Close-Enough-to-Finished Master Bedroom Makeover

Well, it’s finally pretty darn done.  I can barely believe it.

Let’s do the before and after tour, shall we?

Master entry hallway, before.

Entry hallway, after. Closet curtains are still there….the closet deserves its very own makeover post when our bank account recovers from this one.

A close-up of our hallway photo wall. It is my intention to fill this whole wall, but all things in due time!

Remember this? The main bedroom, before.

The main bedroom, after. Love that plank feature wall. Love it.

A great shot of the ‘starfish wall’ (tutorial coming soon!).

The opposite wall, before.

The opposite wall, after. Those collage photo frames? I was never really in love with them. But I had to use them somehow! See how I hacked them into this ‘stained-glass window’ wall decor in an upcoming tutorial post.

Remember this before?….the all-important dog bed and cluttered nightstand.

Same view, after. It wouldn’t be fair if Chance didn’t get a dog bed makeover, now would it? Those are the same ole Ikea Hemnes nightstands, with a bit of a color and distressed-finish upgrade.

Here’s a good shot of our DIY weathered wood headboard (tutorial coming soon!). It’s nice to have an actual headboard….such grown-ups, we are!

Here’s a little close up of the vignette on my nightstand. I heart pink peonies in a blue mason jar. I just heart them.

Remember how the wall opposite the bed looked before? Abbie does.

After. It’s amazing what a little bold color and crisp white trim will do to a wall, eh?  Although, it feels like something is missing….

Ah. There we go.  Now we can move on.

Tree branches: no master bedroom is complete without.

The french door leading out onto what will soon be a lovely pergola-covered back deck. Right now, it is the deck of death; old and rickety and consummately terrifying.  We don’t go out there.  We don’t look at it.  We don’t even speak of it.

Before: the view back down the hall towards the living room–aka, the escape route.

Alas, the unfinished closets still require our attention, as does the attic hatch in the ceiling. Such is why this post is called ‘Close-Enough-to-Finished’. Close enough, it’s close enough.

That’s about the gist of it!

A few random notes here:  after doing our master bathroom makeover, and slapping that dark, dark, dark grey on the walls in such a small space, I arrived at two decisions.  The first is that I love dark walls with white trim–I adore the contrastiness of it (I like to make up words).  The second is that since the master bedroom is also a small and innately dark room, we should just own it and go dark on the walls there, too.  If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  Of course, we tempered the darkness a bit by making the plank wall, as well as a lot of the linens, white.  That always helps.  So do pops of cheerful color.  I think part of the reason I drug my feet on this room for so long was that the voices in my head were at odds with each other over painting the walls some light, gentle color (as logic would dictate you do in a small, dark room).

We were also on the fence about whether we wanted to swap out the existing blue glass pendants for something else.  And when I say ‘we’, well, you probably know what I mean.  Functionally, the pendants are completely awesome–it is brilliant to not have a lamp to knock over on the nightstand (I may or may not flail my arms when I am asleep).  I personally love them, but I’m not 100% sure that they are 100% what I am looking for in those spots.  But do I ever need to be 100% sure about any design choice?  Nope.  I’d say pulling the decision trigger at a respectable 85% is fine.  So the pendants stay; I like the color, I like the transparency (they do, after all, hang in front of those windows), and I like the price tag (ie: already bought).  Works for me!

It is abundantly satisfying to be sleeping in a ‘finished’ room.  The bare drywall edged windows, primed walls, and mish-mashed furniture were great and all, but….change is good.

The Start of the Finish of the Master Bedroom

For those of you who have been keeping tabs on us, you know we’ve been through a pretty serious top to bottom renovation of our 105-year-old house.  After five years of of these shenanigans, we have finally gotten to the master bedroom, and as we put the finishing touches on it, I thought I would regale you with a series of ‘before’ shots to really get you in the mood.

