Wednesday 26 September 2012

Thoughts on the Water Closet

Here's our upstairs "master bath" when we moved in...



Not too bad in the grand scheme of terrible bathrooms. A creamy coloured square tile, and a basket weave pattern wallpaper that was pretty much the same fleshy colour as the bedroom. Since we're planning a huge overhaul for the bathroom and bedroom, to make a better master "suite", I wanted to do simple updates to tide us over for a couple years until we're ready to do the big stuff. I ripped off the wallpaper pretty the same time I took off the stuff in the kitchen - this stuff came off WAY easier. I was just going to paint the part where the wallpaper was, (and maybe probably the tiles), and we were going to replace the sink and faucet, because Jase would be able to get them for practically free (if not free). 
 Then (back at the beginning of the year) Jason says, "it's not that hard to take these tiles off, watch, they probably just like, fall off". Umm, yeah, that wasn't the case. He broke about three tiles, and the wall behind look terrible haha. We weren't able to chip out the rest of the tiles, they all seemed to cascade out in groups haha. So, down the tiles came - all thanks to my awesome little sister Mer! 
   And so we've been living with this God-aweful looking room for a while now...

 I know eh, looking at these pictures kind of makes me wonder what we were thinking by taking down the tile - then I remember I didn't want to take it down to begin with and I feel slightly better. Since the wall behind the tile is covered with glue, and is peeling, we're clearly not going to be able to paint, so we're just going to stick up some bead board to cover up that orange nasty, (that Mer says reminds her of a jungle? we tend not to question her anymore). I'm going to paint the top part of the walls, most likely this colour...


Which is Sherwin Williams "Moody Blue". I'll just paint the vanity black, with the sample tins I got for the bedroom, and we'll replace the sink and faucet with something that hopefully looks something like these...



We want a "vessel" type sink, the top one would be good, because it would fill the large hole that removing the old sink would fill and still sit flush with the counter. Where as if we went with something similar to the second picture it'd have to have quite a large base to fit over the whole, or it would have to be partly recessed, so all depends on what Jason can snag us, what kind of sink we'll be putting in.
   As for the faucets, we want something a lot sleeker than the clunker we have now.




Something like these would hit the spot quite nicely. Something tall and elegant, you know, like we both are hehe. 
   The kitchen is still our top priority, and since I'm back to work full time now, we'll have less time to do random side projects like the bathroom, but we'll slowly keep chipping away at it, so that by the time we FINALLY get around to having our open house/house warming (which we're planning now for December as like a one year anniversary to us moving in hehe :S) the master suite, along with the kitchen will be finite! 

In things are pretty much finished news, here's the upstairs hall in all it's newly painted glory.


I still have to cut in, and try and figure out how to cut in over the stairs (if anyone has any pointers, they'd be appreciated) All we have left to do here is get rid of that ugly blue brain globe light thing (that hangs about three centimetres away from the fan) and install the fire alarm that for reasons unbeknownst to us, has a holder, but has been MIA since we moved in. The gross carpet is exceptionally gross in the hallway (especially since I seemed to have spilled many drops of the dark gray paint on it haha) and I can't wait to get rid of it! But since grody-no-one-sees-but-us-carpet isn't that high on the priority list it'll stay like that for the next while.

Wednesday 12 September 2012

Some New Moves in the Bedroom

Jason and I have been working on a few things in the bedroom...prompted by the fact we came into a new bed. I promise I won't regale you with our bedroom life, but rather with the life of our bedroom.  Up until the past week, this is what we had been living with...



A fabulous amount of skin colour. Seriously I wish I had've made Jase stand up against it, because it was almost the same colour as him...peachy with a slightly pink undertone haha. We thought it was the little old ladies room, but apparently it was the son's, which makes us question the colour that much more...either that, or question the son. You can't really tell from these pictures (it was night when I look them, and I was trying to hurry before stuff was to get dumped in it) but there is in fact baseboard and trim around the doors and windows, they were just painted the exact same flesh colour as the wall.
   If you're wondering why we didn't do anything to the room if we hated the colour so much, it's because the kitchen was sucking all our attention - like that annoying new baby when you've been the only child for so long. Plus we honestly just didn't care, because we didn't have a proper bed, or dressers, or anything really for the room, so what was the point of making it look nice, to just dump a bunch of crap in it? At least that's what my thinking was.
   Then, I got bored one day while I was sitting 'round doing nothing, and this happened...


 I painted the trim! Well, just on this window, to see how it would look, and we both loved it. It's amazing how much it brightened up the window and surrounding wall. Then Jase took of the doors to the two closets (from the 2nd picture) which we never closed, and it opened up the space even more. Then something amazing happened. Like I mentioned before, we got. a new. bed! A giant, amazing, practically new, double pillow top, king bed! FOR.FREE! Which, given the small changes I had already implemented, got we wanting more than the dismal flesh walls we were currently staring at. So I painted some ideas of paint I already had on hand to see what we liked...


I was originally thinking something dark and moody, since the room gets a ton of natural light from all angles, but then had some misgivings once they got up on the wall. The first two were almost identical, and pretty much black - which neither of us liked. Then we had a muddy gray and a greige. We eventually both decided we liked the sample taped up the best. Which is Martha Stewart's "Seal". But then a funny thing happened on the way to the paint store. I sort of changed my mind...


A light, light gray. It's a great colour, because in some lights (mainly evening) it reads as like an ice blue, so you never know what you're going to get with it. You can see how gross the trim and covers still look in all their fleshy/almond glory, so I finished painting the trim bright white, and we changed out all the outlets and covers, for square and white.
 

The room looks totally different now, and all we've done is paint. It's amazing what a coat of paint, and some new outlets will do for a room. I'll show a wider room view once we get the new bed in, and things go back to normal a bit...because right now everything's still sort of shoved to the middle of the room, and it's a hot mess!