I’ve mentioned before that I have some before and after home “Refresh” photos to share with you and I thought what better time to start this series than the New Year! My then boyfriend (now husband) and I had been renting a perfectly lovely house for a couple of years when the opportunity to buy the home came up. We decided to go ahead and buy it knowing it wasn’t going to be our forever home, but figured it would at least be our 3-5 year home.

Once the house was officially ours we planned out our list of “refresh” projects and decided to start small by updating the half bathroom downstairs that was located near the laundry room. As mentioned earlier, the home, which was built in 2000, was perfectly lovely as-is, but the former owners weren’t afraid to dabble in colors and I was looking forward to making it .. ours. I knew I wanted to paint the walls which were currently a light blue, update the mirror, light fixture and all hardware. Easy peasy, right? Did I mention we were planning to do all the work ourselves?

First Up: Shoppping

Eric had to go buy ALL the tools, that was probably his favorite part of this project. Although he may look like a professional in the photo, please keep in mind he is the only one that actually thinks he is. Despite him being generally handy and my experience painting A LOT of interior walls over the years, we definitely ..
Were. Not. Professionals.

Being that this was my first semi-major home project and the fact that I was a newbie I totally forgot to take really good photos, but you get the idea. Not shown in this photo was the flooring which was a builder grade honey colored hardwood, which you can actually see in another photo below. It was nice, but didn’t flow with the aesthetic I was going for and it was present in almost all of our neighbors homes since it was your typical tract housing development, aka.. cookie cutter.

The builder installed the flat beveled oval mirror that is covered up in the picture below as well as all of the hardware/fixtures. Eric had watched many videos on how to take down mirrors that are fixed on walls and they all advised to cover it in tape like this in case the mirror shatters seperating from the wall. I had hoped to salvage the mirror for another room but sadly, as it turned out, the tape was needed for a reason and the mirror ended up in a few pieces.

What we hadn’t planned on was that we would have to remove the pedestal sink from the wall to switch out the faucet. Eric assured me that it was a simple job and would be an easy one. By then I had already tried painting around the sink and as you can see it took as many layers as possible with it. Clearly I had some wall repair to do before we were able to reattach the sink. We also didn’t anticipate that the sink was partially attached with a cheap door plate as you can see in this photo … really what the heck was the builder trying to do here? Eric had his work cut out for him re-attaching this sink and let’s not even talk about the gunk that came out of the pipes. Gag.

Since this bathroom was so small I went with neutral Taupe colored walls, oil brushed bronze light fixture and matching hardware to include mirror, faucet, toilet handle, towel bar and even the toilet paper holder. It all made SUCH a big difference and we received so many compliments, it absolutely made the four days of hard work worth it and we were ready to move on to the next room on the list!

The finished bathroom made such a big impact that I couldn’t wait to tackle the other two bathrooms in the house, as well as the kitchen and all the flooring! I hope you’ll follow along as I share the journey we took in our path as homeowners together and you’ll NEVER guess what we did after we crossed off every item on our project list!

HOME REFRESH | HALF BATH

~ SC

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