Our Rancher: Before & After - The Guest/Hall Bath.

This before and after is a little tough to illustrate.  Our former hall/guest bath was tight.  The doorway was narrow...the vanity was too big for the space.  It was from the 1950's and not comfortable to use.

Our master bath was even worse.  It was also original to the house, much smaller, had a sink too small to ever wash your face in, the shower was leaking...and, well, I'm pretty sure you could be sitting on the toilet AND washing your hands at the same time.

So yay for having two bathrooms (we previously only had one), but booooooooo that neither worked for us.  Thankfully, they backed up to each other, and were right next to a master bedroom closet.

Here is the floorplan before:

Legend:

(1) – Stairs to the Basement

(2) – Hallway Coat Closet

(3) – Linen Closet #1

(4) – Linen Closet #2

(5) – Main Bath

(6) – Master Bath

(7) – Bedroom #1 Closet

(8) – Bedroom #2 Closet

(9) – Bedroom #3 Closet

(10) – Master Bedroom Closet #1

(11) – Master Bedroom Closet #2

And here is it is after we combined the two bathrooms and stole a little bit of master bedroom closet #1:

Legend:

(1) – Stairs to the Basement

(2) – Hallway Coat Closet

(3) – Linen Closet #1

(4) – Linen Closet #2

(5) – Main Bath

(6) – Bedroom #1 Closet

(7) – Bedroom #2 Closet

(8) – My Closet (Master Bedroom Closet #1)

(9) – Hubby’s Closet (Master Bedroom Closet #2)

(10) – Master Bathroom

(11) – Master Bedroom Closet #3

Hopefully those explanations and floor plans can help you visualize the transformation below.  And considering our renovations were done on a tight budget, I think this bath turned out great!!

Bye-bye 1950's....

I love how spacious this bathroom is now!

Make sure you're all caught up with our before and after posts here: the intro, part one, two, three, four, five and six!

Adding Some Interest.

Our master bath is a place that I barely share with you guys.  I literally had to hunt down the last post I mentioned the space in {which happened to be here}, because I could not remember off the top of my head.  Don't worry, you haven't been missing much.  Since the shower doors went up, there wasn't really much else that happened in there.  I knew it needed some attention in order to feel finished, but other spaces...like our living area or our bedroom...took precedence.

Well a couple weeks ago...wait no, it was months...as in, I did this right before Christmas...I decided to pay some much-needed attention to our bathroom.  It definitely needed "something".  My brain was telling me the answer was a wall full of tile, but my bank account was telling me that a stencil would work just as well. ;)

After conquering my fear of stenciling in our hallway, I was pretty sure I could handle a single wall in our bathroom.  So I hopped online and searched for a pattern that felt right.  I came across Cutting Edge Stencil's Retro Flame all-over stencil and I was sold!  It would be the perfect accent in our bathroom.  And since our 1950's walls are never level, the irregular zig-zags would help to hide any flaws.

Around 10PM on a random Sunday night, I got busy stenciling {like most normal people do}.  I removed the large mirror above our vanity, and hubby's towel holder {after I took the picture}.  I had a blank slate to start with.

I figured that stenciling around the back of the toilet would be the hardest part of this whole process, but I was wrong.  Since I could not figure out how to remove our beautiful light fixture from the wall {I even went so far as to Google the installation manual, with no luck}, I had to work my way around it.  Not the easiest task, but I managed.

In the process, I may or may not have melted part of my stencil onto a light bulb because a piece of it was laying on the fixture as I was diligently working.  {High five to my forehead!}

I used the same method as I did with the hallway.  I sprayed the back of my stencil with some Easy Tack spray adhesive and let it tack up for a couple seconds.  Then I stuck it to the wall and secured the corners with painter's tape {sometimes I didn't even need the tape.}  Then I used a small foam roller to apply the paint to the stencil.  Remember, when you are stenciling, less is more.  The more paint you try to gob on, the more it will bleed under the stencil.  You can "off-load" some paint by rolling your roller onto a paper towel before you paint the wall.

The way I got around the light fixture was cutting my stencil.  Yup, I pretty much knew it'd be a one-time-use for me because of doing this, but I was okay with that.  I knew I needed to chop it up into a couple pieces so I could fit around the light, and it worked.  Unfortunately, it makes the stencil less rigid in certain areas of the pattern, so painters tape came in handy to hold things in place.

It adds a lot more interest, don't you think?  Hopefully I'll get around to giving you guys a full reveal of our {almost} completed master bath that you may have peaked at during our house tour feature last week! :)