Ikea Dream Home + Blogger Style: Bathroom

When Katja at Shift Ctrl Art came up with the idea to get some bloggers together to make an Ikea dream house, I jumped at the chance to participate because imaginary shopping=fun and free! And because all those other guys up there are amazing, so being asked made me feel important and special. 

The idea was for each of us to create an all Ikea mood board (completely unofficial and un-Ikea-affiliated) for one of six different rooms/spaces. Put them all together, and you have a whole house! The rooms were randomly assigned, and I got bathroom. In addition to all the fun, this was a good project for me because it forced me to work on the long neglected blogging 101 skill of mood board making. I used Polyvore for the first time, and I was very pleased with it. It was easy and intuitive. Anyway--here's my bathroom:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

I was pretty excited when I found out I'd be doing the bathroom, because my master bath is currently the saddest, most neglected part of my house. I'm hoping that all of this imaginary bathroom planning I've been doing will spill over into some real life bathroom work very soon. 

Ikea does not sell stuff like floor tile or paint (or bathtubs or toilets), so you'll have to fill in the blanks a bit here. Lots of black and white with some soft greens and then splashes of deep purple. Maybe some retro hex tile on the floor:

Source

And then maybe white tile partway up the wall and some kind of soft greyish green paint above that. And, then, you know, since I'm fantasy bathroom planning, let's go with a clawfoot tub and then a big separate shower. Okay, and THEN, when all that is in place, we go to Ikea and come home with all that stuff up there:

1.Fabrikor glass-door cabinet, 179.00:  This is the inspiration piece, if you will. I love this little cabinet! I love the shape of it, and I love that shade of green (they also have it in dark gray and in beige). I like to imagine it in my head filled with stacks of fluffy towels interspersed with pretty little containers and such. 

2. Hjalmaren wall shelf, 89.99: storage! pretty storage even! And places to put all those things I put next to the shelf up there.

3. Koppar table lamp, lilac, 14.99: I'm really enamored of this little lamp.

4. Afjarden bath towel, 9.99: lots of them! In big fluffy piles! I love fluffy towels.

5. Byholma basket, gray, 7.99: put some more fluffy towels rolled up in a couple of these

6. Snika boxes, 18.99: I love these boxes with their pleasantly rounded lids

7. Nassjo candle holder, 7.99: the next few things are silver and purple candles, candle holders, vases, etc. To make things all serene and whatnot.

8. Asikt scented candle, 4.99

9. Blomster candlesticks, 14.99

10. Alsklig vase, 9.99

11. Hemnes/Odensvik sink and cabinet, 429: I was a little conflicted here. This is in the black/brown stain, but I really wish they had it in solid black. They also have white, but with all the white tile in imaginary Ikea bathroom, I thought that would be too much. So black/brown it is!

12. Hjalmaren towel rack, 17.99

13. Lillholmen wall lamp, 14.99: this can be mounted with the light facing up or down. I'm going with down.

14. Stockholm mirror, 99.00: I love the shape of this mirror, and how the bottom ledge makes a little shelf to put stuff on, and I'm crushing on the Stockholm collection in general (I came very close to putting the buffet in here, but just couldn't make it work). I don't even know if this is really the right size for a bathroom mirror. If it's not, too bad! Because I want one.

(umm...here is where I realized I left out putting a number on the faucet. And was too lazy to go back and redo all the numbers to put it in. It's the stainless steel Dalskar faucet, $79.99)

15. Byholma chair, 89.99: I like to have some natural wood in every room.

16. Granat lilac cushion, 3.99: to make the chair comfy and bring some of the purple to another part of the room.

17. Stockholm throw, 29.99: hey, it's the Stockholm collection again! How'd that get in there?!

18. Farglav shower curtain, 14.99: I'm really excited about how awesome this is going to look next to the hex tile.

19. Knodd trash bin with lid, 24.99

20. Toftbo bath mat, 9.99

21. Sibbared Walnut Picture, 19.99: I love this so much that I actually bought it once, for Milo and Gus' room. But then we couldn't find a space big enough for it so we had to return it. So I'm excited to put it up in imaginary bathroom.

Make sure to check out everyone else's posts to see all the rooms!

Amber from Wills Casa: Kid's Room
Anu from Nalle's House: Living Room
Ainhoa from A Little Bite of Everything: Outdoor Living
Katja from Shift Ctrl Art: Master Bedroom
Kim from Newly Woodwards: Kitchen

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Tutorials and Tips at Home Stories A to Z
Work It Wednesday

There is a room that needs even more help than our bedroom...

And it's our bathroom. Remember?

In fact, Dave and I were talking over a pre-baby priority list for the master bedroom/bathroom, and we agreed that the tile in the master bathroom should really be the top priority. It is both the biggest job and the nastiest. To that end, Dave is planning to go to Floor and Decor's free class on tiling Saturday. For we have never tiled anything before.

In addition to being a decorating catastrophe, the master bath is GINORMOUS. Like just over 20 feet long and maybe 10 or 11 feet wide. I'm a little mystified by it, actually, because the house was built in the mid 80's, which I thought was a bit before the time of ridiculously sized master baths. I would, to be honest, have preferred a modestly sized bathroom (and closet. I haven't even shown you the closet. If my house were on House Hunters, no wife would be able to make the obligatory, "but where are you going to keep YOUR clothes, sweetie?" joke about MY closet) and a fifth bedroom in about half of the square footage here. Especially what with being pregnant and my very frequent middle of the night trips all the way across those 20 feet to pee.....I wouldn't mind a slightly less cavernous bathroom.

