Be Still My Heart

It's really a pain to blog from my cell phone and my part 1 post a few days ago was really incomplete. Here's to a sleepless night - I've been up for hours - and a couple of hours to do a little blogging.

I've had many friends asking me to post pictures of our bathroom remodel and I'm just going to be honest with ya here... I really didn't want to.

I've been socially impaired by my bathroom for years, meaning it has given me severe "can't have anyone over" syndrome. It was ugly and falling apart and such an eye-sore I could scarcely bring myself to let anyone see it. I've mention before that it is our only bathroom and everyone who comes over has to use it. I've even had a senator and his wife stop by and use our bathroom. The horror!

The idea of sharing my ugly bathroom photos on FB, or here, was kind of not really fun for me. But, that's a pride issue and I'm over it and if you judge me for my ugly bathroom that's on you. Or them, the judgers, they know who they are.

A brief rundown of our bathroom issues:

*old plaster walls were in bad shape from many years of wallpaper and holes and being patched. There was also peeling paint that was going to be difficult to patch well.

*The floor and baseboards had been rotting away near the bathtub. The layers of linoleum by the tub had gone soft and discolored and the sub flooring underneath was soft. When the kids would take a bath water would actually go right through to the basement.

*The toilet and sink were an almond color. I hate almond color ceramics and appliances.

*The vent fan was loud and inefficient and ugly.

*The faucet was cheap and could not be cleaned properly.

*The toilet was forever being clogged and I had a few too many overflows to contend with.

*The toilet had never been sealed to the floor, caulked around, and there was a lot of pee and water that had seeped under it over many, many years. In the heat of summer I always felt like it smelled like pee even when the bathroom was just cleaned.

*The whole thing was ugly.

So, in all it's ugliness (I didn't have a picture of the whole thing, you'll have to piece together the ugly):

Hiding behind the toilet tank was the original, hideous, wallpaper. There was a ton of wallpaper in this house and it wasn't the pretty stuff.


The vanity was pretty awful and just too bulky for the small size of our bathroom. The bathroom isn't really too small but this big cabinet made it feel small. And the door was forever falling off and being re-attached and falling off again. It drove me all sorts of crazy.

Over on the right you can see the bottom door to my linen closet - also forever falling off, or sagging is more like it. That made me a crazy lady.

Nick enjoyed removing the old floor. I have to say, it made me a little sick to rip out hardwood floors, buried under 2 layers of vinyl, but they had to go.

The nastiness under the toilet had seeped through all of the layers. I'm SO glad we got those out! I always knew there was a problem under that toilet.

I have lots of pictures of the bathroom being made new which I'll be posting soon. It's just so pretty and clean and it really makes me happy. For now I'll leave you with a few photos I used for color inspiration. I had already worked out the design aspect on my own.

Thank you, Google Images, for helping a girl out.

This bathroom is so lovely. The only thing I would have liked to do in our bathroom that we didn't do was to install a claw foot tub. It's just too expensive and too much work and it really isn't practical for our family. I do love those claw foot tubs though. Maybe when the kids are grown...


We actually considered buying the sink pictured here, it is from the Standard Collection by American Standard. We would have purchased the matching pedestal and not the chrome stand though.

This blue tile and this color made me positively swoon.

The color here is drab but I like how it looded overall with the white and the wainscoting.

And, I've got to say I sort of love this too but the color is just too strong for the bathroom we have, being main floor and all.

We went with a Behr color, I'll share the name later because I can't think of it. You can see it in some of the pictures above. It is basically Tiffany blue and I love it.