Hall Bathroom

As I mentioned Monday in my post about our master bathroom, our house only had one upstairs bathroom, a hall bath, when we bought the house.  One of the pieces in making the conversion to a master bath a viable option was adding another upstairs bath to serve as a shared bathroom for the other two upstairs bedrooms.

I came up with the idea that we could carve enough space from one of the bedrooms to create a bathroom, without making any significant structural changes.  The original layout of Ada's bedroom was this:

The doorway came in a bit awkwardly on the side into a narrow space with the closet at the back and then the room opened up into a larger area.  The narrow space felt very separated from the rest of the room so it was the perfect little bit to steal away for a bathroom.  There was a heating vent in both the narrow area and the larger room area so we were all set there, and directly below the narrow part of the room was our coat closet, down the back of which we were able to run all the water lines we needed straight into the basement to connect with the other water pipes there.  Had everything not lined up just right, it would have been a rather expensive project so we were so lucky that it all came together so easily.

I designed the new layout and Scott and I chose all the finishes together but we worked with a contractor to move the walls and install the actual bathroom.  The new layout looked like this:

The contractor put up a wall to separate the new bathroom space from the bedroom.  The old bedroom door became the bathroom door and a new door was cut from the bedroom into the hallway.  A new closet was framed out for the bedroom.  The new bathroom space was completely gutted and prepped for the new layout.

It's a small room so we very carefully chose items that would maximize the space we had.  The white wood vanity was custom made to fill every inch of space between the wall and the bathroom door and give us as much storage space as possible. 

We chose a blue-grey granite for the countertop and brushed nickel fixtures.

Restoration Hardware happened to be having a sale while we were going through this project so I got a great deal on the wall cabinet and lighting fixtures.  I love the graceful flare of the glass lampshades. 

For the shower, we used the same white marble as in the master bath, but went with a more rugged, almost industrial-looking grey tile on the floors.  We bought two different sizes of the floor tile and puzzled them together for an interesting look.

Along the back wall of the shower we mounted a glass shelf to hold bath and shower items.  I picked up the painting above the toilet (Mad Dogs by Jack Vettriano) on a total whim walking past an art store sidewalk sale in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston on my way home from work six or seven years ago.  Its title apparently comes from a 1930's song with the line, "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun."

I couldn't be happier with how the girls' bathroom turned out.  The only change I've been thinking about lately is the wall color.  I never really loved it and I've been thinking that some crisp navy might be a nice contrast to the white of the marble and vanity and the perfect complement to the yellow in the towels and shower curtain.  I love how the navy and yellow look together in the playroom and also love the way the horizontal stripes came out on the walls there, so I've been considering doing navy and white stripes across the wall behind the towels. 

I've also been sort of obsessing over this navy and white ikat stenciled wall since I spotted it and wonder if the bathroom wall could be the perfect place to try it out.

 

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Can you see it on that bathroom wall?  Or are stripes the way to go?

For those of you waiting anxiously for the X bench tutorial, good news!  I expect to have it up Monday, so be sure to check back.

Happy weekend!

Dining Room

Updating our dining room five years ago was the very first time I ever operated any kind of power tool.  I loved the look of wainscoting and decorative moulding and wanted to try installing it myself.  So we bought a miter saw and nail gun with air compressor and several books on how to cut and install moulding.  There was a lot of trial and error in this room but it sure feels great to think back now and know how much I've learned and how far I've come in my ability to do these kinds of projects.

Here's a photo of the dining from our house's sale listing when we bought it:

 

I painted the top half of the wall a pale grey-blue.  Then I got to work installing a chair rail, shadow boxes, and crown moulding along the top.  All of the woodwork and wall below the chair was painted antique white.  I was completely intimidated by crown moulding corners so chose to use cornices, which make crown moulding a cinch.  All you have to do is nail the cornices to the corners, measure the space between, and cut each end of the moulding straight to fit in between.  And I think they look kind of pretty too.

We replaced the brass chandelier with something a bit larger and more rustic.  I decided to use ivory, very tailored valances on the windows because the room is a bit small and as much as I love floor-length drapes, I felt like they would overwhelm this room. 

