Be Book Bound: From the Design Book: A Bathroom Makeover

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

From the Design Book: A Bathroom Makeover

"[Dessie's] shop was a unique institution in Salinas. It was a woman's world. Here all the rules, and the fears that created the iron rules, went down. The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves- smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested. The whalebone corsets came off at Dessie's, the sacred corsets that moulded and warped woman-flesh into goddess-flesh."

~ John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I have a bittersweet relationship with bathrooms.

On the one hand, I have to clean them.

(And it wouldn't hurt to remind you here that I have 5 boys.)

On the other hand, bathrooms offer me a moment of honest privacy in this very public world.

The bathroom is where I close the door on the idealized bodies I see on magazines and television and Pinterest, and where I come to terms with my own, very normal, very real woman-flesh. Here is where I weigh that flesh, clean it, pluck it, shave it, paint it, scent it, dress it, and own it. That moment in the morning when it is just me and the mirror is a defining one: each day I decide to either live with what I see or change what I see.

Not long ago, I realized I REALLY didn't like what I saw in the mirror---aside from that trouble area just south of my chin and north of my kneecaps. It was everything ELSE in the mirror that troubled me. I saw yellow-striped wallpaper, builder-white walls, and non-committal brown cupboards. Yuck. It was indeed time for a change, and this time, it didn't involve a diet.

Behold.

My bathroom decor was doing NOTHING to help me feel confident, happy, or skinny. So I decided to change it.

Here it is now.

Now my bathroom is soft and serene and sparkly. And while I may need a heck of a lot more vertical lines to make me look skinny in that mirror, I swear the new surroundings have completely changed my outlook in the morning.

The first thing I did was strip the wallpaper down to the bare walls and paint it a neutral tan color (Gobi Desert by Behr).

Next, I took those horrible brown cabinets and painted them white and added a brown glaze over top.

To finish off the tub area, I added a topiary and a candle chandelier.

For the sink area, my husband and I framed out the mirror with some inexpensive molding. This made a HUGE difference for not a lot of work. (Says the wife whose husband did all of the cutting . . .)

I added apothecary jars on silver trays for a little sparkle . . .

These jars looked lovely sitting across from my vintage toiletry bottles.

And then, as the finishing touch to the bathroom, I decided to use this little garage sale tray as a "towel plaque." Just a simple swipe of a white-out pen in the center of the tray, and voila!

I wish I could say that my new bathroom is self-cleaning, but it's not. But somehow cleaning a beautiful bathroom doesn't feel like such a chore. The boys' bathroom? Well, that's another story . . .