Tag Archives: bathroom

November 8, 2011 · 9:41 am

Bathroom Storage Solution

Good morning!

Hope everyone had a great weekend! Ours consisted of a trip to Lowe’s and an afternoon of building…who is surprised?? Can’t complain though…the chill of fall is definitely in the air, which means our unheated one car garage-turned-workshop will soon lose it’s appeal as our go-to workspace. So, while the weather cooperates, we’ll be out there trying to finish up a few projects we are determined to do this year before it gets too cold (obviously this means you’re all getting hand built stuff for X-Mas…sorry).

I think I’ve discussed this on here before, but we have 1.5 bathrooms in our house and they are probably the smallest bathrooms ever.  You’ve already seen our half bath…

(Find out about how we painted those stripes here, and about that shelf we built here).

Anyways, now that the half bath is good shape for the time being, we thought we should spend a little time on our “master” bath.  I say “master” like that, not because I approve of unnecessary quotation marks (find out more about that here, haha), but because it’s really a lousy excuse for a master bath.

 

Not so bad at first glance, but it’s definitely tiny and space is limited. There is some storage under the sink and above the toilet, but it wasn’t working for us (imagine various toiletries falling out of that cabinet into the toilet. Yep, that happened.) So the idea for a new storage shelf was born, and the only place to put it was under the window opposite the sink/toilet wall.

Since the shelf had to be the perfect size to fit under the window and still allow the door to swing past it, Bryan designed this shelf on his own (that’s right, this is NOT just a post about us building something from Ana White’s website! Yippee!!) The design was really just based on the idea that we needed a place to store some towels, some toiletries, and some other bathroom necessities.  We found a couple woven baskets at Lowe’s to bring some natural texture into the room, and designed the shelf heights/widths around those.  We also may or may not have measured the top shelf to hold TP rolls. Hey, might as well make sure they’ll fit! Here are a few detail shots of the building process:

Bryan using uniform spacers to make sure the shelf height is the same on both sides:

If you look closely at the picture below, you’ll see two pocket holes on the underside of the shelf, made using the amazing Kreg Jig…a must for almost every project we’ve ever done.

Here are some of the fancy routed edges:

And some more fancy woodwork on the legs:

We used the same stain we’ve been using for everything in our house lately (Minwax Stain in Ebony), and gave the entire thing a coat of satin polyurethane since it’ll be in a humid environment.

Here it is in it’s new home, all dolled up:

No. We aren’t planning on keeping 6 rolls of toilet paper in there at all times. But we could, and that’s pretty cool.

Another angle…

And just because I haven’t mentioned Goodwill yet in this post, both of the glass canisters (holding Q-tips and cotton balls) are of course thrifted:

Now that we’ve solved the storage problems, I’d really love to tackle some of the bigger design problems in there.  Suffice it to say, the tiling throughout the room is SO bad that it’s driving us both insane. I don’t think we’re ready to do a real project like that, especially considering this is our only shower and a long drawn-out demo involving two amateur DIY-ers could possibly ruin our marriage (anyone else been watching Marriage Under Construction on the DIY Channel? At least we’re not as bad as them…)

Happy Tuesday everyone!

xox,

katie

About these ads

1 Comment

Filed under Build It, DIY

Tagged as , , , , , ,

August 24, 2011 · 3:26 pm

Violin Shelf? Maybe?

Ok, that was my attempt to tie into our last post and the Einstein quote…sorry if you were expecting something more amazing.  We’re gonna go ahead and call this little project a “violin” shelf, even though by the end of the process we were definitely getting more of a “bowling pin” vibe.  It’s up to you to decide for yourself.

You may remember our bathroom from this post, and the temporary artwork that I added:

Well if you can’t tell from the pictures, this bathroom is seriously small and lacking in storage.  Notice the makeshift cover for the pedestal sink…no shelves, drawers, or anything.  We decided that adding a small shelf behind the toilet might give us a spot to store an extra roll of TP, a yummy candle, or anything else that strikes our fancy.

Sure, we could have bought a shelf. But why would we do that when we have all our mad building skills (skillz? I feel like a “z” should go there…we’re THAT good). Off to the books…

No, we didn’t create this one totally from scratch, but we did modify it a little to fit in our space. We basically followed the directions in the handy book above, except we were definitely not as precise as they would have liked. As you can tell above, they basically suggested we use large graph paper to plot out the curves, transfer the template to a piece of cardboard, and use the cardboard as a template on the wood. Reallllllly? That seems like a lot of work when you can just freehand:

Just like Picasso.  We messed with it a little (yay erasers!) until we liked the shape, then just cut it out with the jigsaw:

Easy stuff, right? So I sanded it down a little bit so everything was smooth. YES – I work in the shop too, but I’m usually the one behind the camera, until now:

I hope everyone appreciates how awesome and serious I look (and yes, I’m using sunglasses as goggles…safety first!!) PS: you can see my dresser project drying in the background – multi-tasking at its finest.

Once we were happy with side one (see how it kind of looks like a violin?? Sort of??), we used it as a template on the second side.

