Home Tour: An Update on the Upstairs Bathroom

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I’m so excited to share another updated room tour today! I’m going to be honest, I didn’t expect one of the first room tours to be the upstairs bathroom.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good space… we just haven’t done that much work to it, and it feels like it needs a bit of a renovation.

Basically, the room is… fine.

But over the last year and a half, we’ve really made some functional and visual improvements that I’m very happy with!

I wish I had taken more before photos! A lesson for the next house we live in, I guess.

One of the biggest changes in the space is the lighting. When we first moved in, there were 5 different switches you might need to use. There are 3 switches on the wall (overhead light, overhead fan, shower light), in addition to two wall sconces over the sink that had to be turned on with their own on-off switches.

It was… not practical. So a few months ago, when we were working on revamping all of the lighting in the house, we found these sconces that we loved from West Elm. The issue? They didn’t come in oil-rubbed bronze with milk glass, like we wanted. They came in chrome or brass with milk glass, or oil-rubbed bronze with clear glass. And you couldn’t mix and match.

So, Rustoleum to the rescue! We ended up buying the chrome fixtures and I spray painted them with an oil-rubbed bronze spray paint from Rustoleum. To be honest, you can’t even tell they weren’t that color to begin with! They make me so happy.

Of course, then we realized that the previous switches for the sconces were in the fixtures themselves… so with the new ones, they were on all the time. The only way to turn them off was to unscrew the light bulb.

Luckily, we was able to take out the built-in medicine cabinet and have the sconces wired into the wall switch, so now a single light switch turns on the sconces and the main ceiling light. Finally, two fewer switches in the bathroom!

I’ve touched on this a bit before, but we also did some major organization of the bathroom closet. It’s short (shorter than me!) because of stairs that lead up to the attic take up the top half of that wall. Normally I’d make it more functional by building shelves that go all the way across, but… that wasn’t possible.

The closet’s main function is access to the shower / bathtub pipes. There’s a door in the wall for the upright pipes, as well as a hole in the floor for more pipes. When we moved in, there was literally just a hole in the floor with a cutting board over it.

We figured a rolling solution would be best, so we found this extra-long cart from Michaels. It’s the perfect dimensions to use up all of the space available while still being functional!

The problem was that a hole in the ground with a cutting board over it isn’t exactly wheel-friendly. So we went out to the garage and found a sturdy piece of plywood and cut it to size to cover the entire floor! We’ll eventually use it as a test project for tiling so it matches the rest of the bathroom.

In addition, we got a bamboo shelf from IKEA to store towels, toilet paper, decorations, and other things guests might need easy access to. Our scale also fits under it perfectly!

Then I hung up my Bondi Beach photo and it started to feel much more like home!