Tag: DIY

Pretty much any time I look around our home and think of updates that could be made, the total dollar amount instantly translates in my mind to plane tickets, travel accommodations, or adventure excursions. Don’t even get me started on the kitchen overhaul with a bottom line that basically equates to half of my dream trip to Antarctica. Functionally, everything in our house is in good shape and nothing truly needs replacing (knock on wood; 90s orange oak wood, to be specific). The basic builder-grade “finishes” throughout the house could stand to be upgraded though, so I’m thankful that a few easy and inexpensive fixes here and there make our little townhouse look a bit more updated without depleting our travel funds.

Last year I gave our guest bathroom a mini makeover, and it was high time I applied those same tricks to the master bathroom upstairs. I started by replacing the bare-bulb vanity lighting with a fixture from Shades of Light. And based on the drywall disaster that we found when we replaced the light fixture in our guest bathroom (giant ragged hole in the wall behind the old fixture; took us eight hours to fix it), I hired an electrician for assistance with this one. Good lighting is one of the areas I don’t mind spending money on because the quality seems to make such a huge difference, so I put the majority of our budget for this mini makeover into the Schooner Bath Light.

It’s really difficult to photograph a light fixture in a room with no windows or without dragging out studio lighting equipment, so I’ll just show you the stock photo and call it a day.

photo via shadesoflight.com

But the update that made the biggest impact (and at the least expense!) was putting a few coats of paint and some hardware on the orange oak vanity. I had my eye on a couple of new vanity options, but they were all in the quadruple digits price range so that’s when I decided to give paint a try instead. I’m really happy with the way it turned out! Here is the before (documented lazily many years ago with a point-and-shoot) and the after:

All I did was roll on a coat of Zissner primer, two coats of Sherwin-Williams Java, and then installed some hardware purchased at Pottery Barn. No crazy prep, no sanding, and pretty minimal dry time – I finished the whole project in a weekend.

Ta da! Next up, I’m going to try to frame out that giant mirror, replace the faucets, and update the flooring (and I still need to paint the orange oak quarter-round near the baseboards). But for now I’m loving the difference the warm chocolate brown cabinet makes in the room. And of course I’m loving that the $30 in supplies didn’t eat into my Antarctica funds.

Sometimes being a homeowner feels like such a roller coaster ride. Whee! There are times I look around and swell with pride over how much Chris and I have learned and accomplished by owning a home. Other times it’s quite frustrating like when something breaks or looks ugly and you’re the one responsible for either figuring out the repairs or phoning it in for help. Apartment living meant that we could call the maintenance team for just about anything, we never had to worry about major purchases, and it also alleviated my own stresses of minor things like paint color selection because we weren’t allowed to paint. But I wouldn’t go back to renting – I love our house, and being the control freak that I am, I appreciate having as much input as I can on how our home looks.

On that note, we aren’t allowed a lot of leeway when it comes to the outside appearance of our little townhouse. The exterior paint colors and fixtures are all HOA-selected, and we aren’t allowed to make many changes. Things were looking kind of blah from the curb, so last week I added a cute reclaimed wood planter on our tiny stoop with zinnias for a splash of color.

The planter looked great, but then it made me notice the awful condition of our front door! Not to mention our handle decided to break and we couldn’t open the door from the outside, so I figured while I had the handle off I might as well paint. I wish I had a better before picture of the door for you, but once I decided to remedy the old, faded paint job, I got to work right away and forgot to take a photo! I only have this close-up from when we bought the house. I cleaned the surface to see if I could get those drippy marks off, but it didn’t look any better. We also changed our deadbolt a few years ago and it was a different shape than the original, so there was a bare patch with no paint above and below the new deadbolt. And, someone recently put some kind of dumb sticky flyer on our door and when we took it off, the adhesive ripped away a strip of paint, so there was that eyesore, too.

