master bath | Operation Home

Sometimes my Type A personality is a tough thing to get past. I’m a detail person. Details must mesh with one another, especially when it has to do with a project that I’ve worked on myself. And when a project feels half-done (or like it doesn’t flow) I can’t think of much else besides fixing it until it’s actually complete. Which explains why our master bath has been a huge mental pain in my arse for the past 5 months. My Type-A-Ness has been hitting the crazy-meter. And no, it’s not because it’s ugly. That’s a fact that I accepted when we bought the house. It’s a detail thing. A paint detail thing to be exact.

Just in case you haven’t seen our master bathroom, allow me to introduce you (prepareyourself)…

This room is decked out with navy blue and purple cultured marble (with swirls of mauve… we must not forget the mauve), 80’s floor tile with stained grout, peach walls, and what I like to refer to as our “coffin-shower”. I mean, just tell me that doesn’t look like I’m buried alive…

Not to mention the cramped, poorly thought-out layout with zero natural light. It’s quite the gem, really.

Honestly, nothing short of a full gut is going to save this room. We know this. So, the only things that I could think to do to freshen it up as we save for a complete renovation was to give it a good scrubbing and paint those awful peach walls.

And my color of choice was white. It was really the only option. I refused to give that terrible marble the satisfaction of trying to match it in any way.

My goal was to match the trim paint but use an eggshell finish (as opposed to the semi-gloss that was on the trim). Since we didn’t have any trim paint on hand, I basically just held up a bunch of color swatches to the trim and ended up with Behr Ultra Pure White 1750, which according to the swatch I had was a nice true white. Not too bright and blue, not too yellow. Just nice. Or so I thought.

Now, here’s where things got a little hairy. As I just mentioned, the color I was going for was a soft creamy white. But the color I was painting appeared to be brighter… more blue. I figured that it just needed to dry, so I gave it a chance. But after spending all day painting (it took three coats… yeah, not super impressed with Behr’s coverage in this case), I stepped back and realized that the paint was definitely more blue. And that blueness was making our trim appear yellow in comparison. Ugh. Not good. And then I held up my color swatch…. Yup. Wrong.Friggin.Color. You’d think I was crazy if I showed you the photo I took to demonstrate this. It just didn’t capture the difference as it was in person.

Now, did the paint color look completely terrible? Not completely. Did it look better than the peach? Most definitely. Some may be able to look past it, but I’m an undertone person. Colors either need to intentionally contrast or match exactly. The almost-matches-but-not-really thing is NOT cool with me.

So, I purchased new paint, this time emphasizing that the color needed to match the swatch exactly.

And time passed.

And nothing happened.

*coughcough* I probably should mention that the painting of the bathroom happened in OCTOBER. I even alluded to it in this post back when I painted our bedroom. I just didn’t want to post about the master bath until I got it repainted again.

But then, the repainting didn’t happen. And it kept not happening. For a long time. And then I realized something….

NOTHING will make this room look good shy of a full gut. (pause. rinse. and repeat) Nothing.will.make.this.room.look.good.shy.of.a.full.gut.

I mean, I know this. I’ve KNOWN this… So, after this statement bounced around my head for, like, 5 months I finally had a break-through: If nothing will make this space look good, then why am I stressing over a slightly different shade of white??? Lame, Christina. Totally lame. I guess sometimes it just takes time to realize that you need to step back and look at the big picture, ya know?? And I finally did. I weighed the amount of time and energy I’d spend repainting this hole (and mind you, it’s not a fun hole to paint thanks to all those ridiculous nooks and crannies. (Heehee! Gross.)) versus the reward (slightly different white paint), and I just.said.NO. Now, don’t get me wrong… If this were the final space, I’d totally do it. But really, this bathroom is gonna be ugly no matter what color white it is. So, we’re gonna rock it as is for a while.

Here’s how it looks now…

Remember how I discussed the difference light bulbs can make on a paint color? The above picture is a prime example of how a light bulb can make a space seem yellow. That’s a quick switch that I’ll probably make at some point.

You can also see in the pic below that the coffin-shape of the black-shower-of-doom is replicated in our toilet area (…you can even see the shower in the mirror’s reflection! Nice touch, right? Haha!) …

I’m just imagining someone in the 1970’s wearing bell-bottoms and a a large-collared shirt, planning this bathroom, and thinking how clever and groovy it was to carry the coffin-shape throughout the space. Heehee! And ya know what?? I just realized that our bathtub (which is oddly vortex-like)…

Is reminiscent of something else…

Remember that wallpaper that we found behind our wet-bar mirror?? And instead of peach walls (like in the bathroom), they had peach countertops! Way to tie it all together. This house must’ve been the place to boogie in its heyday. 😉

So, anyways, that’s the master bathroom. I have a hard time seeing us doing anything else to it until it’s renovation time (aside from a bit of accessorizing and some hardcore grout-cleaning). The awkward layout and the fact that both the shower and bath tub plumbing fixtures are set on the weird partition walls rather than exterior walls…

