 
At last, the Imperial Bungalow Bathroom Renovation Project is complete. (Thanks to Bobbi and Brian for scanning the "before" photos!) Work began the day after closing on the house in December 2000, when I had a plumber replace the ancient, leaking toilet with a new one. The following spring, I pulled up the nasty old linoleum floor, then sanded and sealed the hardwood floor that had been underneath.
This summer I had another plumber replace the sink, though the dandy caulking job around it is mine, as is the tub recaulking. The tub, by the way, gets no updates... it's the original and is a foot longer and six inches deeper than modern tubs and is great for a long soak.
After settling on a decorating scheme in 2001, it took me this long to get around to actually doing it. Looking for a colorful theme that would be original, not childish and not involving a marine theme (which I've had before), I was inspired by a series of postcards I found while visiting my friend Laura in Seattle. The cards, imported from India, depicted a variety of Hindu and Buddhist deities and demons. I created a color palette and theme from them and, voila! Behold, the Toilet of the Gods (and yes, it's also a pun on "The Twilight of the Gods," you clever types).
Inspired by the layouts in BBC Good Homes and the format on "Changing Rooms" and "Trading Spaces," here are some more details:
Best bargains: I'm kind of tickled over how inexpensive most of the items were. The wastebasket and beach bag (turned toilet paper storage sack), for example were each $1 from Ikea. The curtain was a picnic table cover on clearance at Target for $3 that I cut to shape and stitched to fit over an old curtain rod. The towels are from Wal-Mart, as is the pink plastic toothpaste and toothbrush cup on the sink, which was 50 cents. Also, the stencils along the moulding were free, because I made them myself, using card stock and an Xacto knife, recreating shapes found on the curtain. The stylized Ganesha stencil is one I made from a bumper sticker I bought at an Indian grocery store in Florida while visiting my friend Lila.
Favorite things: Because it's a tiny bathroom, I wanted more storage without adding shelving. I really like the way my "shelf" of mini-beachbags turned out. They're hung on towel hooks so I can change them when I get bored with the color scheme, and I got them for a couple bucks each on clearance at Target, whoo hoo!
Go home. |
Biggest costs: The entire project cost around $600, with the main expenses being the toilet and sink replacement. The biggest expense that did not involve a plumber was buying the paint and primer.
I'm super happy with the way the mirrors turned out. I made color photocopies of the original postcards that inspired the theme, and decoupaged them to unfinished wood frame mirrors I got at Ikea for $1 each. I also really love my hindu god fingerpuppets, above the medicine cabinet, which I found on EBay for $4.
If I Had To Do It All Over: I would definitely call the Behr paint hotline before I bought the paint (I wound up calling them after it became apparent that something was Terribly Wrong). The guy at Home Depot told me I had to prime everything a battleship gray for the saturated color paints to take. He was right about the purple, blue and green walls, but the yellow wall was a nightmare, looking like bronchitis cough-up after three coats of yellow over the primer. Even priming it white didn't help. Eventually I had to apply two coats of yellow-tinted primer over the mess and then three more coats of yellow (to their credit, the manager at Home Depot, when I complained, gave me a free quart of yellow paint, a free quart of the yellow-tinted primer and refunded the cost of the wasted quart of yellow). I used a pink-tinted primer for the pink wall, but it still took several coats.