The photo above shows the original master bedroom of the house when we bought it….I didn’t take many photos because we ripped into that part of the house so fast the ink was hardly dry on our escrow papers.  This isn’t a totally fair ‘before’ shot, either; you see, we didn’t even make this the master, or even a bedroom.  But you can see the master bath there, leering at you from the right-hand door….that awful, awful bathroom–we let that stay where it was, but did some pretty major tweaking to it (see that makeover here).  We chose to put the actual bedroom on the other side of the bathroom, in a room that was….well, we don’t even know what it was.  And strangely, I took no photos of it until we started ripping down ‘walls’ (I use quotes because what we found was that most of the walls in this house were actually 1×12 boards nailed up and covered with wallpaper.  The structure of the house defied physics and basic common sense).

As you can see, we started a touch of demo when I snapped this picture.

Here’s a photo of the original master bedroom once we had started our gleeful destruction:

Here, you can see where we are opening up the hallway that will lead to the new master bedroom.  You can also see the shards of ‘wall’ that are coming down.  Good times.

So eventually, we got some legitimate structural walls put up, you know….since this is a house with a roof and all, and arrived at a master bedroom that was finished but not finished.  You feel me?

For five years, the master has looked like this:

The entrance hallway: to the immediate right is the master bath, and to the left is a series of curtained closets. Curtained closets are for people who can’t afford closet doors.

I give you….the bedroom. In all it’s primed-wall, trimless, paintless glory.

A hodge-podge of cast-off furniture completes a very sophisticated college-dorm look. Dang, this place really needs some black-light posters. The white dog would look pretty epic in black-light.   I digress.

The all-important dog bed and cluttered nightstand.

Looking back towards the hallway and closets.

The escape route back to the living room.

I hate to do this to you, but this is it for now.  I just wanted to set the scene and show you how we’ve been living for the past several years.  The Texan is constantly baffled by my lack of initiative with this room and how I have let it stay like this for so long.  It’s very unlike me.  But I only just found my inspiration….so stay tuned, because the ‘After’ post is coming soon!  I swear.  Really, it is.

Bathtubs and Sugar Scrubs

She was running a couple of weeks behind schedule, but the Birthday Fairy got it done.  She Got.  It.  Done.  After five excruciating years, I finally have my bathtub.

Let’s take a little stroll down memory lane, shall we?

How the master bathroom looked when we bought our house. I don’t even want to talk about what we found in the cabinets.  So I won’t.

The sink side of the master bath after our renovation.

Sadly, the space for the intended tub sat vacant for a couple of years….taunting me mercilessly with what should be.

And finally….FINALLY!  Behold:

My long-awaited, much anticipated, official favorite spot in the house.

Due to some pretty tight space constraints, we wound up choosing a tub that is pretty modern in design (despite heavily considering a clawfoot, and at one point even a metal horse trough), but with that antique-looking faucet, I think it works pretty seamlessly in our ‘modern farmhouse’.  It’s a good, deep soak….existentially deep, which makes up for the fact that it isn’t the longest tub in the world (ah, tiny bathrooms).  But, yes….yes, I think I will keep it.

So in honor of our newest, most cherished family member, I decided to post a lovely little recipe for a homemade sugar scrub (something I have been dying to make, but refused, like a petulant child, to make it to use in the shower).

With so much grapefruit in the yard right now, you know it had to be a bit grapefruit-y:

Fresh Grapefruit, Coconut, Rose Scrub:

–1 cup superfine sugar

–2 tablespoons heated virgin organic coconut oil

–1 tablespoon rose water

–1/4 teaspoon fresh grapefruit zest

Start by zesting your grapefruit.  The ones from my tree are the yellow variety (Oro Blanco), but this would work just as well with Ruby Red or something good and pink.

Next, you want to scoop your hardened coconut oil into a microwave-safe dish.

Microwave it for approx. 30 seconds or until it looks like this:

Now mix your sugar, oil, rosewater, and zest all into a paste–you want it moist, but not soupy.  If it’s too moist, add a bit more sugar to dry it up.  It should look a little something like this:

Find a pretty jar to put it in and fill-er-up.

FYI: not really sure how long this might be good for because of the grapefruit peel. Use your best judgment. If it smells funny or turns wonky colors, don’t use it. To make a version of this that probably lasts a bit longer, substitute a drop or two of grapefruit essential oil in place of the grapefruit zest.

Rub-a-dub-scrub!

Okay, so as I was making this….I got to thinking….this would make a really interesting cocktail.  So, yes….this happened:

See the recipe here.

