Budget Friendly Bathroom Transformation Part 1

I recently helped a friend "redo" her hall bathroom, and there is just so much inspiration in the end result, that I have to break this up into a few posts. 

Her house was built in the mid 1980s, and like so many homes from that era, it has some wonderful character elements and some elements that are beginning to look and feel dated. We had two goals. The first was to make the room feel bright and current without erasing all character. The second was to give the room a whole new look and feel without spending a ton of money.

We were so excited to get started that we forgot to take before photos, but luckily she has another bathroom with the same cabinetry that she has not redone yet. Here is the dark brown wood and period hardware we started with:

 The room had two features that she and I both really liked and wanted to preserve and highlight: a pretty blue counter top and pretty blue tile. Blue is thankfully a color that never really goes out of style, especially in bathrooms, and these features were in excellent condition. That was good news for the budget since new counters and flooring can be costly even for budget friendly alternatives. More good news was that the cabinets were also in excellent shape and very sturdy. So the obvious answer was paint. White or off white would have been good choices, but the owner opted for gray as it is a trending color, and a sample of Amy Howard's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" looked amazing with the counter and floor. She also spray painted her existing hinges with Rustoleum in a metal finish and replaced the knobs and pulls with inexpensive brushed nickle pulls that simplify the look and unify the metals in the room so that now the faucet, knobs, and hinges are all silver in tone. (Tip: buy knobs in bulk packs to save money.) She even painted the existing wooden light plate to match since she had the paint already. Spray painting hinges is a favorite cheat of mine since it saves a ton of money and makes it so much easier putting the same hinges right back where they came from.

Both the owner and I loved this pretty blue counter, and since it is in pristine condition, it would have been a waste to replace it. It was really not shown to its best advantage with the brown cabinets and dark hardware, but the gray paint and nickel knobs really make it pop.

In the future, we might decide to router out the scalloped edge on the cabinets to a straight line for a more modern look, but for now she is liking the country vibe it provides (and remember, we didn't want to erase character for the sake of change). She might also repaint the walls from the very pale creamy yellow that they are now to a light modern gray to further simplify and update the color palette of the room. Because she is starting to update long before she might even thing of selling, she has time to make changes as she likes and to enjoy them--and to take advantage of sales at the hardware store! The best part of this make-over was when she said that she used to kind of hate this room, but now she loves it. Music to my ears.