Before & After - Hall Bath

Before & After - Hall Bath

As I've mentioned on occasion, our current home was built in 1980, and while it's been kept up very well by the previous owners, there has been very little updating done over the years.  Nel and I tackle items from time to time when we are able to actually decide what we want to do with a room or whatever.  Other than flooring (which is sort of a 'whole house' commitment) we have finished with our hall bath.

BEFORE:

 

This is what the hall bath (or half bath, or whatever you want to call it) looked like when we moved in.  It was fine, but certainly dated.  We have four bathrooms in the house, but this is the one that visitors most likely will utilize so we wanted to spruce it up a bit.

She gets about as much paint on her as she does the walls, but she's an enthusiastic worker!

The first thing we did was sick Nel on it for fresh paint.  This is the 2nd home we've lived in together.  When we first got together we lived in my home that I had built new, so it needed absolutely nothing.  Besides, I'm not really sure she ever thought of it as "her" home.  This place is the first home she's owned herself, so she's always ready to hit some home improvement project or another.  She did a great job painting the cabinets, walls, ceiling, and everything else.

We followed the fresh paint up with new hardware and fixtures, new sconce lights, a new mirror (which required us to texture the wall where the old mirror had been) and a new toilet.  It really makes no sense not to change out old toilets.  New ones don't cost much and they're 10 times better than the older stuff - and bigger too.

 Mid-Project Pause:

This is where we ended up for a while.  The only thing we needed to address was the counter and sink area.  We assumed we would just wait until we put granite in the entire house, but we were walking through Home Depot one day and found a returned special order counter.  They will blow those things out cheap, and I knew we could cut it to fit, so we snatched it up.  My brother and I were doing the cutting in the garage one night and got all the way to the very last cut…..and then we made a minor error and ruined the counter - for our bathroom anyway (I still have the original piece if anyone wants it).  Fortunately, they had a second one in the same pattern with a cracked corner.  Since we were going to cut the edges anyway it didn't matter to me.  We bought it and made the cuts again…carefully!

Old Counter...

...New Counter

This is what we ended up with.  I think it looks pretty good.  It will be better once we get some dark wood floors in, but functionally the bathroom is finished and much better.  New toilet, faucet, lights, plugs, and I even replaced the vent.  I went ahead and replaced the shutoff valves and supply lines with the newer models that are less prone to leaking.

AFTER