Disqualified!

If you've seen our bathroom, you know that we were unwilling contestants in the World's Most Garish Bathroom competition. We've recently been inspired by a lot of HGTV and Holmes on Homes, as well as younghouselove, and decided to do a mini-makeover of our one and only bathroom.

This is what we started with:

You could say it had some vintage charm. We just called it ugly.

Our plan started off as just paint the bathroom. So after removing the wallpaper, washing the walls, and receiving a warning that I might flip my lid while the bathroom was in shambles, Keith did that. We chose Cork in a satin finish. Vast improvement, no lids flipped. Except the one on the paint can. It took two coats of primer, two coats of paint, and a little help from Mocha.

That was going to be the finish line, but we decided to go just a little further. We didn't want to shell out the money on new towels bars and such, but really hated to put up the silver ones we had. So, we decided to spray paint them with a copper-finish spray paint. And then we thought, why not paint the vanity cabinet a dark brown? We knew it wouldn't quite look like wood, but it really couldn't get any worse than it was. Off to Lowe's for spray paint and a quart of paint for the cabinet (we went with Molasses). And while we were there, we decided we couldn't face putting the hideous over-the-toilet monstrosity back in but we wanted the storage space, so we bought a nice new one of those too. And a light fixture. Because the old one fit the old theme (which was "ugly") and I was in an open-wallet mood. Keith has learned to recognize and exploit these rare episodes.

He even remembered to paint the screws!

The last detail was buying a few new knobs for the over-the-toilet cabinet and the medicine cabinet so they tied in as well. Here's the finished product:

Mocha decided Frogger is the appropriate accessory
for the bathroom. He does match the tile!

We still have the crazy tile but it isn't nearly as offensive when everything else gets mellowed out. We're on the look-out for some kind of valance or curtain (maybe with a little pink and blue to tie the tile in), a wastebasket that didn't come from the dollar store, and a rug or mat to cover the area between the toilet and the sink (read as: cover as much tile as possible). No rush to find those though. We think we've come a long way for less than $200 (most of which was the new cabinet). Totally worth being dq'ed in the World's Most Garish Bathroom competition.

Last note: we did save a piece of each wallpaper, not just from the bathroom but also the dining room and kitchen when we tore that off, and are trying to come up with a fun and tasteful way to display a little bit of our house's previous "charm".