Bathroom Update – Part 1

I haven’t posted in a while.  Seems like I say that a lot on this blog, but that’s the way I roll.  I have such a love hate relationship with this blog…

I’ve been jumping all over the place painting pretty much everything and updating window and door trim when I can.  I’m dying to buy the rest of the molding to finish the doors and windows upstairs, but I’m trying to keep to a monthly house-update budget, which I’ve been blowing on other things (like, say, major car repairs) lately, so the old brown trim keeps laughing at me behind my back.
Since I’ve been doing so many different things and not finishing any one thing, I never felt like there was anything to put up on the blog, but today I figured I’d at least tell you about my master bathroom. 

As I detailed in my “ToDo” post, I wanted to do some small updates to our master bathroom to make it prettier while we planned and saved for a more major redo.  Here’s how it looked before:



What you can’t see is that there was a giant semi-patched hold on the wall between the shower and toilet that never got completely sanded or painted over. That was my first project.  At first, I was just going to leave it until we did something interesting to the bathroom, but one day, I’d just had enough, so I grabbed some mud and went to town.  (I thought I had snapped a picture of my patch job, but looks like I didn’t, so you can just imagine the beautiful job I did on that.) 

Of course, once it was patched and textured, there was a big giant white spot and no paint for covering it up.  Which meant, of course, that I had to paint the entire room.  I knew I wanted a serene bathroom with blue-green walls, so I took a look at my (not insubstantial) stash of blue-green paint.  I tried out every paint we already had from the girls’ bedrooms, our kitchen, etc., but didn’t really like any of them.  I kept seeing Sherwin Williams Sea Salt online and really liked it, so I got a tester pot.  I still wasn’t sure about it, but was tired of looking, so I just went with it and got a full gallon (and that, my friends, *IS* how I roll). 

With some fresh paint, the room looked a little better…

…and then the old early-90s cabinets really started to bother me.  Just a year ago, I probably would’ve just painted them white, but I was concerned about being blinded by all white when you walked in half-asleep in the morning, so I decided to try staining them.  I used PolyShades “one-step” stain and polyurethane product in “Tudor”.  I had used something similar on my dining room table, which was a disaster, but I had read some positive reviews of the Polyshades, so figured I’d be super careful and give it a go.

I was a little concerned when I put the first coat on and could barely see it!  It just looked like it was wet…



…but I persevered with thin coats and FOUR COATS later, I was done.  Nice and dark:

 

It actually looks pretty nice!  For the most part, I liked working with the PolyShades.  It did get a little harder to apply as I got into the third and fourth coat, but that may have been my own fault for not letting it dry longer (I let it dry a day in between, but perhaps it needed longer as it got thicker).

It needs some knobs and drawer pulls (and new faucets, better mirror and lighting, blahblahblah), but it’s looking better all ready!