So, in an effort to bring some kind of normalcy, here is more progress on the bathroom. Again, we are farther along than this, but I’ll just play catch up to post more.

We had the floor finished, which I’m really happy with now that we got the pattern right LOL!

We got the new toilet installed for a little while – yay!

Then came finishing up the walls. We had to install drywall on the one open wall, which I then did a skim coat on and started painting. We changed the color a little bit. It’s still blue, but more powder blue than aqua blue. Paint color is Air Kiss by Valspar

The trim is going from a beige color to white.

Our original plan was to put wainscot panels on the lower half of the wall. We had the panels and were dry fitting them to put up and realized it was going to be really difficult.

With a floor that isn’t really level, panels don’t work very well because the top chair rail needs to be level and if the lower part isn’t, it’s really hard to make the panel level without trying to cut and fit the panels or the baseboard, which really just makes them shorter and would mess up where we wanted the chair rail to be. Queue yet another frustrated round of curses.

I was bummed because I really wanted the wainscot look and thought about doing it with a painting technique, but I hadn’t finished the bottom part of the wall because it was supposed to be covered!

Now people, I know this will be a shock since I have long professed my hatred of wallpaper after removing many rooms of it, but I found some paintable wallpaper that looks like beadboard wainscot. I couldn’t believe it was coming out of my mouth to suggest it, but with major side eye, we decided to proceed. With the size of our bathroom, we needed just two rolls, so that ended up saving us money over what the panels cost. I purchased this on Amazon (my affiliate link)

It actually was pretty easy to put up. You just soaked it in water, let it sit for 5 minutes and put in on the wall, squeegee-ing (new word!) the excess glue out. That part was pretty messy, I have to say. The paper is very easy to cut sharply when dry, not so much when wet. I was pleased after it started to go on:

The chair rail goes over the top of it. You can see the lines more when it is wet. Once it was dry, it was all white again. We did have an issue with the outlet on the left as that was the original outlet in the wall, which didn’t get moved. Of course, it butts into the chair rail. We didn’t want to move that outlet (or John didn’t want to move it), so we ended up cutting out the chair rail around it, which looks fine. We needed the chair rail to come to the exact level of the backsplash of the vanity so the room would look aligned. The ceiling in the room is about 7 feet, so we kept the wainscot a little lower for balance.

The vanity also arrived and I am so in love with it! Marble!!

It’s 48 inches. It looks a lot longer in this shot. The marble top was just anchored to the vanity, not glued, so it could be taken off. Thank goodness because that top was farking heavy! We did get it upstairs and the vanity installed without breaking the top, so heavy sigh of relief there. I cannot tell you how nervous we were about damaging that top.

Also during this time was painting of fixtures and such. Our old things like the TP holder, towel ring, vanity handles and light fixture were a mix of brass and nickle. Since we wanted to go with oil rubbed bronze sink and shower fixtures, I got a can of Rustoleum ORB paint to see how those would look. I really hated our old light fixture, but trying to keep costs down with the economic uncertainty right now, painting was an option here.

We had 2 fixtures, but consolidated to one. We bought 3 new shades, so it cost about $30 to redo this, versus a couple hundred for a new fixture.

I am quite pleased with how it turned out. In the future we might change to a setting that is more to our liking, but this works fine for now.

With a mirror just behind and below this, it gives the room a lot of light. i was a little worried going down to one fixture from two, but with the overhead light/fan combo, it seems as bright as before or maybe more so with all the white in the room.

This weekend we plan to move on to part B, which is the tub and shower. All the materials are in, so we are ready to go. The object is to get it all out and replaced this weekend. haha 😀