So I ask you this?  How bad is it, on a scale from one to awesome, that I was mixing cocktails at 10:30 am on a Tuesday?  Just wondering.

Birthday Bathtub

Image of my hopefully soon-to-be tub from signaturehardware.com with a few embellishments added by yours truly.

I have a hole in my heart….a bathtub-shaped hole.  For five years we have been renovating this house, and for five years, I have pined for a bathtub.  You see, I am a tub person.  I love a good bubble bath.  But I have not had a decent, soaking tub since I moved out of my childhood home (15 years ago).  Now, some of you may have noticed that there is, indeed, a bathtub in the Farmhouse (no, not that enormous kitchen sink) guest bathroom.  It is, indeed, a bathtub.  But it is an old cast-iron wall tub that fills just high enough to get your ankles wet.  It’s great for bathing the occasional visiting nephew, or muddy pup, but for an adult human?  It just does.  not.  cut.  it.

The Kitchen Tub….I probably fit better into this than I do the guest bathroom tub.

We have lovely showers at this house, don’t get me wrong–it’s not like we’re out using the garden hose.  I just really want me a tub….first-world problems, right?  We just can never seem to justify the expense of it, when there are so many other, more important projects that require our time and bank accounts.

Remember when I showed you the photos of our made-over master bath?

And remember this sad little bare patch where there is supposed to be a tub? Yep.  It still looks like this.

I have a big birthday coming up in a month (and it shall remain numberless, thank you very much!).  And I have announced to the Texan (and now to the world) that this is it!  This is the birthday when the birthday fairy is going to bring me my tub.  She and I go way, way back, and I have given her a much-needed vacation for the past several years, so, the way I see it, she owes me a favor.  This is happening, people.  I want my gosh-darn tub!

We’re working with a pretty tight space, so it’s not going to be, say the bathtub of my dreams, necessarily, but it is going to be as big of soaker as we can possibly squeeze into that spot.  I really always figured on a claw foot tub, as it kind of feels as though that’s what a 100-year-old farmhouse might feel comfortable with.  It’s the safe choice.

But, secretly, I kind of want to do a tub like this:

Snatched from http://www.motherearthnews.com/natural-home-living/an-alabama-family-handbuilds-a-sweet-small-home-from-scraps.aspx, photo by Michael Shopenn

Yep.  That’s a fiberglass tub fitted inside a horse trough, and the article claims the whole thing only cost 90 bucks.  That’s pretty farmhouse-y, wouldn’t you say?  Am I brave enough to do this?  I don’t know!  I just really don’t know!

We’ll have to see what the birthday fairy’s got up her sleeve.  Stay tuned….I know you are all on the edge of your seats! 

 

Garage Makeover Reveal

As beautiful as it was in this ‘before’ shot (taken many, many, oh-so-many weeks ago) the garage was due for a complete refresh.  Afterall, I needed an art studio, not an art shanty.

After! All fresh-faced and functional.

The front of the studio (as it shall hence be known) got brand new, properly-functioning carriage-style doors, board and batten siding (to match the house), and some farmy decorative accents.

A little countrified vignette.

Why, yes. Yes, it is.

My grandfather’s rusty old spurs.

Some primitive wreathes that I can decorate as the seasons dictate.

Decorative wire garden edging hung upside-down along the eaves to serve as a trellis.

The west side of the garage before.

The west side of the studio, after.

The garden-side of the studio got two new, functioning windows, complete with bright shutters, as well as new board and batten siding and decorative trellis edging.

More garden-variety decorative wire edging re-purposed as a trellis for the grapevines and morning glory to dominate.

Fresh new snappies and pansies to accent the garden walkway along the studio.

Gotta love that conveniently-named “Farmhouse Red”….my favorite paint color by Behr…. same color as the front door of the Farmhouse.

With the outside finally signed, sealed, and delivered….it’s on to the inside….the Texan thought he was finished with this project….MUHAHAHAHAHA.  Not by a long shot.

Garage to Studio, Phase III

My apple butter bribery worked….the Texan and I got back to business on my art studio this weekend.  It’s a big moment….the front of the garage is the part we see from the house and the view has been a bit too deep-woods distillery for my tastes (if it was actually a distillery you know my feelings would be different).