Painting always feels like a lot of work to me, but it’s such a small commitment in price and time for a huge return. I can’t even believe the difference it made, and I feel so happy to walk up to the front door now! The only problem now is that the freshly painted door made me notice how badly the door trim needs a new coat of paint, too. There’s always something!

We’re finally done refinishing and replacing the last of our brass lighting fixtures in the house! Not that there’s anything wrong with brass at all, and I know it’s gaining some popularity again as of late, but the fixtures we have are all builder grade and just not as warm and cozy as I’d like them to be. Plus I had already switched out all the brass hardware on our doors, so updating the light fixtures ties everything together nicely. There were five fixtures total – the dining room chandelier (which was covered with a DIY drum shade since I have yet to find a fixture we like), three ceiling flush-mounts in our hallways, and one pendant fixture at the bottom of our second-floor stairs. Replacing all five fixtures would easily be over $1000, and I’d rather spend that on an international plane ticket! Plus the dining room chandelier would have required an electrician’s assistance. So we decided to DIY four of the five fixtures, and splurge just a little on the pendant light. Here’s what we did.

The three hallway ceiling fixtures were all the same – this octagon shaped flush-mount seen below. We will probably replace them eventually, but I don’t hate the shape and I wanted to see what bronze fixtures would look like everywhere, so in the meantime I decided to just spray paint it with my favorite Rustoleum oil-rubbed bronze paint. It says it’s a primer and paint all-in-one, but I wanted good coverage, so I also used a primer spray as my first coat.

Before all the spray paint though, I taped the heck out of the glass panes and cut pieces to fit with an x-acto knife. Now listen, this isn’t a quick project because of the tape, and maybe there’s a better method. (Maybe you could cut pieces of paper to fit in over each area of glass?) But I already had Frog Tape, and a free afternoon (for each light – I didn’t do them all at once), so I went with this method and it works fairly well. I say fairly well because some spray did get on the other side of the glass underneath because of the hole in the top. I easily scraped any excess paint off with a razor blade. Oh and to do the mounting plate, I stuffed little bits of rolled-up paper towel in the light bulb sockets so as not to get spray paint into the sockets. I did three coats total – one coat of primer, and two coats of the bronze. I allowed the recommended dry time in between each coat, and then I let it dry for a full 48 hours before reinstalling the fixture. But before the final coat dried, I carefully peeled off all the tape.

The results are great! It’s still not as fun of a statement piece as I’d like, but I think it’s an improvement over the brass. P.S. The little “hello” sign in the photo below will get painted soon. I’m still trying to decide on a color! And sorry for the clutter in our organizing station. There’s an oxymoron for you – cluttered organizing station! (The wire bin is for paper and mail recycling if you’re curious.)

The beauty of spray painting the ceiling flush-mount fixtures was that from any vantage point the new finish looks like it was purchased that way unless you stand and study it. The inside shows sort of a bare metal (not brass) because I didn’t try to paint over it, but it’s not shiny and it’s enclosed so you really can’t tell. The pendant lamp shown below posed a different issue. The fixture isn’t enclosed, and standing beneath it you can easily see inside, so I’d have to tape (and tape and tape) both the outside and the inside in order to paint the whole thing. And that would be in addition to the chain, the wires, and the mounting plate cap. The fixture is in a prominent area of the house as opposed to the foyer and hallways where we just pass through, so I wanted the lighting to look nicer than my DIY skills.

So, ta da! I had been searching for a suitable fixture that we’d really like, and this one showed up at Pottery Barn just recently. Here she is all installed thanks to my super patient and handy hubby!

The fixture came with one of the cool hipster filament bulbs, but I felt like it was actually a little too small for the lantern and didn’t quite give off enough light, so we just used the big globe we had in there before. I like it.

