A little while ago, I shared in my Instagram stories that we are doing a “Phase One” master bathroom update. It’s consumed most of my free time over the past week so today I thought I’d share our progress so far.
First of all, what do I mean by “phase one?” I was inspired by Chris Loves Julia and their Phase One kitchen update. After moving into their house, they weren’t ready for a full kitchen renovation but they did not like the look, feel, and function of their kitchen. So they set up to update it for under $1000 and make it work for the short term. It’s still not their ideal kitchen, but the goal was to “fall in love with what they already had” with a few simple updates. I thought this was such a good idea, and it made me think of our bathroom.
When we first moved into our house, I knew I wanted to do major work in the master bathroom. Ideally, I’d like to completely gut it and re-work the layout (particularly the shower area, which is off to the right of the large vanity). We have a plan to do that someday, but we need to pay down Justin’s student loans first. It will likely be at least 5+ years until we can make it the bathroom of our dreams, so we decided in the meantime to just do a “phase one” refresh. My goal was to spend under $500 and do some simple updates to fall in love and be content with the layout as is, but make it feel fresh and clean.
Here’s what the bathroom looked like to begin with:
The room is definitely dated, but the dark walls and carpet were my two biggest complaints. I am not a fan of carpet in the bathroom and this one had stains (mostly rust stains from the previous owners’ antique vanity) and other signs of wear and tear. That combined with dark colors just made it feel dingy.
The first thing we did was rip up the carpet. My dad came over last week and we spent an afternoon pulling it up and removing all the staples from the subfloor.
The nice thing about no flooring was it made painting easier – no worries about drips! I primed and trimmed out the walls quickly. You’ll notice I even painted a little love note in the space behind where my mirror will go on the wall. ❤
We’re going to lay down an inexpensive peel-and-stick vinyl and the directions called for the wood floor to be primed first. We used a shop vac to remove all debris and then primed the floors.
I finished painting the walls and then was inspired to also paint the vanities. I had plenty of paint in Sherwin Williams Urbane Bronze leftover from our previous house so this didn’t cost anything extra. Score!
Now my plan from here was just to paint the ceilings a fresh white, lay down the flooring, touch up some caulk, and be finished BUT . . . I can’t decide if I like the wall color! I chose Sherwin Williams Gray Screen and tested it in multiple places around the room before painting. It always looked gray when I tested, but now that it’s fully on the walls, it looks blue! I think the issue is the wood trim. When I tested the paint, it was surrounded by white primer and looked gray, but now that it’s outlined by wood, it brings out the brown undertones and looks blue. Depending on the amount of natural light, it does vary a little (you can see in the above picture that the walls around the tub even look different than other walls) but it never really looks like the gray I envisioned. So I can either repaint the walls a different color, paint the trim white to help it look gray, or leave it as is and deal with the blue. Sigh. None of those options are particularly appealing so I need to spend some time thinking about this.
I’ll be sure to report back once the room is totally finished in a week or two – I’m so excited to have an updated bathroom soon!
simplify the chaos 