Bathrooms. They can be a huge pain in the you-know-what! They're probably the most difficult room to remodel, after kitchens. Thank fully we started with a great kitchen, and it was perfect after only painting the cabinets. However, the bathrooms. Cheap linoleum floors, gross almond colored counters and shower tile, and awkward vanities. It's actually a pretty standard bathroom, but it does nothing to stir my creative juices without re-doing everything.
Which we planned on doing.
However, we've given the bathroom situation, as well as condo-living, some deep thought and came up with the following:
We're ready to move into a house. A place without rules, a place where we can do what we want and not have to worry about neighbors crushing our zen. More square footage, opportunities to really make improvements as we see fit.
Unfortunately, we're also addicted to living in the city, and the city is expensive. For what we paid for our tiny condo, we could have gotten a much bigger house in the suburbs....but we didn't want to give up the culture of the city to live in the boring-ness of big box suburbs. For a tiny house in the city, it will cost at least double the price of our condo, and probably more. Soooo.....we'll be saving for quite awhile before we can realistically start looking to move. Plus there's the whole selling our condo thing. We'd love to keep it and rent it out, but that might not be possible with rental caps and we probably don't want to deal with it.
So, we're officially starting a "New House" fund and have decided to only upgrade things to the level I can live with for the next 5+ years and still love, but not sink a lot of money into a home that we're planning on leaving. Unfortunately, saving for a house won't go quite as quickly because of our obsession with traveling to foreign countries. But hey, we're working on it! We're pretty good at saving when needed. We purposely live below our means so that we can sink a lot of money into savings when needed...but concert tickets, eating out, and new dresses are so much more fun!
Anyway, deciding to go the cheapest route possible has actually saved us a lot of uncertainty and stress, because know we know exactly what changes we want to make, and we won't have as much panic when we sink a sum into an upgrade, "Is this this the right choice?" And I don't have to worry about investing in a perfect rug or curtains, because they will move with me wherever we go in the future!
But back to the bathrooms. We were about to start renovating months ago when we halted to reconsider what we really wanted to do. Now we're back on track and here's the game plan:
Overall Bathroom Tone:
These are just the colors of our bathroom right now, and what we'll stick to in the future! Light blue and green.
Vanity:
Old Plan: either A. find an old dresser at Goodwill or a garage sale and turn it into a vanity by adding a round sink on top,
or B, straight out replace the vanity with this pretty white one from Home Depot (we'd add a black counter top instead of the white one shown).
New Plan: Paint the cabinet dark gray (the same color as our bedroom),
Put something like these rolling drawers in the cabinet:
Switch our almond colored counter top with a white one.
Shower:
Old Plan: Install a shower door, replace the ugly almond tile with white subway tile.
New plan:
Think about buying a shower curtain. We took down our curtain almost immediately after moving in, because the room is kind of dark on that side (which is actually pretty nice in the mornings because I hate bright light while waking up!), but the plain vinyl curtain isn't pleasing to the eye. So, we might buy another curtain that's lighter or semi clear, or we may even still install a shower door since we still plan on being here for 5+ years.
Still replace the tile with white subway tile eventually.
Floors
Old Plan: Rip up the linoleum floors and install warming tracks under gray stone tile.
New Plan: grab the same concrete patterned peel and stick tile floors and grout them in place, as we actually previously planned to do here. At that time, we ended up returning the tiles because we were re-thinking the floors, but we're back on board!
Miscellaneous:
Build a set of shelf in Tim's narrow, tiny bathroom
Accessorize!
So there you have it! We'll probably start with the floors, so I'll keep you in the loop as soon as it happens!