We sanded that side down too, and attached the shelves.  Here’s an action shot of Bryan sanding the finished product prior to painting:

The wood grain was so pretty and it would have looked lovely stained, but with the new stripes in the bathroom we thought white would look more cohesive. A couple coats of satin white spray paint later, and viola! (or, violin!)

Or, bowling pin.

Ignore the awkward placement of random items…right now we’re trying to cover a few blemishes in the wall from the prior artwork and installation mishaps, but hopefully I’ll have a chance to figure it out soon. Here’s a shot of the entire room:

Hope you like it!

xox, katie

1 Comment

Filed under Build It, DIY

Tagged as , , ,

August 9, 2011 · 8:14 pm

seeing stripes

Here’s a quick project I’ve had my heart set on ever since seeing Sherry and John at Young House Love (www.younghouselove.com) add subtle stripes to the half bath in their first house.  We were basically working with the same situation…a small half-bath that needed some personality.  Here’s our boring before:

Complete with the smallest sink known to man…which is great if you only want to wash one hand at a time.

Anyways, it’s hard to tell from the picture (sorry, taken with my iPhone), but the baseboard and the trim around the door was the same color was the wall. WHO DOES THAT??? Maybe it’s just me, but there are few things I like more than crisp white trim, which was a major point of contention when we were first looking at houses (Bryan is a fan of the old houses with dark wood trim…whhyyy????)

The walls were not white either…they were a very “blah” tan/beige.  Of course, the exact shade was unknown to us, so during one of our (many) trips to Lowes, I picked up a few paint chips to find something close.

And by “a few”, I obviously mean that I picked up a ton of paint chips.  Is there a rule about how many of these you’re allowed to take in a single trip? Let’s hope not.

After comparing a bunch in the room, I finally decided on three that I liked together: a bright white for the trim, a darker neutral to repaint the entire room, and a lighter neutral for the stripes.

If you can interpret the little scribblings of the paint dude at Lowes, you can tell that I got a quart of each wall/stripe color in semi-gloss.  I also got a gallon of the white since I’m planning on re-doing most of the trim in the house at some point. Why semi-gloss?  Mainly because most of the rooms in our house are already painted with semi-gloss, but I also like that it has a little bit of a sheen without being in-your-face glossy.  The two quart-sized colors were more than enough for this project…I’ll have leftovers for awhile.

So I painted the entire bathroom, then painted the trim (which turned into painting the door, which turned into painting the outside trim, and the basement door).  I just couldn’t stop – it’s hard to look at old trim next to the pretty newly painted pieces. Finally I cut myself off to go tape off the stripes.

As an aside, some of you may know that Bryan and I met in law school.  I’m not speaking for Bryan, but the saying “you went to law school because you’re not good enough at math for med school” definitely applies to me, so the following instructions on YHL were lost on me:

“Step 1: Divide & Conquer- Measure the full length of your wall and divide that number by twice the number of stripes that you want to have minus one (ex: our ceiling is 98″ tall and we wanted six horizontal stripes so we divided 98 by 11 (6 x 2 = 12 – 1 = 11) to get the thickness of each stripe. Ours came out to about 8.9 inches.”

Ummmmm………….yeah. I’m sure that makes perfect sense to most of you, but I was NOT on board (I blame paint fumes and the brain-melting exercise that is the Bar Exam).  Our ceiling measured about 94 inches, and 6ish stripes sounded fine to me, which ended up meaning the thickness of each stripe was going to be about 8.5 inches (how many more times can I approximate the measurement of something in a project where, evidently, it is important to be exact?)

I tried measuring up from the baseboard 8.5 inches and making a little mark.  I did that twice on each wall and tried to place the tape to make the first stripe.

Not. Even. Close.  I double and triple checked and I still couldn’t get the lines to meet up and be level.  I finally decided that there was no way this could be my fault, and that the floor must be uneven (a definite possibility in an house that was built in 1927). Let’s be honest…it was probably me just sucking at math/measurements in general.  

The method that worked for me was to use a speed square.

I put the pointed end against the baseboard, used the built-in level to make sure everything was even, and marked a line across the straight edge.  Unfortunately, the height of the speed square was closer to 7 inches, but I was willing to sacrifice perfectly sized stripes for ones that were level.  Marking all around the room took longer than expected, but it’s nothing that couldn’t be completed in an afternoon. I don’t have a picture of the room all taped up, but YHL’s picture is basically what I was working with as well.


The reason the spaces don’t look even is because you have to account for the width of the tape in the “negative space” stripe (the stripe of the original wall color that will remain after you add the new color). So, for every other piece of tape, you alternate whether you place the tape on top of the measured line, or underneath (it makes much more sense while you’re doing it).  The wider spaces get the paint – the smaller spaces don’t.  

The most important tip about this project is to peel off the tape immediately after you get the paint on the walls.  Leaving it and allowing the paint to dry will cause some of your new paint to peel off when you remove the tape.  I did about 1/3 of the room at a time, peeled the tape, then continued.  I still had a few minor issues with the lines not being crisp, but I went back and touched those up after the entire room was finished.

Here’s the final product!

We’re still working on art for that room. I think we still need something bigger…thoughts? Hope you likey :)

xox, katie

2 Comments

Filed under DIY

Tagged as , , , ,