Front of garage before.

In addition to pure aesthetics, we needed a strong dose of function.  Those old barn doors (though lovely with their eons of peeling, different colored paint) were so gap-toothed that full-sized tumbleweeds could blow in through them (in addition to a lot of dirt and dust).  Additionally, we had a frightening wind storm last winter that actually ripped one in half, and, as a quick fix, we screwed support boards to the inside that rendered one whole set of doors inoperable. In a nutshell, those doors needed to go (though I am keeping all that glorious chippy, painted old wood for other projects).  In order to use this space as an art studio, I need to be able to shut the dirt and debris from the outside world out, and shut the mess I make in.

Oh man….those hinges: a study in every kind of bad bolt and flathead screw known throughout history. All painted into place.

Jonathon removes each bolt by hand and loses quite a bit of knuckle in the process.

Jonathon, mid-curse, as he deals with the dreaded flathead screws.

After he frees one side of one hinge (of ten), we get a close-up view of the layers of paint.  Am I the only one who thinks this is pretty?  Jonathon doesn’t.

WHY!? Why do these exist?!!

This project is flushing a lot of these out to play.

Finally! One door is off….but the hinges defy logic.

Millie does quality-control on the trim for the new doors.

At the end of the day, the doors are off…but the hinges are still taunting Jonathon.

Abbie weighs in on the hinge. She decides we’d better bust out the reciprocating saw.

Millie manages the job site.

Routing out plywood for the new doors.

The router is my new obsession in life.

I am starting to regret allowing chickens in the construction zone.

Millie rocks the catwalk. Then she and the rest of her cohorts get banished to the back garden. I don’t need chicken**** on my freshly-painted doors, thank you.

The good news is that, since Phase IV is the interior of the studio, I’m not going to wait until after that to reveal the outside of the garage/studio.  The bad news is that Phase III took a lot longer than we anticipated, and it still isn’t ready for the big reveal either.    I know I am really dragging this out (not intentionally!).  So for now, how about a glimpse at the ‘after’ of the doors to tide us all over.

New weather-proof (hopefully), easy to operate, snazzy-looking carriage doors on my soon-to-be art studio.

What paint color is that, you ask?  It’s called ‘blood, sweat, tears and four-letter words’.  Exterior semi-gloss.

Garage to Studio, Phase II

In true Labor Day style, we got back to business on the garage this weekend.  Phase II (of four phases) is focused around the west wall of the garage, which began as a modge-podge of poorly-fitted corrugated sheet metal tacked up around an off-centered, non-functioning, 100-year-old window.  Don’t get me wrong–I actually loved that window (and was devastated when, a week after closing escrow, the guys we hired to clear the jungle that was our yard shattered the bottom pane out), but for my new studio’s sake, we needed more windows, and the current one wasn’t going to cut it (especially with the chicken wire we put over the bottom of it to ‘replace’ the missing glass).

First things, first….that window had to come out:

Jonathon strategizes.

Fingers crossed that the top portion of glass survives removal!

Huzzah! The window survives….and joins my ever-growing pile of re-usable s-crap.

With the window gone, it was time to get at that metal siding.

A lovely view.

We were sad to see this panel go….Racing bike-MEOW, indeed. I know it will shock everyone, but we did not write this.

Whilst Jonathon swung away with a mallet at those panels (and disturbed the peace for miles around), I was busy helping like this:

Oh, look! Pretty flowers!

And look at these pretty flowers!

So many pretty flowers….

Chance was helping, too.

After getting yelled at for my lack of focus (Chance didn’t get yelled at), I was assigned to a very important task: rusty nail collection.  As they popped out like bullets, I had to duck and cover, then scrounge for them in the bushes.  I’m important, you know.

My growing collection of rusty nails.

Finally, after A LOT of noise (there is nothing quite as beautiful as the siren song of a mallet on metal to win the good graces of our neighbors), the west wall was a nice little breezeway….

Anyone else feel a little uncertain about the integrity of this structure? Just me? Allrighty, then.

Afternoon shadows on the garage floor.

Abbie inspects the missing wall.

