November 9, 2016  

Take The Tour: Neutral Calm Bathroom Reveal | One Room Challenge Finale


I’m bursting with excitement to share our finished bathroom makeover today! Eeek! Five weeks sounds like plenty of time to complete a room makeover, especially for as small as our bathroom is, but it went by quickly!

I carved out a few hours here and there in the evenings after work and over the weekends to work on this room, although I had so many other things going on that I only got a couple hours of work in most weeks. Thankfully I had last week off of work, so I had extra time to finish everything up. That was a good thing because I had so much left to do! Actually, I’ll be honest, I still have a few things left undone.

Just five short weeks ago, I started the One Room Challenge and set out to transform our bland beige bathroom into a beautiful space. The One Room Challenge is hosted by Linda of Calling It Home every spring and fall. I love a good challenge and am so excited to show you the final result today! It felt pretty slow going at times, but I kicked it into high gear this past week and am very happy with the result. Ready to look around?

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

I was provided with free product to complete this room makeover, however, all opinions are 100% my own. This post contains affiliate links. See my disclosure here.

We live in a small house with one bathroom. The bathroom is certainly not grand, but that doesn’t mean it can’t look beautiful. It had sat in its boring, bland beige state since we moved in two years ago and I was most definitely ready for a change. I’ve been on a mission to cover up all of the beige paint and pine trim in our house, and now I can check this room off the list!

I have a ton of photos to share with you in this post, but I thought I’d start with a video tour. This room is small and hard to photograph, so I thought a little video would be easier to get the full effect. Enjoy the tour!

Here’s my favorite part of makeovers – the side-by-side before and afters. Check it out!

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

 

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

One of my last projects was painting the closet and main doors. You haven’t seen the black doors yet, so I’m curious to hear your thoughts! I was a little nervous to go black, but I am so glad I did. I’m planning to makeover all of our interior doors like this over time.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

The below photo is a good look at the faux board and batten I added. I’m really happy with the look it adds to this room. I say this is faux board and batten because there is no board behind the vertical strips of wood. I simply nailed the “battens” straight into the wall. You can still see the textured wall in between the battens, but I think it looks great anyway. I read a lot of tutorials on creating this look and some people don’t like textured wall showing through while others don’t mind. I’ll write up a full tutorial on the blog soon so you can see more details about how I created this look.

I do want to give a shoutout to Ryobi, who sent me their Airstrike Cordless Brad Nailer to use on this project. It made attaching all of the boards a breeze, even for a woodworking beginner like me. I’ll admit I was afraid to pull the trigger the first time, but after one nail I was hooked and now I keep looking for more reasons to use my new tool. Visit Ryobi Nation for more project ideas and how-tos.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

Although our bathroom is small, we actually do have quite a bit of storage and closet space in here. So the little shelf I added above the toilet is primarily for decorative purposes. It gave me a bit of space to add some pretty touches to the room.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

 

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

Our old towel bar was above the toilet, which was a waste of that wall space in my opinion and my short arms couldn’t reach it from the sink. So I added a little round hook to the right of the sink for our hand towel. It was an easy update that makes things more user-friendly.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

One of my favorite updates is the mirror. Look at the before and after! I finally have a pretty frame! I’m new to woodworking and didn’t want to try to make one, although many people do. So I went in search of another option and ended up finding Mirror Mate, a company that custom makes frames to fit your existing builder-grade mirror. All I had to do was send them the measurements and pick out the material, and they shipped me a beautiful frame that fit right over top of my existing mirror.

I loved Mirror Mate’s process so much that I’m going to write a whole blog post about it soon with more detail. It was really slick! While I love to DIY, some things are easier to buy. And since the mirror is a focal point in the bathroom, I wanted it to look professional. It was tough to narrow down all of the style and color options Mirror Mate offers, and I ended up selecting the Chelsea Classic White.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

Next up is the light fixture, another project I haven’t shown you yet! I wanted to upgrade our Hollywood style strip light, but I was too cheap to replace it. These mirrored lights are in so many bathrooms, and they’re certainly not the most attractive option.

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I unscrewed the light bulbs and was able to slide the mirrored front right off. I spray painted the mirror surface with a matte black spray paint and used a foam brush to paint the sides of the light base black. Doesn’t the black look awesome?! I was iffy on this project beforehand, but now I’m totally sold. If you have a light like this, don’t be afraid to bust out the spray paint! I’ll post a tutorial on this later on, but it really was simple. I didn’t take the fixture off the wall or mess with the wiring at all. Easy, peasy.