And the fact that the step that leads to the bathtub (??) was tiled around and grouted in (as seen three pics up), mean that only major changes will make a difference in this room. If the plumbing was placed differently, we could at least take down some of the partition walls to open up the space. But we can’t. So, we wait. I’m excited to someday take a sledge hammer to this joint (given that I can actually LIFT said sledge hammer… I might just kick the walls a lot instead. Heehee!). 🙂

In the meantime, I’m (well WE’RE — Joey’s hatred of this bathroom is as vast as my own) daydreaming of adding a solar tube for natural light, a HUGE glass-enclosed shower with gorgeous tile, maybe a clawfoot tub, and completely reconfiguring the space so that it makes more sense. It’s actually a pretty large bathroom… The space is just used so inefficiently (and the tub is so massive) that it seems small. This project will literally be a gut down to the studs once we’re able to do it. And we wanna do it right, so it may take a bit of time to save enough, but we’ll get ‘er done eventually.

So, tell me… what’s your favorite part of the space? The coffin-shower? The vortex tub? Any design ideas or suggestions? Anybody been through a full gut of this magnitude? Any tips or tricks?

So, I’m now finally getting to the LAST never-been-seen area of our home. Our master bath (dahdahdah-DAH!). So, hows about a tour?

Ya see, our bathroom started out looking like this….

Like our guest bath… not bad. But basic. A lot of beige going on. After painting our bedroom with Glidden’s Driftwood Grey, this tone quickly became my favorite color EVER. With its deep grey hue and racy green undertones. Oh, Driftwood Grey, please tell me… do you rent? or own?? Those wings. You angel. (Name that reference!!)

So, anyways, I loved the paint color so entirely that we decided to extend it into the bathroom. Doing so, not only made me ~~drool~~ happy, it unified the two rooms to make them feel like more of a cohesive master suite.

I added some art and towels as well as some accessories that I already had from our last house (which are actually much more muted in person. They’re looking a little “color-kaleidoscope” in the pics below. It all goes in person, swear.). We opted for square sinks, but unfortunately, the builder we used no longer supplied white countertops, tubs, toilets, shower basins, etc. Their color of choice was biscuit. Which pretty much looks like the food. It’s basically an almond tone. I would’ve preferred white, but it is what it is (until we change it? Eh, Joey??).

The door straight ahead in the photo below is our closet. Then, we have a small linen closet beside the shower. I’ll tell ya, they did good with this floor plan’s master suite when it comes to storage. No complaints there.

Onto the toilet room. It started out here….

And now is here…

Meet My Pretties (aka. our shelves).

Sorry about the pics. This room is so small that photographing it is really difficult. Here are a few close ups, to give you a better idea…

We DIYed our shelves using 1×10″ boards from Home Depot. We had them cut down to size for free right there at the store (We decided on one inch shorter than the room’s width to allow for 1/2 inch on either side). Once we got them home, we sanded and stained them with ebony-toned stain, then mounted them atop these unfinished brackets from Ikea for 3 bucks a pop….

…which we stained the same color. We ended up spending roughly 10 bucks per shelf (including the brackets) by going this route. And I love the custom feel they give due to their perfect size in comparison to the nook. And the rustic aesthetic is the bees knees. We didn’t polyurethane the shelves because we liked the matte, low key feel that they gave with just stain. My only complaint is that when I dust the shelves, the knots hold onto some of the fuzz from my Swiffer sheet. I’m sure there’s a solution to this problem, but I haven’t been bothered enough to find it.

Here’s a slightly different view of the toilet room…

The mirror is from Target. It was originally $49 bucks. I stalked it until it went on clearance for $14.98 and then, with a “whoop!” of victory, I made it mine. The paintings hung in our last home’s front room vertically. I originally got them from Kohls for $3.98 a piece… they were exactly the same picture so I just relocated the hanging hardware on the back of one of them so I could hang one upside down and one right-side-up. I decided to hang them horizontally here to better fill the space. I simply relocated the hardware on the backs again and hung them with a few nails.

And here’s the view of the bathroom from the closet…

Now, there’s definitely more to go with this room. And here’s the plan…

Add a faux DIY roman shade to the window in a fun pattern
Change the builder towel rods and rings for hooks
Either frame out the current mirror or replace it with two mirrors with shelves in between
Bid adios to the current light fixtures over the mirror and replace them with something more “us”
Hang a fun chandelier in the toilet room?
Replace all faucets with sleeker, simpler versions
Add pulls to the drawers
Possibly switch out the cumbersome double doors (not shown) in the entrance of the bathroom with a sliding barn door?
Add an area rug.

Lots to do here, but all completely doable. I can’t wait to get going on this. Our guest bath will be first (If the weather will stay mild enough for me to paint the dang tile surround. I’ve got all the stuff and everything!!), but this one’s been on my mind for a while so hopefully we will get started on these changes at some point soon.