Bathroom Refreshing

The bathroom and the kitchen are the two rooms in our house that need kind of major stuff done to them and therefor have had pretty much nothing done to them since we moved in. The major stuff the bathroom needs are tile on the floor to replace the ugly linoleum, a new mirror, a new light fixture and a new tub. We still aren't quite ready to tackle any of these major things, but what we can do is paint. The cabinets were a light colored wood with peeling off varnish. There were no knobs on most of the cabinets (which contributed to the water stains and peeling varnish), except for the linen cabinet which had one broken handle. There was a medicine cabinet above the toilet, which must have been added later, because unlike the rest of the cabinets, it was white. The one thing we did like about our bathroom was the tile in the shower and sink back splash with the grey accent tiles. Here are some pictures from before we moved in.

We decided to paint the cabinets white (actually Valspar Betsy's Linen) to match the trim and the white medicine cabinet and we painted the walls grey to sort of match the accent tiles. As usual it was really hard to find the right color grey. The first one we got ended up looking purple on the walls. The one we ended up with was Valspar Notre Dame. It is a little lighter than the tiles so that it wouldn't be too dark for such a small bathroom.

We ended up finding the knobs on Amazon because I had this specific style in mind and neither Home Depot or Lowes had anything close.

We still need to tackle the major stuff, but for less than $150 I think we managed to make the bathroom feel fresh and much more cohesive.

Paint It, Black

Despite my assertion in my earlier post, the barn was not complete. There was one nagging problem. The floor. The floor was previously covered in fugly peel and stick vinyl tiles. They wouldn't have been so bad if they were the black and white checkerboard ones but these were just really unattractive and they were starting to unstick completely.

Underneath the tiles was a plywood subfloor. On line I saw some examples and a few tutorials of painted subfloors. So we decided to just pull up the tiles and paint the plywood black.

We borrowed a friend's belt sander and sanded down the floors. There was quite a bit of stickyness from the old vinyl tiles which did not really all come off with the sanding. We decided that since this is the barn it doesn't have to be perfect. If we were doing this inside our house we would have been much more thorough and probably patched some screw holes and the gaps between the plywood sheets better.

Then, after taping, we primed the floor with grey tinted primer and then two coats of Valspar latex gloss porch and floor paint in dark kettle black.

It covered really well and it looks pretty great. The only problem is that it shows every speck of dirt and dust. Black was probably not the best choice for the floor of a building that you have to walk through grass to get to.

It has made me think that probably one of the reasons that natural wood floors are so common all over the world is because brown is close to the color of most dirt and dust.