After months of contented living with our upstairs bathroom, we decided we'd had enough of the streaks and grim. It seemed foolish at first to put time and money into it know that one day it would all get torn down and redesigned. But then reality struck. True, it will all come down eventually, but that will likely be several years down the road and it currently looks like this.
Pretty horrid, right? To be honest, I'm not sure how we lived with it for so long. I guess we just got accustomed to it, or maybe it looks worse in pictures (wishful thinking...).
Anyway, we decided it was time to say to long to the streaks. But still not wanting to spend much money on it we bought a $12 gallon of stain sealing primer and snagged a $5 gallon of mis-tint paint at Lowes (thanks to the brilliant suggestion of the gal working in the paint department!). I was pretty excited about the color at first (when it was in the can). It seemed very similar to what we put in our hallway. Once it was on the walls, however, I was sorely disappointed.
In the pictures it doesn't look so bad. In real life it looks very pinkish brownish. Think swine. Not exactly what I had in mind.
I did do a little trim work around the counter top and the mirror with a pint of off-white paint we picked up (also a mis-tint for super cheap!) to try and add some character. Sadly, the off-white was a flat paint so I didn't want to use it much were it would get a lot of moisture.
As I keep reminding myself, the objective of this operation was not to produce a stunning, designer bathroom, just a clean, streak-free one. Mission accomplished!
And THIS is what it looks like now! I am thrilled with the change. I can actually see what I have now and I think (hope) it will be fairly easy to maintain. The tub on the left contains my big bulky fabric (like the 12ish yards of wool I scored at a yard sale for only $5 this summer!), blankets that have been donated to my fabric pile for repurposing, batting, and my small bit of yarn in the little green box. The tub on the right is what I'm most proud of though.
I bought a box of 2.5 gallon zippy bags and sorted my fabrics by color, so for the most part each bag holds a different color fabric. So instead of rifting through a big tub of fabric, I simply have to pull out the baggy of the color I'm looking for while the rest of my tub of fabric remains undisturbed. This part I didn't plan, but I was delighted to discover that the bags fit perfectly in my 20 gallon tub so I was able to line them up on end making it even easier to sort through them.
After
