Today I finished decorating the bathroom. We still have some caulking to finish and someday replacing the sink but for the present we are done with the bathroom. The bathroom has really become my favorite room. I just love the choices we made, from paint color to tile styles. We pretty much did a full remodel on the bathroom. We pulled out the shower surround and put in a new deeper tub, tiled to the ceiling in the shower, and also tiled the floor.
Here's a picture of our new tub, faucet hardware, soap holder, and tile. The tile we chose is a basic tan ceramic 6"x6" tile from Home Depot. Since we were putting in the tile ourselves we thought we should do something fun so we added a travertine and green-tinted glass accent strip through the middle of the wall. We bought the accent in mesh-backed sheets of 12"x12" from Lowe's and decided to cut them down to 4" thick to run the entire length of shower enclosure.
Here is a closer picture of the accent tile:
Here's another view of the shower showing our water-saving rain flow shower head. I'm really glad we decided on the rain flow option, it still gives decent water pressure but it's a bit gentler. It's so relaxing I end up not wanting to get out of the shower. I guess that kinda cancels out the whole water saving feature :o)
The color scheme for the bathroom arose from our shower curtain. I fell in love with it looking through the Crate and Barrel catalog and had to buy it, even before we were completely moved in to the house. I just loved the colors and their soothing nature and the leaf pattern. We incorporated the light tan color with the tile and the light green with the paint color on the walls and also the glass tiles of the accent strip in the shower.
We also tiled the floor of the bathroom. When we moved in the flooring was just a plain white "tile-looking" linoleum. Brian decided to surprise me while I was out of town by starting the floor tile but ran into a snag when he found we hadn't bought enough of the hexagonal tile from Home Depot and they no longer carried it. I'll leave the details for him to tell in a post when he talks about how to actually do the tile work. But we finally finished and the floor looks great. The hexagonal shape is reminescent of tile used during the early 1900's when our house was built but has a more modern feel due to the color and non-glossy appearance.
Here you can see the tile a little closer up:
You can also see from this picture a couple rows of tile near the baseboard are a slightly different color.........that's how we ended up dealing with the tile shortage. We had to contact the manufacturer and ordered a slightly different color tile. It has more shades of grey and tan than the original tile we had. We have the greyish tile running the perimeter of the room, an even thickness all the way around. Another bit of "fun" or "character" we added to the room :o)
So after we had the major things out of the way I got to work on the little touches. I had a cute little bird that I had bought several years back that I thought would work well with the whole leaf motif of the shower curtain.
For some reason this bird and the "French Clay" green of the walls made me think "French Garden" for the decoration theme. And today I found this cute little ceramic bird at Michael's:
So the bird's crown incorporates aristocracy and that makes you think French too, right? :o)
I also bought some prints of bird eggs and flowers a couple of weeks back that I finally found frames for at Target and was able to hang them up.
Here's a grouping on the wall next to the sink:
And a bit closer:
And I also put a couple of small frames over the toilet, though this was a bit difficult to place because our toilet is not centered in this little cubby :o( And I might try to use larger frames to fill the space a bit more.
So here's another, fuller view of the bathroom:
We do have an old desk in the bathroom that we found at a yard sale that we use to set clothes or towels on instead of the floor.......and it also doubles as a cat box hider! We attached some curtains to help contain the cat litter so we didn't have to worry about stepping on it with wet feet when we get out of the shower......YUCK! (You can read more about it
here).
Here you can see a little more of it:
So there you have it, our finished for now bathroom.........until we tackle a new sink :o)