Hall Bath Refresh

thanks so much for the love on yesterday's instagram post about our hall bath redo! i'm back today to share all of the details from the project and the decision process that went into creating this space. the saddest and worst part is that i don't have a proper "before" shot. can you believe it?? i feel SO dumb for not snapping at least one before any of the work started. i videoed it a ton on instagram but here is as close as i can come to a before pic.  *all sources listed at the end of the post!*

BEFORE

at this point the new tile is already installed in this shot. the old tile was 12x12 white squares. just plain and blah. also the new knobs are already in here - before they were chrome. and lastly the new mirror was already hanging in this pic - the old one was "built-in" - a piece of glass glued to the wall with a painted wood frame around it. we have them all over the house luckily so there are ones just like it in three other bathrooms.  🙈

in case you're new here, i should add that our home was a spec house and completed by the time we found it so i had no say in any of the finishes. the vanity is the same color and style as every other piece of original cabinetry in our home. it's lovely but gets boring after a while since everything is that same off white tone. the countertop material was crema marble and is also repeated in every bathroom in our home (except our powder room which was just an integrated sink top before i changed that!). it's nice but not at all my taste. the walls in here were green and the original color from the builder - one of the only rooms that i hadn't yet repainted. basically design-wise the whole space had no rhyme or reason or flow.

AFTER

the funny thing is that this bathroom was never supposed to be included as part of the laundry room project i had planned. it's not a bathroom we use a lot so from that perspective, it was completely fine. however it's a spot i walk by approximately one million times a day and every time i walked by, all i could think was UGH. it was just so blah. so one day 8 or so boxes of tile showed up at our door and mr. r said "what the hell is that" and it all began. 😉 i figured if i had the tile, it would have to be done! more about the tile in a bit!

backing up to the very beginning though, the first thing i bought for the room was the serena & lily shower curtain - i got it on major sale probably a year ago. the whole room took direction from that curtain. it has warm tones and i liked the idea of doing a bathroom that feels warm instead of cold which can easily happen with marble, metals, and hard surfaces. i chose calacatta marble which has gold tones in a penny round shape to achieve that warmth. carrara marble, for example, is a lot grayer and reads a lot cooler.

one thing about calacatta is that it can have some very rust colored veining. when i went through the sheets, i saw about 4-6 pieces on each sheet that i wanted to remove before installing so that the overall look remained fairly light and a bit more uniform. this was an extra step, and my installers wanted to kill me, but it was worth it. i also removed any pieces that were super dark gray. i took a sharpie to all of the sheets to make sure the exact ones i wanted removed were in fact removed - pencil can be erased! you can see in the pic below holes where the pieces i x'd out were removed.

since the budget for this space was small, zero actually, i had to find places to save. a new vanity was totally out of the question so after i selected the tile, the next thing i chose was the new cabinet color. i toyed around with the idea of greige for a while but it was too "safe" and i thought this would be a good place to do something a little out of the ordinary since it's not somewhere we spend a lot of time. i chose retreat by sherwin williams and unlike in the laundry room where the right paint color eluded me for weeks, i knew it was the one from the beginning. to get the smoothest possible finish, i had it sprayed and the painters color matched it to benjamin advance paint which is latex but is meant for cabinetry. i like the satin finish best.

the mirror is also in the budget-friendly category! i liked the idea of wood over metal to again maintain some of that warmth. the deep frame makes it a little more modern. i also bought this a while ago and dreamed that one day it would replace one of our glued-on mirrors. i'm so happy it finally did!

another touch of warmth came from the brass fixtures and hardware. i used brass in the lighting - both the sconce above the mirror and the flushmount - as well as the hand towel hook. the knobs on the vanity in brass worked so well with the paint color.

i changed the countertop to white quartz which always creates a clean, sleek look and the sink to a rectangular shape instead of the traditional oval. i had the original faucet reinstalled, it's by grohe.

the toilet area got a little love with a new toilet paper holder and art courtesy of homegoods! i was browsing homegoods over a year ago and bought these palms without having a place to put them. sometimes it pays to buy something you like without knowing exactly where it will go!

the final touch was a bunch of white paint - i used simply white from benjamin moore here.

did i mention yet that this space was impossible to photograph?! it's super narrow and i don't have a wide angle camera lens so i don't think the photos really do it justice. the only way to get a straight on shot was this!

SOURCES

sconce | mirror | sink | cabinet knobs | hook | towel bar | toilet paper holder | flushmount | marble tile
hand towel | diffuser | cement boxes | hand soap | vase | shower curtain | fish art | rug (similar)

paint colors: 

cabinet - sherwin williams retreat

walls - benjamin moore simply white