I’d especially like to reiterate how patient Chris is because this was not an easy installation. We have the electrical part down pat at this point, but this fixture was on a sloped ceiling at an awkward angle in a tight spot next to the stairs. Our ladder has a big footprint and would barely fit in that area, so getting the mounting plate screwed in nice and tight was a challenge. Not to mention I had to find somewhere to stand and hold the lantern part while he connected wires and attached everything. It was a good shoulder workout! But we like the results, and other than one more (chrome) fixture in the master bath, we should be done with lighting for a while!

What do you think? Are these an improvement over the brass fixtures? (We think so!) Do you have any lighting projects coming up? Let me know – I’d love to see your results!

Note: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of my links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you so much for reading and for your support!

Just another quick update to the guest bath for you! In my last post about the bathroom, I mentioned that I needed to add some color to the gray-green palate. I was inspired by this beautiful print on etsy, and decided that the red and pink poppies would add just the right amount of subtle color and interest to the room. So here’s where we started originally:

And then this is after my mini makeover, but right before I swapped out the art (the pear print is now behind the door) and the candles.

And here’s the room with new art, red candles, soap and washcloths. The cute little green stool was a really inexpensive find at Antiques Farmhouse. (The white rug with green stripes is still in there, it just didn’t show up in the photo. This room is so hard to photograph!)

I just love this happy little print! Kelly N. Photography has tons of gorgeous photos in her etsy shop. Definitely check it out!

Our main floor guest bathroom was definitely filed in the “rooms-in-serious-need-of-a-makeover” folder. Everything builder’s grade that can be put in a bathroom was in this room – the hardware, the faucet, the lighting, the floors, the cabinet, and so on. When we bought the house, I remember thinking, Ooo, it’s a blank canvas! We can do anything with it. And yes, it truly is a blank canvas. The only problem is, the entire house was a blank canvas, and we simply couldn’t tackle everything at once. Somehow, this sad little bathroom didn’t get a ton of attention until recently when I decided to give it a mini-makeover to tide us over until we can decide what we really want to do with it. So here’s the before:

Here’s the other side, though not much will change over there. (P.S. Sorry that the toilet lid was up! But you’re probably blinded by the other horrible features in here and maybe didn’t notice that lid.)

The first thing we decided to change was that light fixture. All of our research indicated that this would be a simple swap! Until we popped the fixture off and found this mess of a hole behind the mounting hardware. Unfortunately, the hole would not be covered up by the new fixture. We spent the day learning how to patch large drywall holes (short answer: make a bigger, square hole and fit a fresh piece of drywall of the same size in the new hole). Once the hole was repaired, sanded and painted, installing the new light fixture was easy breezy.

After swapping out the light fixture, we painted the walls a soft sage color (which doesn’t photograph well at all, by the way). I wanted to go with a light neutral since this room lacks a window and therefore doesn’t get any natural light. We installed a new towel bar, a shelf and I added a few accessories and art, but it still looked blah because of that vanity! It was just so…orange. And the faucet needed to be more fun.

The vanity and the vanity top were in good shape, so I decided to just paint the cabinet a grayish-green and add some simple knobs and a new toilet paper holder. I followed these directions for painting the cabinet. It was super easy, only took one weekend (due to the drying time), and I think it made a huge difference! The Sherwin-Williams paint color I used on the cabinet is called Chatroom.

I also painted the quarter-round to match the baseboards. I’m not sure why it was ever orange oak in the first place. I still need to find a new mirror, and we also plan to add crown molding. Eventually I think we’ll gut the whole thing and do some really nice upgrades, but for now, it’s so much better.

Oh and here’s the new faucet! It’s not the most expensive one by any means since this is just an in-the-meantime fix, but I think it’s more fun than what was in there before.

Since this is my first bathroom makeover project I went with a really safe monochromatic palette, but I think my next in-the-meantime steps will be to find the perfect mirror and also add in some color with different accessories/art. Maybe something similar to one of these palettes – autumn hues, or bright punchy colors with the soft neutrals.

Oh and I have another bathroom to tackle in the same way, so more on bathroom updates soon!