I hung a metallic-framed mirror on the wall across from one of the windown to bounce more light into the room.

We bought the wool rug when we bought the house and I don't love it an inch less than I did five years ago.  I doubt I'll ever get tired of the dusty blue/green/grey tones.

When the room is not being used, I keep the table decorations very simple.  The sideboard table has a glass hurricane, glass candlestick, and one of those little preserved boxwoods I like so much on each side.

This Simon Pearce bowl was one of my favorite wedding gifts - I love the simple, graceful lines.  My favorite dining room table linens are hemstiched ones like this ivory runner here.

I'll be wrapping up this mini house tour week tomorrow with a look at the bathroom we added 3 years ago for our daughters!

Playroom

Our house doesn't have a fully finished basement, but does have a small room at the bottom of the stairs that had drywall, a nice built-in cabinet unit, and a carpet when we bought the house.  The previous owners had it staged as a playroom when we first saw the house.

When we moved in we had no children but a treadmill, stationary bike, wicker chest, old sewing table, and lots and lots and lots of boxes.  So all of those things went into the basement room, and I think once you designate an area as "dumping grounds," it's just too easy to keep adding to the piles.  So over the next few years, in went my in-laws' huge old TV, a few chairs we weren't using, miscellaneous home decorations, either out of season or just not being used...and on and on and on.  In the meantime, we had two daughters who started accumulating alarming amounts of toys and playthings that we housed in our living room.  Thank goodness for the big built-ins there because they did help keep the room from looking totally overrun by toys, but after a few years, I was starting to feel like the living room was constantly a mess.  It's the first room you see when you walk down the stairs in the morning and the first room you see when you walk in our front door, so I really wanted to do something to help keep it a little tidier and looking less like a romper room.  

So I revisited the little room at the bottom of the basement stairs.  It was stacked practically to the ceiling with stuff and inhabited by a shocking number of spiders but I thought with a little elbow grease I could transform it into a special little space for my girls to play in, and on a pretty tight budget since I really didn't want to spend much on this project.

First step was either purging or relocating all of the items in the room.  Once the room was completely cleared (part of this was rescuing all of our wrapping paper supplies from their jumble inside one of the cabinets), I got to work scrubbing the baseboards and vacuuming up the spiders and webs.

I painted the entire room, including the built-ins, a bright white semi-gloss I had leftover from another project.  I then marked off wide horizontal stripes on the wall across from the stairs and painted them pale grey, also left over from a previous project.  The stripes were a little tricky to do since both the floor and the ceiling are far from level, but I found that the most important parts are that the lower stripes match the pitch of the floor so furniture against the wall matches the line, and that the stripes at the top follow the pitch of the ceiling.  Then you very slightly taper the center stripes so they meet in the middle looking level and all the same width.  

I wanted a large storage bench that would double as seating but couldn't find anything that was as deep as what I wanted or was nine feet long.  So what do you do when you can't find what you want and you're working on a budget?  You build it!  I built the storage bench using cabinet grade plywood and some wood moulding.  I had the yellow and white striped cushion custom made at Outdoor Living Your Way, which was by far the cheapest option I could find, and only marginally more expensive than buying the foam and fabric myself.  The quality is great and they made and shipped the cushion super quickly.

The storage baskets that best maximized the space I had in the cubbies were laundry baskets from Walmart.  We store mostly loose toys inside them.

The one thing in the room I sort of splurged on was the capiz shell pendant from Pottery Barn, though I got mine on EBay for about half the retail cost.  There is one petal that has the tiniest bend in it - completely invisible unless you really hunt for it - so this was a great score.  I absolutely love it, it's hands down my favorite light fixture in the whole house.  Ada runs over to turn on her "pretty light" as soon as she goes downstairs to play.

The little table and chairs set was $19.99 at Ikea.  Ada loves to use it as a drawing table and I think it will be great for both girls to play games or do puzzles together when Ellie gets a little older.

