Bathroom Update

It's time for me to update our guest bathroom. It is a little juvenile and since the household is all older than 20, the bathroom needs to be hipped up. Here are some before pictures (notice the rubber ducks and frogs):

I wanted to easily update it. This means no painting, no updating of fixtures, and needs to be cheap (Target and Ikea).  I also wanted to make it more efficient. Here is is:

Some efficiency changes I made

I really disliked cleaning the little corner ledges of the bathtub, they were covered with goopiness from the odd shampoos/lotions/etc piled up on them. I also tried shower hangers, but they tilted or fell off. So I bought the soap dispensers and the corner shelf. They attach easily with provided silicone glue. Love them!

And I don't know about you, but keeping towels neatly folded on a towel rod never happened, so I used to put up "fake" neatly folded towels, that were never used. This is a waste of space in a small bathroom.  So I got some S hooks from Ace Hardware and put them on the towel rod. And now it's easy to simply hang up the towels.

Also, my college-grad daughter uses this bathroom when she is here.  The bathroom doesn't have enough counter space for her lotions and potions, so I bought the rolling grey cart from Ikea. We just roll it out before guests arrive, that's her face towel on the hook.

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Bedroom Makeover

Our bedroom has never really functioned well, especially the bedside tables. We have a lot of books, so we had two low bookcases for tables. They worked great for storing books; but the tops were too narrow for lamps, jewelry, magazines, clocks, reading glasses, etc. So at our garage sale, we got rid of them, without anything to replace them. We just knew we didn't want them anymore. So this is what our bedroom looked like: with books piled up against the wall, a lamp on top of a stack of books, basically a mess. This is a before photo. I intentionally didn't make the bed, which is similar to a person's face for a before picture of plastic surgery. They are rarely smiling. So my bed isn't smiling. We made the plain padded head board from an old sheet to drape quilts on, and then safety pinned them in place, but it looked too feminine and a bit dated.

Before

So, since I like to be as efficient as possible, I made a list of all the things we needed our bedside tables for: reading, storing books/magazines/etc, storing jewelry, writing, charging phones/tablets, last minute work stuff (checking email before going to bed or making tomorrow's to do list), etc.  So that means we needed desks. Desks? Yes, desks. They provided everything we needed as well as making our bedroom a little more practical with another quiet place for working, writing, and reading. 

After

The Bed

I kept the head board, but I covered it with some scrap fabric I had around (tutorial coming). I know that the chevron pattern is pretty trendy right now, but I had a large piece that would work just fine. The black pillows are from Ikea, but I made the other pillows: the pocket yellow trimmed grey ones (tutorial blog coming soon), blue with black stripes, and the yo-yo black pillow (leftover from Zoe's dorm room). The coverlet, quilt and bed skirt are from Target.

The Desks

The desks I bought from Overstock.com. They look vintage, the top is glass, so it's easy to clean. When I made them I actually reversed the top, since it wasn't as shiny as the other side.  The lamps are from Ikea. I also got a little magazine storage bin for Scott's side, as he likes to go through his magazines at night: New Yorker, Bicycling, and Believer. The chairs are from Target. 

Most of the baskets/boxes are empty. I fill them up with items from my closet that I don't wear anymore so it's convenient to send off to Goodwill.

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