Under $100 Restroom Renovation

When we bought our house last year, we put our focus into the everyday living spaces first: the kitchen, living room, breakfast nook, and since it’s connected, the dining room. So if you’d walk into the house on first glance, you’d think, wow they updated it… but take a walk down the hall and you’d find three neon yellow bedrooms and 3 bathrooms with peeling wallpaper, missing tiles, mold, and ginormous sheetrock cracks. It seemed logical to do the spaces that we use most so we slowly made way to the hall bath and master bedroom… and our most recent project… the jack and jill bathroom. I’ll be sharing the steps we took with the old peeling wallpaper, the foundation cracks, new hardware, lighting upgrade, and mirror upgrade. Now I know this isn’t some magical transformation. You can 1000% find way cooler “before and after” restroom remodels on pinterest. But for just $100, I’m so impressed on what we were able to accomplish!

But first, let me give you a little background on the room:

The room before renovations:

This bathroom goes between our office and guest bedroom and is really two separate rooms. One room is the shower, toilet, and an abnormally large built-in storage cabinet. The second room, which is the room I’ll be sharing in this post is a room with 2 sinks and 2 again, abnormally large built-in storage cabinets. So the people who lived in the house before us chose to paint almost every room with neon yellow paint. It’s so bright that it’s almost green and it stays blinding you when you blink. I’m not even overreacting. It’s just that terrible. So included in that neon yellow paint job was the bathrooms that were fully wallpapered. When you walk into a room that has been painted with wallpaper, it has a different vibe than the rest of the house. It doesn’t have any texture so its a very flat feel, and it has a different sheen, it’s a lot more shiny and reflective than painted sheet rock. So even if you can’t put your finger on “what’s different about this room” you still know it has a different vibe. Plus, in our case the painted wallpaper was peeling and bubbling, so you instantly walk into the room and stare at the ugly walls.

Fixing the Peeling and Bubbled Wallpaper:

The first thing we did was cut off any of the peeling with a razor knife. We didn’t pull it any farther than it was already peeled but found the point that it was still in tact with the wall and cut there. Then we cut out the bubbles. We’d find the edge of the bubble and cut with a razor knife, not any farther than the bubble itself went, but just to the edge. Next, we skimmed and floated with quickset joint compound, then we sanded the seams until it was as level as possible with the surrounding wallpaper.

Texturing a Wallpapered Wall:

The next step to making the room look like the rest of the textured house, was to give the walls some texture. We covered everything that wasn’t a wall with painters plastic and carefully taped the edges with masking tape. We are so lucky that Cody’s dad has #allthetools. He has a texture hopper that we hooked up to our air compressor and were able to spray the whole room in about 3 minutes. Isn’t it frustrating when the taping takes 3 hours but the spray takes 3 minutes?! We let the texture sit overnight then painted the room the next day. Every room in our house is painted with the shade “pale oak” which is a greige (half gray half beige). I picked it to blend the old styles of the home with the newer more neutral tones that we are slowly incorporating overtime. It blends the two really nicely but is still very neutral itself.

New Hard Ware:

New hardware can make any cabinet look fresh. I picked the same hardware that I used in the kitchen to again make this room feel like the rest of the house. I’ve gotten all of my hardware on amazon and am super impressed with it. We get the brushed brass shade and used the 10 inch on the built-in doors and the 2 inch T’s on the drawers. We had to drill a new bottom hole on the cabinets under the sink so I could put 5 inch cabinet pulls on each of these.

Lighting:

I personally like these style of lights! I know they’re straight from the 70’s (like the rest of the house) but other than me liking them, I think the rest of the world is too! I’ve seen so many ads for these on wayfair and in some famous interior designers galleries lately. Of course, when a trend comes back, they’re just slightly different, but hey I think they’re close enough to match today’s trend. So all I did here was remove the two fixtures from the wall, remove the glass globes and light bulbs, and then spray the fixtures with my favorite gold spray paint. I gave them 3 coats to make sure they were evenly covered then added them back to the wall. I love how it turned out!

Framing the Mirror:

I want to do a whole blog post on this because such an inexpensive project that really elevates the look of a restroom. For a quick summary until I get around to writing that blog post, it’s door trim cut at 45 degree angles and pieced together into a rectangle. Again for this, I used that same favorite gold spray paint so the color would be cohesive.

Faucets:

I know exactly what faucets will go in here because I want them to be the same one we have in our half bath. We bought it off Amazon for around $50 and it looks so good! For the sake of saving money, we’re holding off on changing out these 2 for another day. I don’t hate these faucets and they work fine but would love them to be brushed brass to fit the rest of the house. … but I mean they’re only $50 each so I think we’ll get to them soon!

Finishing Touches:

I bought two towel bars off Amazon. I like that they’re not completely round like a traditional hand towel bar. Plus towels hang flatter! Lol only I would notice/care about that. I found the towels in a two pack at home goods.

For decor, I found this heritage 1 gallon jar at Target for under $10 and put two sea sponges in it. Next to it, I put a glass bell jar and filled it with cotton balls. With how much hard and cold there is in a bathroom (tile, counter, mirror, etc.) I wanted to add some texture any where I could (hence the sea sponges and the cotton balls). I love these blue vintage looking soap dispensers with the brass pump. One day when we tile the bathroom, I plan to do blue tile so these will match perfectly! I added this braided gray runner to the floor to again bring in some soft texture. To finish the look, I filled an old vase with water and some clippings from the yard, and rolled up some towels for our guests.

Here’s the breakdown of costs: