The time I tried to tackle a reno all by myself

[caption id="attachment_1877" align="aligncenter" width="388"] The old bathroom--please ignore swiffer and other random items in the picture.[/caption]

When we first moved in to our home, the bathroom off the kitchen had a bi-fold door, and was this kind of blah purple colour.  The vanity was also quite tiny with no room for storage underneath.  In a house with no closets  I find it surprising that ANY design choices were undertaken in this home without "storage options" being at the top of the list.  This is primarily my bathroom as I get ready for work down here while Garret showers upstairs.  We tried to share the bathroom in the mornings but with us both leaving around the same time in the morning it just doesnt work.  I was trying to put contacts in with a steamed up mirror...makes makeup application tricky too. So I migrated to the downstairs bathroom.  The problems with this arrangement happen to be that the vanity is tiny and there is no room to store anything (as I have already just complained about)  My Mum and I were mulling around ways to make this bathroom better and we found a really awesome option at Ikea:

[caption id="attachment_1878" align="aligncenter" width="388"] fancy new sink[/caption]

We fell completely in love with this and the matching medicine cabinet and decided to have a bathroom reno party on the long weekend.  In our total naivete we thought that the only thing we would need G for would be to hang the cabinet and hook up the plumbing. Done and Done. For under $500 we could have a freshly redone bathroom/laundry room I was sold!  The furniture was picked up, Garret and I picked and paint colour and on the long weekend my Mum came down to paint.

I thought I would be doing more helping in the process but "Nana" was rather emphatic about Gus being exposed to paint fumes...so she painted and I just sort of mucked around and kept her company.  The new paint colour in the bathroom looked fantastic. (but I think after 3 coats she was ready to shoot G for claiming we didnt need primer...with that gross purple we DEFINITELY needed a primer coat!)  The time came for G to install the fixtures and we ran into a mild-ish problem.  The plumbing was done in such a way that it stuck way out of the wall....and wasn't going to work with the vanity that I picked.  There was also a brief "I hate Ikea" rant provided by him in the background as well based on the weird plumbing attachments that came with the vanity.

I could make this an extremely long drawn out story, but it just gets less and less interesting...so....A friend of his from work came by Fri night and Sat morning and helped him fix the plumbing. Which ended up being a really good thing because part of it was rotting out. SO when he has been complaining that "my" reno ended up requiring him to do some emergency plumbing I have been reminding him I am actually a lifesaver.  So yeah new plumbing, and yeah new fixtures and yeah our bathroom looks awesome.

[caption id="attachment_1879" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Oh look....he loves it[/caption]

Farewell to ugly purple and ugly vanity and hello to grumpy husband!  Now that it is finished he is loving me and my design choices again but he has said that we are not allowed to have any more Ikea in our house.  I think the next project I take on (or have my Mum and I take on) will require no help from him.

He is saying that since he helped with this he should get to take one item off his "before baby comes/G wants a new TV" honey do list.  Me thinks not. Anyone care to vote?

 

 

Planning the next step

While Garret is worrying about how our old uneven floor is going to cause problems for installing the new floor....I am already starting to think about what we can do next.  As I have complained about countless times before, we have no storage space in our house.  In fact we have a really weird teensy walk in closet in our room and a linen closet in the hall way and that is it.  Storage space is scarce n our parts and we have been trying to think of some creative solutions that also look nice.  My mum came across the below two images which I think would be perfect in some combination in our bedroom

[caption id="attachment_953" align="aligncenter" width="388"] Snazzy and would match our existing Ikea bedframe[/caption]

sourced from here

And this one which I also really like:

[caption id="attachment_954" align="aligncenter" width="388"] And this I really like because we could display things (nicely and neatly) on the shelves and have other stuff like jewellery, socks, various other needing storage items in the drawers.[/caption]

Sourced from here.

The tricky part with our bedroom is:

1) Our bedroom is pretty small so the shelving on either side wouldn't be able to be too wide

2) The ceiling in our bedroom is slanted (there is no attic over our bedroom so the ceiling sort of follows the pitch of the roof)  Therefore we don't have a ton of height to work with.

So I think we will end up having to fiddle with a few things to get it to work.  G wants to build something himself, but I am trying to convince him that we should start with an Ikea shell and go from there.  There are just so many projects that require our attention around the house that the ones where we can cheat and get it done in an afternoon? I'm all for those.  Plus I have heard that building Ikea furniture together is a really good marital test so hey why not?!