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Our Vintage Bathroom

We should have done this years ago.

Vintage Bathroom

Our house likely had both an unfinished attic and basement when it was built in 1910, so this bathroom on the main floor (right off the kitchen) would have been the only one. All of the fixtures are original: the hex tile, pedestal bathtub, toilet, and wall-mounted sink with separate hot and cold taps.

Vintage Bathroom

We changed the shower curtain when we moved in, but lived with the mint-toothpaste-green wall and trim color for over six years. I didn’t love it, but it didn’t bother me enough to change it right away. I bought a new shower curtain a little while ago to change it up again, and more recently I changed the toilet seat lid from white to black. I’d been planning to paint since, oh, forever, but couldn’t decide on a color. Turns out it’s much easier to pick a color when you step out of your own weirdness about choosing just the right hue and instead just pick something neutral-ish that will complement the blue in the tile! The bathroom is charming now that it’s a soft blueish gray with crisp white trim, and I’m kicking myself for having waited so long.

Vintage Bathroom

Now I’ll have a sweet little bathroom that I only get to enjoy for a couple of months or so, until we sell the house and move. Stupid earlier indecisiveness.

Vintage Bathroom

The wall color is Keystone Gray, and the exterior of the bathtub is Onyx. The white trim is Snowbound (leftover from painting my office), and the ceiling is White Dove (the pint leftover from testing whites for the kitchen was put to good use). The wall color is similar to the color in my office, but a little more subdued, and with a little less green. Both rooms are on the main floor, so it’s nice to have some continuity in the color palette.

Vintage Bathroom

I always thought the bathroom was kind of cute, because I could see the potential in it. Now it’s cute in real life though — not just in my head. It’s much better this way.

One Week to Listing

(We think.)

The house is being photographed for its listing on Tuesday morning, and we should be on the market June 6th or 7th.

The kids spent the night at my mom’s house so that we could get some uninterrupted work in. Brandon put a fresh coat of paint on the front porch this morning, and I’ve been painting the bathroom on the first floor.

Painting the Bathroom

We need to start packing some of our stuff away to ready the house for showing, and do a few things like tidy the bookshelves, wash the windows, and weed the garden. I’d like to paint the living room too, since I think it should not be pink (even though it IS a subtle shade of pink). Brandon and the realtor think that it isn’t necessary, but I’d feel better about our house’s chances of selling having done it.

I’m off to paint the exterior of the bathtub. I think we’ll change out the light fixture in the bedroom today too, and then pack a bit more.

This is all happening very quickly.

Improvements Made to the House

Brandon and I have done a lot to the house in our six years of ownership, and we did much of the work ourselves. We’re house-proud, and I wanted to gather some of the major work we’ve done here in one post! We (okay, I) made cosmetic choices that not everyone agreed with, like wallpapering the dining room or painting the not-so-nice wood trim white, but we’ve also made many structural improvements. We…

  • remodeled the kitchen (adding a dishwasher while we were at it)

Kitchen

Dark Bamboo Flooring

  • added zoned central air

  • upgraded the closet doors in two bedrooms

Craft Studio

Books

Half-Bathroom

  • installed a tankless water heater

  • updated the electrical wiring

  • updated the plumbing

  • created a new laundry room (with a gorgeous sink)

Laundry Room Sink

  • replaced the roof on the upper portion of the house (the rest of the roof was a different type and is fine)

New Roof

Backyard Patio and Garden

  • added a railing to the stairway

  • replaced light fixtures throughout the house

Eleanor's Room

(The Edison chandelier in our bedroom is coming with us though.)

Our listing agent has advised us to not do too much more to the house to prepare it for sale. There are still a handful of projects that we could have done had we planned to stay here longer, but there are always things that could be done to a house that’s over a hundred years old. We decorated it to our tastes, sure, but we also gave it a lot of love and a lot of new life. We hope the next owner(s) of this house will love it as much as we have.

Our Organized Bathroom Storage Area

This post is sponsored by Glad®. Take small steps to reduce waste and earn a chance to win big. Sign up for Glad’s Trim Your Waste program here.

I’ll be starting on bigger changes to prepare for moving soon, but until an agent comes and I can go over my ideas for what we will do, I figured I should start small.

Our home has 2.5 baths — one full bath upstairs by the bedrooms, one on the main floor, and a half bath that we added to the basement when we finished it. The bathroom upstairs has storage directly outside of it. It wasn’t bad, since the system I put in place six years ago is still working for us, but it needed a little attention. Do you think we should add doors? There were bi-fold doors when we bought the house, but they were broken when we moved in, so we took them out. I don’t mind having the area open, but what would you prefer in a house?

Here’s the space now.

Bathroom Storage Closet

It’s not a huge difference (hence no “before” shot), but I was able to consolidate some things. Brandon’s stuff was on the other side before, along with the extra toothbrushes, bars of soap, and assorted other sundries. Now it’s all together, and the other side can be devoted almost entirely to linens.

We keep a small garbage can in the bathroom but when we have something recyclable to throw out, like a plastic bottle or the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper, we bring it downstairs to sort in the kitchen bin. Trim Your Waste with Glad has more green ideas, and by signing up, you can be eligible to win prizes like $2500 to green your home, or make a donation to Keep America Beautiful. (More information and rules can be found here.) We do try our best to live cleaner and greener. Sometimes that means going through fewer paper towels by using cloth instead, and sometimes that means buying refills for cleaning products, soap, and anything else we can. My giant shampoo and conditioner refills are comically big, but I use them to refill the smaller ones in the shower so we are buying less packaging in the long run. It’s a small step, but it helps.

Shampoo and Conditioner Refills

A quick aside: I remember that I wrote years ago about not caring about what shampoo and conditioner I used, and that I just went with the cheap stuff. That was before I fried my hair, trying to bleach it and go red. When I went for a hair cut the next time after dying it, my stylist used Kevin Murphy and my hair was instantly better. I’ve used it since.

I know it’s a little thing, but having my storage areas organized makes me happy.

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