The next step was, of course, to reinforce the existing studs, and frame out for the new windows.  Unfortunately, once again, this is where I leave off in order to not give away the end result.  I’m all about suspense.

Oh, look! Pretty flowers!

Garage to Studio, Phase I

The front of the garage/barn, in all it’s 100-year-old glory.

One of the things that I loved about our house, upon first sight, was the ramshackle barn that is the garage.  It is the perfect spot for something that I have always dreamed about having: my very own, grown-up art studio.  But, in its current condition (though it is such a fun photo-shoot backdrop), it just doesn’t pass muster: dirt and debris seem magnetically drawn through the cracks and crevices of those old barn doors, the electrical is worrisome, at best, and with no insulation, it is a sweat lodge in the summer and an ice box in the winter.  For the last four years, I have pined bitterly for my studio, but with all the work that needed our attention/funds in the house, it has routinely found itself at the bottom of the priority list.  But finally, finally! we are moving forward with it, and I am beside myself with excitement to be able to get my art back on.  It’s going to be a lengthy process, so to adequately cover it from start to finish, there will be many more posts to come.  Everyone’s on the edge of their seat, I know.

The west side of the barn, though charmingly shabby, is getting a face-lift, too.

So somehow, after starting the weekend like this:

….we managed to get our butts to work.  The current interior of the garage, I am embarrassed to say, is a dark, disorganized, post-apocalyptic outpost that looks something like this:

Notice the chubby kitty to the left. She’s hard to miss.

The first phase of the project called for building a large storage closet in the back corner of the barn.  But first, the area had to be cleared, including removing all the haphazardly attached odds and ends of wood that were tacked along the walls, as well as removing the morning glory vines that had grown inside and turned it into The Not-So-Little Shop of Horrors.

The cool salvaged machine-shop shelving is staying….just had to get it untangled from the death-clutch of the vine beast.

Jonathon measures the freshly-cleared space. Notice the ‘window to nowhere’ on the right-hand side. That’s staying. It’s awesome.

Abbie helps Jonathon with an engineering issue.

A small handful of the THOUSANDS of old nails we pulled out of the various mish-mash of materials that were tacked up to act as interior paneling.

The growing pile of mish-mash that was pulled off the walls….keeping all of it, of course, to use in future fun projects. This place is an old-wood gold mine!

One of several sets of old, rusted, lovely shelf brackets salvaged from the barn walls. Definitely going to be up-cycled! I love me some junk.

The skeleton of the new closet goes up!

Unfortunately, since we are far from done, I am going to reserve all ‘after’ shots until the whole thing is done.  Oh, the humanity!

Phase II coming soon….

Screen Door 3.0

We love us some screen doors at the Farmhouse.  During our long Southern California summer (which goes from about February to November….just kidding….it starts in March), there is just nothing like having all the doors and windows thrown open and letting that breeze run amok with all the paper in the house.  But we definitely have our bug moments.  We have just come through June Bug season, and I’m not sure when it starts, but Pterodactil season is starting pretty soon, too (known to everyone else as flying Daddy Long-Legs).  So, yeah, we like screen doors.  The problem is, screen doors don’t seem to like us.

The first incarnation came in the form of a ‘disappearing’ screen door.  I thought this was a pretty ‘neat’ concept because we had gone to all that trouble putting in our pretty french doors, and I wasn’t too keen on covering them up.

Fail.

As you may be able to discern from the photo, this screen door was a failure because it does not close all the way.  Turns out that dog hair and yard debris do not for a properly-working sliding door make.  I firmly believe that shotty installation by inexperienced screen door installers may also need to be factored in.  In addition, due to its ‘invisible’ properties, several dogs, who shall remain nameless, went straight through it on several occasions before getting the picture.  Needless to say, we quickly figured out that this was not a screen door that would be repeated on the rest of our six exterior doors.

At that point, I had the big idea that, because this is a ‘farmhouse’, it should have honest-to-goodness, old fashioned, slamming-shut, hinge-squealing screen doors.  Right?  Right.  None of this new-fangled, I-have-a-screen-door-but-you-can’t-see-it silliness.  Instead of trying to pretend like it wasn’t there, I wanted to embrace the screen door….

