Bathroom Make-Over on a Shoe String Budget

Here are the results of my husband's labor of love. I am so very pleased with it.


This is the small cabinet that was hard to access because the door was blocked. (See prior post for the "before" pics) We took the door off and made it into cubbies. There is a quite a bit of usable storage space. We must admit there is still one wall with the disguised tile on it. As you can see above we just painted it white. We are hoping that will last a while before we have to attack one more tile/cement wall.



Look, no more saggy wall paper. The good news is that there was not too much scary stuff lurking behind the wall paper.



Here is more new storage space. Brian put in a medicine cabinet with lots of shelf space in it. Yes, we know we mixed gold and silver finishes. That's how it goes on a shoe-string budget.



Here is one of the walls that Brian took the tile off of. What a difference a few days make. This is the final result. Note, yet another storage cabinet and hooks. Yahoo!! The lighter paint made the bathroom seem a lot bigger. It is a wonderful birthday present. I am so, so grateful!

He's Speaking My Love Language!

We have have just celebrated our one year anniversary in our, "new to us", home. The best we can tell is that it was built some time in the early 1900s making it around 100 years old. It is full of character and charm. The sweet family, that owned it before us, lovingly upgraded and restored most of the house. We were able to just move right into it. It has been the perfect home for us.


Over the course of the last year, we have continued to make small up-grades to our beautiful home. We are "DIY" (Do It Yourself), kind of people. Mostly because that is the only way we can afford to make the changes to our home, but also because, for the most past, we enjoy doing the work.

This year, for my birthday, my husband decided to tackle our upstairs bathroom. Now don't get me wrong, the bathroom was not in bad shape. It just had a couple of, umm.... well lets just call them "quirks".

Along with all of the "character" we inherited with an older home, we also inherited the lovely pink and blue bathroom tile. (Someday, I would like to learn the history of the Dalhart, pink and blue bathroom tile.) Anyways, the last family did an amazing job of disguising the tile with marble looking contact paper. It was a wonderful idea that bought us an extra year of not having to redo the bathroom.

Very clever tile disguise.

The second quirk was the lack of storage availability. It had a beautiful mirror over the sink that sadly, did not provide any storage options. There was also a cabinet over the toilet that was hard to access due to the toilet obstructing the path of the cabinet door. So, our one and only towel cabinet was very overcrowded.


Small unusable cabinet blocked buy the toilet.

The last quirk was that the beautiful, painted wallpaper, was beginning to sag. We knew it needed to be removed but we were fearful as to what we would discover lurking under the paper. So, we put the whole bathroom make-over on hold as long as we could.


Wall paper and shower steam proved to be a bad combination.

My birthday seemed to be the time to tackle the project. Knowing that my love language is "Acts of Service", Brian knew that the best gift he could give me was a bathroom make-over. Once he tackled the project, he realized how great of an act of love it really was.


Nice huh!

The tile was put on directly to a cement wall! Still, he persevered. A lessor man would have run away in fear. He is quite a guy.


The clever man in action...



And his helper


Here is what that giant hole in the wall began to look like a little while after the project was under way.

You won't believe how it all turned out. Tune into my next blog to see the finished product! (I know, I know, who knows then that will be:)