Powder Room

I love to start a blog post with a statement like..."And this is where we started." Because it means we have moved down the path of renovation and ended up somewhere else.

As in the case of our Powder Room. This is where we started:

And this is where we have ended...

Uhh, that would be me trying to take a picture in an incredibly small room...

One of our earlier projects was the powder room, although it was only wrapped up this past weekend. As I mentioned here, the powder room is awkwardly situated in the kitchen. Don't get me wrong, the door closes, but I always feel terrible that guests have to use the bathroom right in the same area where we are cooking the food.

We therefore tried to make the powder room as nice as possible for our guests. Budget? On a dime of course. Someday our goal is to move the powder room into our someday-to-be-built sunroom, but that's about 5 years down the road.

Here's what we did.

• Replaced the pink laminate with wood Ikea countertops.

• Replaced the rusted out sink and faucet with an American Standard sink and faucet from Lowes. Simplicity was the key to our decision. Knowing that we were going to work with this powder room for at least 5 years, I didn't want anything too trendy or expensive.

• Painted the cabinets white and added glass knobs from Restoration Hardware.

• Painted the walls with Latte colored paint from Restoration Hardware. Since this time, I've learned to find 'inspiration' in the paint color collection at Restoration Hardware and then head somewhere else to have the paint color mixed for me. With all due respect to the folks at Restoration Hardware, I find the paint quality seriously lacking in light of the cost of the paint.

• Added beadboard wainscoating to the walls and painted it white. You can pick this up at any hardware store. As you can see from the picture below, we had to install the beadboard pretty high in order to cover damage to the walls that occurred when we ripped out the previous mirrored vanity.

• Toilet above. Vintage. As in, original to this bathroom.

• Cafe curtain for the window. The element I finished up sewing this past weekend. I LOVE this fabric and have been wanting to use it in one of our projects. It's Annie Selke for Calico Corners and I had my first glimpse of this fabric in a spread for House Beautiful.

By the way, sewing a cafe curtain is one of the best starter sewing projects that I know. It teaches you how to cut your fabric correctly and learn how to sew a straight seam on all four sides. Nothing tricky to sew as you hang up your panel using cafe curtain rings and a tension rod. If you have a sewing machine but are intimidated by sewing, I recommend starting out with this project.

Thanks for reading folks. In keeping it real, however, I must disclose ceiling of this powder room:

About a year ago, we had raccoons tear out the roof directly above our powder room. Seriously. Raccoons are the size of dogs in Seattle and they have no problem ripping through trash cans and, apparently, our roof. Needless to say, torn out roof (of which we were unaware) + rainy Seattle weather = flooded ceiling in bathroom. Next steps are to replace the ceiling and the light.