Second fail.  Dang that thing looks awful!

Because the trim and french door were all white, and because I was daunted by the idea of painting an unfinished wooden screen door (even though that is what I wanted), we went, against my better judgement, with the low-maintenance vinyl variety.  For the record, I hate replacing things that should be made of wood with things that are made of vinyl.  In theory, it sounds great: low maintenance, easy to clean, durable.  But in reality, it’s plastic.  It looks like plastic, it acts like plastic, it’s just so….plastic.  We put this door up, and immediately realized that this sucker was going to sag, and with each successive heatwave, I swear the thing is melting.  It never hung right (again, this is most likely largely due to installer error), and despite the very visible vertical barriers on the lower half, one of the dogs (who shall remain nameless) pretty much immediately put a paw through the screen.

The infamous, ill-fitting, hole-filled chicken screen door.

And so, for a couple of summers, this is how it’s been: two of six exterior doors, partially screened.  Really effective first line of defense against the Pterodactils.  We sat in limbo this long because, although we knew we wanted authentic wooden screen doors, we were daunted at the thought of painting them.  You see, to paint a screen door, one must first remove said screen, and then be able to magically put it back in.  This.  Is.  Not.  Simple.  At least, it is not simple for the screen-door-challenged amongst us.  We have had such terrible luck up until now, that we had sort of resigned ourselves to failure in this particular home-improvement arena.

UNTIL NOW….still riding the wave of our newly-refreshed DIY philosophy (‘good enough’ is no longer good enough!), we decided to tackle the dreaded, elusive wooden screen door.  If we couldn’t make this work, on our third try, then it was time to call in professionals….either way, we would have functioning, hopefully attractive screen doors.

Awful photo of the about-to-be-painted screen door.

We got a very simple, inexpensive wooden screen door from Lowe’s (only about $20!!!), a set of screen door hinges, latch, and pulls.  Additionally, because I can never leave well-enough alone, we got four little decorative star trim thingies to embellish the corners of the door (hopefully giving it a little more of a custom look).  I had already chosen the paint color (it might help to point out here that I had long ago decided to paint our white french doors and windows a very dark olivey-brown color….so these screen doors would be painted the same), so it was time to get some painting done.  Fortunately for us, Jonathon had a momentary strike of brilliance and decided that, instead of completely removing the screen, we should pull out only half of it at a time, and paint both sides of that half.  When this had dried, we could tuck that part of the screen back into place, and then do the same to the lower half.  This allowed us to successfully get the screen put neatly back into place.  GENIUS!  I knew I kept him around for a good reason.

Dark brown/olive paint+primer goes on.

First coat of paint on the decorative star trim thingies.

After two coats of paint, lots of flipping and rotating, and re-attaching of screen, the door was finished.  Almost.  We then wood-glued the star trim pieces into each of the four corners of the door.  After these had set and dried, it was go-time.  It was time to hang the door, which is the moment when every screen door is either made, or ruined.

It worked.  IT WORKED!!  For some crazy reason, it worked like a gosh durn charm!

The finished screen door in place over the freshly-painted-dark french door.

I’m on a dark door kick. I love how this looks! Why didn’t we do this sooner?!

Close up of our ‘custom’ decorative star trim thingies.

Wow.  This was a really long post on a very boring subject.  You get a gold star if you made it all the way through this.

Suffice it to say, we’re pretty proud of ourselves with this one.  This is a long-overdue win.  Now, we just have five more to do.  Sigh.

The Almost-Final Master Bathroom Semi-Makeover

After

This past weekend, we set to work finalizing the decor in our master bath.  It’s about damned time.

One annoying aspect of this crazy renovation of ours is that rooms and things get, maybe, 88% completed, and then we are so exhausted that we take a break and excuse ourselves with the proverbial “It’s finished enough”.  ‘Finished enough’ is pretty much the theme of our entire renovation.  ‘Finished enough’ means it is functional, clean, and what’s left can suck it because we’re tired and broke.  So, sometimes, all the poor little details sit in limbo indefinitely.