I set up a little kitchen area along the back wall of the room with the girls' play kitchen.  I hung a few simple hooks on the wall to keep kitchen utensils organized.  The shelf and brackets were also a great bargain from Ikea.  The shelf holds all of the kitchen serving pieces.

Ada was with me at Ikea and instantly fell in love with the colorful little cups, and at $3.99, I very happily brought them home for her.  Aren't they adorable?

The built-ins were in great shape and really just needed a fresh coat of paint.  I bought some magazine files and cups and boxes at Ikea to help organize drawing supplies and organized the girls' toys and games in their boxes on the shelves according to type. 

I put larger toys inside the cabinets.

To the right of the built-ins I set up a dress-up corner. I did a simple stencil on the wall and put a small rug on the floor to mark it as a special little spot in the room, hung a mirror at toddler-level, and put some pretty white hooks on the wall to hold some of the dress-up clothes.  The rest of the dress-up supplies go in the woven box on the floor.

The playroom is everything I had hoped it would be.  My girls love using it and it feels warm and cozy and childlike without being babyish.  Their toys are all organized and accessible.  And I have my living room back.

The only little piece left is the space under the stairs.  I feel like there is some hidden potential there but I've yet to come across any ideas I love.  Well except for this:

pinterest

How awesome is that??  I would have loved this as a kid.  But I think I'm looking for something a little lighter-on-labor here.  Lately I've been thinking of some light curtains so they could still make a kind of fort, but could also be pulled aside to open everything up.  Anyone have a brilliant, whimsical, under-the-stairs idea to share??

Living Room

Continuing with our house tour today is a look at our living room/family room.  We have one rather large combination room, which suits our current lifestyle perfectly.  We've made quite a few changes in here since inheriting it like this five years ago (these are the previous owner's furnishings):

The first thing we did was paint the walls a warm camel color and brighten the built-ins with bright white paint.  We initially hung a picture above the mantel but after a couple years and much convincing, I agreed to mount our TV above the mantel.  Despite my aversion to having a big black box above our fireplace, it really is the best solution for this room.

Last fall I spent a weekend embellishing the mantle and built-ins with dentil crown moulding and raised paneling.  I love the subtle detail it adds to the room.  It doesn't jump out at you, but it's a much more polished, interesting backdrop than the plain wood.  To make the raised panels, I used doorstop moulding and very small wire nails.

The two upholstered chairs in the room are centered on the french doors that lead out to our screened porch. 

On the other side of the room is our couch.  The DIY X benches I made are on the side of the coffee table by the fireplace.  They're great extra seating or footstools.

The coffee table used to be the same dark brown color as the couch but I sanded it down and stained it a light honey color.

Check back tomorrow for a look at my girls' recently finished playroom!

Master Bathroom

We’re currently enjoying a week at the Delaware beach with my parents, so I’m off my usual routine of cooking and home projects.  So as to not leave you high and dry this week, I thought I’d do a bit of a house tour to show you some of the rooms in our house that received love and renovations long before I ever started thinking about blogging. 

Today I’m starting off with our Master Bathroom.  When we bought our house five years ago there was no master bath.  There was one full bath downstairs next to the guest room and one full bath upstairs that was shared by the three bedrooms there.  No big deal at first because it was just Scott and I living upstairs, though the bathroom was in serious need of updating.  I don’t have a single before picture but it consisted of a teeny tiny vanity topped with Formica, a small, cheap, mirrored medicine chest, a linen closet, plastic yellow and white tiles on the walls, and a dark, dingy tub no matter how much scouring I did.  Not quite the lovely master bath one dreams of.

Original layout

Our original thought in buying the house had been to dormer the walls of our master closet and put in a master bath there, but we quickly realized that plan would cost tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars and we just weren’t looking to sink that much money into the project.  I can’t tell you how many laps I did around the upstairs of our house - and it’s not that big - before I had a lightbulb go off in my head that we could convert the existing bath into a master bath by eliminating the linen closet, which shared a wall with our bedroom, cutting the door to the bathroom there, and sealing up the old doorway.