But I realize that whining about how my bathroom is too big is A. annoying and B. useless. So I'll stop. But what I was getting at is that it's going to take a lot of tile to cover that sucker. We'll leave the hex tile that's at the end, so I'm estimating roughly 120 square feet leftover that needs tile. This means anything that costs more than $2.50 or so a square foot is right out.

I really love the way this gray plank tile looks here:

Freckles Chick

I'm not having much luck finding anything super similar for a reasonable-to-us price, but I am eyeing this:

"Adirondak Grey Ceramic Tile" from Floor and Decor. I like it online at least, and it's only $1/square foot. 

Ever since I got gray tile in my head for the floor, I've pictured a gray-green for the walls. I think I can get away with it with the Newburg Green in the bedroom. Maybe Benjamin Moore's Glazed Green. Although I can't find any examples of it in a room online, so maybe it's not anything special. But something along those lines. 

Originally I was planning on beadboard for the bottom half of the walls, but now I think it might be overkill with the board and batten in the bedroom. 

I would love to do a big overhaul of the bathroom someday--with an updated tub and a bigger shower and new sinks and all.....but that's a long way off. So for now we'll settle for tile and paint and a few other small changes.

That light fixture, for one thing. And the fixtures. Normally we'd frame out the mirror to make it look pretty, but the mirror itself has some big spots where the finish is rubbed off, so it will probably need to go. And then see those cabinet doors? They are kind of weird and slatted and they don't close right on top of that. I'm not sure what to do about them. I don't think there's any way to make the one on the right close correctly, thanks to a weird shelf thing next to the tub, so I'm thinking of maybe taking the doors off and putting curtains there for now. This bathroom suffers from the same "everything is white except the beige countertop" issue that the kids' bath has, so eventually I'd like to rip that sucker out and maybe put in pedestal sinks with a little cabinet in between (there's also a linen closet in here, so there's no lack of storage).

Yes. I think we can change out ALL the light fixtures.

And say goodbye to the brass towel racks.

The shower door's not in good shape, so I'm thinking take it down and put a shower curtain up. And change out the fixtures in there, too. 

And then we'll have a passably pleasant master bath! 

Kid bath: progress

This is the room that I mentioned needed some very quick help shortly after we moved in, because it didn't have a mirror:

Clearly, it started out with a big ol' frameless builder grade mirror, which meant that just slapping a new mirror up there without at least painting wasn't an option....at least not unless we wanted to buy a huge new builder grade frameless mirror, exactly the same size (or even bigger!).

This meant I didn't have the luxury of months of second guessing and self doubt about paint colors; I realized we had some paint left over from Milo and Gus' room that would probably look good with those awesome light fixtures, and I went for it. The downside of my forced hasty decision making, though, was that it turned out there wasn't really quite enough of the paint left, and we wound up having to buy another quart of it to touch up (although we still haven't gotten around to that yet. but we have the paint!)

Okay, so here it is now. With the fancy light on:

Without the fancy light on:

The mirrors are from Homegoods. I liked the bronze-y color, but these were not my favorite mirrors. They were the only ones where I could find two identical, non-damaged specimans. It looks like I did not do the best job cleaning these. Oops. Cleaning them is really the kids' job, but I did a quick wipe down before I took pictures.

Shower curtain:

$10 from Target. Ari helped pick it out. What I really wanted, very specifically, was a sepia toned Eiffel tower shower curtain. I don't know why; it's just what I had in my head. I found this one on Amazon, but it was $99, and I don't spend $99 on shower curtains:

...and then this one, which was priced right, but had bad reviews and even looks cruddy in the picture:

What's up with that weird shadow at the bottom? Anyway, so it appears that the shower curtain I want doesn't really exist, so cheap skyline it is. It's not the Eiffel Tower, but it's still....architectural.

And then this is our floor:

Hex tile! It's the same hex tile that's in our bathroom, or at least in the little part that's not carpeted. I like hex tile, although this isn't a particularly exciting example of it.

Okay, so all we've really done in here is paint, hang mirrors, and buy a new shower curtain (oh, and a new toilet. But that needed to be done and wasn't especially exciting).

Still to do:
*touch up paint!
*art for the walls
*a new towel rack for hand towels
*invent sepia-toned Eiffel Tower shower curtain for under $30
*curtains
*do something or other about those cabinets.

ah, yes--the cabinets! Here is the problem: the counter top is cream colored. The tile and all the trim are white. I can paint trim, but I don't see either the counter or the tile (or the tub or toilet, for that matter) going anywhere any time soon.

Here's what I'm thinking, tentatively. The paint color is Martha Stewart's Saguaro. On the paint chip for Saguaro, Martha helpfully suggests a coordinating color for woodwork, called Garden Shed. Garden Shed is a lighter shade of green. So I'm thinking of painting the cabinets and all the trim in Garden Shed and then adding some oil rubbed bronze hardware, and then I'll have myself a bathroom. A bathroom with a counter that doesn't match the floor, but...baby steps. Alternatively, I could just go with a dark stain on the cabinets and leave the trim white. But I'm kind of into the idea of colored cabinets in one room.