I did try swapping the bulbs for edison-style ones like many of you readers recommended, but I decided I liked the rounded bulb best. I tried a round Edison bulb but it doesn’t look any different except for the inside filaments when it’s turned on. Since I already had three working light bulbs, I decided it wasn’t worth the money to replace them. The Edison bulbs at my hardware store were $10-12 each, which was steep for me.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

I used my brand new Homeright Finish Max Fine Finish Sprayer to paint the doors of the built-in cabinets to the right of our sink and above the tub. I’d never used a paint sprayer, but it turned out to be a fabulous tool to add to my DIY arsenal! Check out this pretty white cabinet, a HUGE improvement from the pine cabinets before.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

After I painted the cabinets, the finishing touch was to switch out the hardware. I replaced the old pulls with these polished chrome bar pulls from D. Lawless Hardware. It’s amazing what a difference a simple change of hardware can do!

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

The black doors are probably my favorite part of this entire makeover. Take a look at the before and afters below. Once again, it’s amazing what paint can do! I also added picture frame style moulding to the doors to fancy them up a bit.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

Here’s a before and after. The door on the right is our closet door, and the one my hubby is holding is the original color on the main door. We took the door off the hinges and then I thought of taking this picture. David rolled his eyes, but he appeased me. He’s getting used to my blogger ways.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

I switched out the old door knobs for new ones from D. Lawless Hardware. I chose the Colonial Satin Stainless knobs. Our old knobs didn’t have locks, so I’m excited to have a locking doorknob on the main door now!

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

I’m thrilled with the progress I made in this room these past five weeks! I do have a few things left to finish up. I’m still searching for the perfect fabric to use to create a Roman shade out of the mini blinds. I bought fabric last week, but it didn’t work well in this room. All of the blue and gray tones are hard to match!

I had also planned to redo the shelving in the closet and cabinets and repaint the insides of all of them, but I decided to table that project for now because of the time and expense involved.

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

Bathroom Makeover Projects

Check out the posts below for the full behind the scenes of my bathroom makeover and all the DIY projects I tackled in it.

[go_portfolio id=”bathroom_makeover”]

Sources

Paint Colors – Wall – Bottlenose Dolphin, Ceiling/Trim/Cabinets – Designer White, Doors – Tomcat

Board & Batten – DIYed using the Ryobi Airstrike, painted Designer White

Door Makeover – colonial trim, painted Tomcat, DIYEd using the Ryobi Airstrike & Homeright Finish Max

Hardware – towel bars, round hooks, chrome bar pulls and door knobs from D. Lawless Hardware

Shower Curtain – Tomcat

Mirror Frame – Chelsea Class White frame from Mirror Mate

Soap Pump – Ceramic Farmhouse Pump

Rugs – used for a few years, similar rug set here

Shelf – 24” shelf board with brackets from the hardware store

Potted Plant – Hobby Lobby (similar plant here)

White Picture Frame – thrift store frame painted white with scrapbook paper inside

Square Tin – old from Target

Framed Artwork Above Toilet – old

Black Basket – thrift store basket spray painted black

 

Thank you so much for following along on this bathroom makeover! It’s amazing what progress you can make in your home when you buckle down and focus on it. Looming deadlines are always helpful for me!

Now, it’s a great day in blogland because there are soooo many incredible room makeovers to tour! Visit Calling It Home to find links to all of the makeovers Thursday morning.

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P.S. Check out my past One Room Challenge makeovers! You can tour the navy bedroom I did this spring and my jewel-toned craft studio I did last year.

Navy Bedroom Makeover – Spring 2016 One Room Challenge

This navy bedroom is gorgeous! Check out what she did in just five weeks for the One Room Challenge. Lots of bedroom DIY projects and pretty details.

Jewel-Tone Craft Studio – Fall 2015 One Room Challenge

Craft Reveal Before After

 

 

Check out this neutral gray bathroom with white board and batten. Love this One Room Challenge room makeover! It's amazing what you can do to transform a small bathroom.

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  1. Beautiful transformation! You did a great job with the faux board and batten too!
    Congrats!

  2. Emily! This turned out amazing!! What a gorgeous bathroom! Congrats on an awesome reveal!

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