Another unpleasant side-effect of this sort of renovation is what I like to refer to as Project ADHD.  There are so many damned projects that need our/my attention that I find it nearly impossible to focus on just one at a time.  Sometimes the list is so long, and so overwhelming that all I can do is go take a nap and not do any of it.  I’m pretty efficient like that.

Mark my words…NO MORE.  I am a woman on a mission now: MUST FINISH.  Getting over this hump is a pretty straightforward process, really.  Pick ONE damned room at a time, and finish that beast from head to toe.  Simple, right?  Right.  So with this newly adopted life philosophy, we chose the master bathroom to start our finishing.  Let’s revisit, for a moment, what this particular ray of sunshine looked like when we began the renovation:

Before

Ah, yes.

Obviously, there has been some skillful rearranging and upgrading of certain (all) fixtures thanks in no small part to our contractor, Mike.  I am, however, for the sake of this post, going to glaze over all of that, as it is all a blur to me anyways, thanks in no small part to the massive wine consumption that was taking place during that part of the renovation.  After the actual building part of it was done, we slapped some paint on the walls and were just thankful to have an actual functioning bathroom instead of a toilet surrounded by studs and insulation.  It’s the little things in life.

During. This is how the master bath has looked for the last few years. Not bad.

Looking at the above photo, some might think that the bathroom looks fine–great even.  But the photo doesn’t show the nitty-gritty.  It doesn’t show all the unfilled nail holes, all the caulkless seams, all the missing trim.  It doesn’t show the grout splattered across the ceiling from the tile installation.  It doesn’t show the ‘holidays’ in the dark brown paint where I was too lazy and un-in-love with the paint color to do a second coat.  It doesn’t show the unpainted door, and it certainly doesn’t show the missing clawfoot tub and the plumbing sticking out of the wall in wait of said tub.  Ah, the beauty of photography.

So, needless to say, the above list of items definitely required our attention.  Color is always a major priority for me, and ever since I had put that dark brown color on the walls, I knew two things: first, I loved the dark paint, second, this particular dark brown completely clashed with the slate floor tiles and needed to be banished.  I knew I needed to go with a dark, dark slate grey (dare I say light black?).  So that much was a given.

That moment when you pour the paint into the tray and panic about how dark it is. But I ain’t scurred.

Jonathon was put to work on his arch-nemesis: crown molding.  There is really nothing that he hates more in life than crown molding.  But for some reason, this room went seamlessly, with minimal swearing, no do-over cuts, and no wasted material.  A minor miracle.  And that’s a good thing, because he’s got four more rooms left to do after this one.

Jonathon’s weapon of choice. I am really pretty surprised that this thing hasn’t ever been turned on me.

Nobody puts Jonathon in a corner.

Gettin’ after it.

With the wall color and trim done, it was time for choosing accent colors.  Usually, I tend to go with red or orange or reddish-orange accessories (see the striped rug in the ‘during’ photo above) because I just love them, but I had a little moment of accent color envy.  My sister-in-law is decorating their new baby’s nursery in the loveliest grey and yellow scheme, and I suddenly found myself wanting some more yellow in my life.  She’s going with light greys and pastel yellows, and since I had already decided on this darkest grey, I figured I should go with a super-saturated yellow and not fully rip her design ideas.

Happy yellow.

I realize that this color combo is pretty modern.  This kind of conflicts with my whole farmhouse design philosophy.  But I don’t care.  I love it.  There’s a lot of vintage mixed into the details and accessories, so it squeaks by, in my opinion.

The metal shelving unit is a cheap Ikea find that I painted yellow and then distressed the daylights out of to give it a funky, used vibe.

Et voila!  A pretty pulled-together bathroom, if I do say so myself.

The walk-in shower with vintage-inspired, visible plumbing fixtures.

Wow that door came off really purple in this photo…in real life it’s just a lighter shade of dark grey than the walls. To the left, you can see the full length medicine cabinet that we had built into the wall for extra storage.

Adorably-perfect rugs from Crate and Barrel.

Window treatments and vintage accessories on the sill.

Pretty towels from World Market.

 And finally, the reason why I am entitling this post ‘Almost-Final’?  Oh, because we are still waiting on that damned claw foot tub.  Cheers.

Someday I will have a bathtub. Someday.

*****UPDATE*******

I am complete….