blue and tan to coordinate with the rugs, wall decals and shower curtain.  They’re embroidered too, with little A’s for goldenrail.  The blue towels have tan A’s and the tan towels have blue ones.  I really wanted towels like my mommy and daddy have at home, superbly soft and fluffy.  But there’s are from Linen’s and Things, which is now gone.  The ones I got turned out to be just as fabulous.  They’re from JC Penny’s.  Same brand as the rugs, that way I could be sure the colors would match when they arrived.

The ducky towel stayed; there are still a number of small ducks around the bathroom, they match the yellow flowers and go with the general bird aspect of the theme.

bath towel hand towel

The Finished Product!

Ta da!  Here it is, the final result.  Because of the size of the bathroom, it’s a bit difficult to get a good overview shot.  Here are the best two pics I could do.

left side

right side

I really like the results.  Stepping onto a soft rug after a warm shower, wrapping myself in a fluffy towel and taking a deep breath of fresh clean air in a room full of happy images and uplifting colors fills me with so much happiness!  The Legend said “I thought it was fine before.”  And Mr. Trizzle said, “there’s a lot of stuff on the walls.”  plhhhh.  guys.

 

[All pictures on this post are licensed under CC-BY  by goldenrail. ]

6 comments:

munchkinhead said...

YOu're so imaginative! and its soooo prrrretty! just like you ^>^

goldenrail said...

Oh yes, meant to mention since some people will probably be wondering how I managed to pull this off when I have no job, and thus no income.

The 20% off at Bed, Bath & Beyond, the 20% off at JCPenny's and the many sales certainly helped.

But in general, I fore-went grocery shopping. I decided I had enough food, it just isn't necessarily what I want to eat. So I dealt with it, rediscovered pancakes and tomato soup, and traded in extra snacks for a wonderful bathroom. :)

goldenrail said...

awwww... thank you Munchkinhead. And you get to see it in person soon!

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Jeannie said...

Very pretty - maybe you should go into interior decorating as a side-line for some income ;)

goldenrail said...

I think at one point I wanted to become an interior decorator. But that was just a trade school, not a 4-yr degree, so it wasn't good enough.
Anyway, no thanks. I'd prefer sometime more stable and certain.