This is my baby brother's bathroom. This room was decorated when Baby Brother was approximately 8 years old. It was lovely then. Well, Baby Brother is now 29 and married with a PhD and his bathroom, sadly, had not grown up with him. In fact, it was just an homage to the life of a teenage boy when my sister and I got our hands on it - old tubes of Clearasil, lots of hair gel, and disposable razors that would give you tetanus just to look at them. After a thorough cleaning out of the expired products, we were ready to start. First on the list - that hideous (it was great at the time, Mom!) wallpaper. The burgundy and hunter green stripes HAD to go.
Well, we had way too much fun taking down the wallpaper. I'm not kidding! We borrowed a steamer from some friends and went to town. We eventually learned better ways of taking down wallpaper (adding fabric softener to the water, working on one section at a time, not taking so many Days of Our Lives breaks...), but with some music and a couple of scrapers, we had it down in a few hours. Maybe it was the fumes from the 20-year-old glue (or the occasional adult beverage), but it was pretty painless!
IMPORTANT NOTE - I should have started out with this, but I'm too lazy to go back and edit now. As you may guess, these posts are not professionally edited. Anyway, we wanted to do this room on an EXTREME budget, as with the other rooms in my mom's house. We were on our own little HGTV show, trying to making HUGE improvements with mere pennies, so you won't find extravagant splurges in this room. We're staging this home for an eventual sale, so we're keeping things pretty neutral and basic. Anyone that doesn't like the outcome is MORE than welcome to buy the house and put their own touch on it! To the lady who said, "YOUR POOR MOTHER!" in response to our dining room makeover - you're not going to like this one either. Sorry.
Back to our regularly scheduled program. After the wallpaper was down, we painted the room a lovely tan color that we think was named Almond Toast or Toasted Almond or Almond Joy. Something like that. We knew we didn't want to do Jazzercise in front of the giant, builder-grade mirror, so we wrestled it to the ground and donated it to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore (note: most H4H Restores don't want these mirrors, but we asked ahead of time, and they had a customer looking for them so that he could set up a gym. Score! Someone WILL be Jazzercising in front of it!) My mom got into the act (she gets on board when there is shopping to be done), and found a lovely bronze-framed mirror at HomeGoods to replace it. We also found a bronze-y light fixture, a new faucet, towel bars, and a shower rod, mostly at our local home improvement store. New knobs to replace the old brass ones, some Old English on the oak cabinets, and some accessorizing (read: stealing things from other parts of the house), and we were done!
We all love the results! You would never know a sarcastic, mischievous little boy once spiked his hair in this room. It's finally fit for the PhD that he is...even if none of the rest of us understand what he does, exactly.
Happy Junkin'!
Sarah