New layout

We hired someone to work with us on this project, since I was 6 months pregnant and neither Scott nor I felt comfortable with the scope of the project as a DIY.  But we did the design and chose all the finishes ourselves.  To help keep costs down we opted to leave the plumbing where it was - toilet in the same place, sink in the same place, shower in the same place.  The space was completely gutted and the new and old doorways were respectively cut and sealed. 

It’s a rather small bathroom so we eliminated the tub completely and went with a glass steam shower to keep the bathroom visually open.  The key to keeping a glass shower looking nice between cleanings?  A squeegee!  Give it a quick wipe after showering and it wards off some of the inevitable soap residue.

We got a great deal on the white and grey marble and tiled the bathroom floor and shower walls with it.  We chose a coordinating mosaic marble tile in shades of white and grey that we used to tile the floor and ceilings of the shower, add a decorative band about 3/4 of the way up the shower walls, and add a backsplash behind the vanity.

I loved the contrast of dark fixtures against the white marble so we went with an oil rubbed bronze finish on all the hardware. 

We definitely wanted a double-sink vanity, and there was plenty of room for a smaller scale one based on the new layout.  We chose one with dark wood cabinetry, British cane inset on the doors, and furniture-style legs, and topped it with a marble slab similar to the tile on the floors and shower walls.

We purchased a wall cabinet with the same dark wood and British cane inset as the vanity and mounted it above the toilet to give us some storage for toilet paper and such since we were losing the linen closet.  I had been worried about the lost storage space but we gained so much other storage with the larger vanity and the wall cabinet, I’ve never once missed the closet.

While this is a small bathroom as master baths go, it’s such a light, bright space, and I'm so happy to just have a master bath, I never really notice how petite it is. 

A Home Story

My husband, Scott, and I bought our house in the Boston suburbs almost five years ago now, in June 2007.  We were still sort-of-newlyweds, married eight months at that point.  We both worked full-time, he in technology sales and I as an elementary school teacher.  We had been looking at houses in both the city and the suburbs for over a year, not totally sure where we wanted to buy, and had seen a LOT of properties.  Scott had fallen half in love once with a house I wasn't into.  I fell several times and had to be talked off the ledge of obsession by my more methodical, rational-in-the-face-of-spending-a huge-chunk-of-our-savings husband.

Then one Sunday in April we drove out to an open house in a quaint little town 35 minutes outside of the city.  We walked through the cozy cape-style house and uh-huh-ed and hmmmmm-ed and okay-ed as the real estate agent showed us around.  I had left houses before exclaiming, "I LOVE this place!!"  No such love-at-first-sight for me this time, and yet...there was something.  I remember getting into the car and Scott asking, "So what did you think?"  "Yeah, I liked it, it's got potential," I replied.  And he said, "Yeah, I liked it too."  Two days later we submitted an offer and two days after that we had ourselves a deal and a house.  I'm still not sure exactly what it was about this house that pulled us in...but like I said, there was something about it that felt right for both of us.

So we moved in the end of June with a truckload of stuff and energy and plans for improvement.  Five years later we've redone the kitchen, renovated two bathrooms and added a third, installed wainscoting in the dining room and master bedroom, painted every single wall in the house, ripped out and replaced all of the original front landscaping save one lovely azalea, and much, much more.  For some of it we have hired help.  Much of it we have done ourselves.  We've learned so much along the way, and I tell you, I never imagined I could love power tools as much as I do.  I hope that writing this blog will inspire me to take better before and after pictures because, frankly, I have been downright horrible at documenting some of the changes.

I can't wait to share both projects we've already completed and ones to come.  For now, I will leave you with straightforward before and after shots of the front of our house.

Before

After

Scott built the stone wall rock by rock.  My very talented brother, who is a landscaper, designed the new layout and content from 300 miles away, and then Scott installed all the new plantings. 

It still makes me smile to hold these photos side-by-side.  Granted, the first picture is covered in snow (this is Boston after all), but there wasn't much there besides some nondescript, rectangular shrubs.  I absolutely love what my brother designed for us.   

And so begins our little home story...