One Room Challenge: Guest Bathroom – Week 1
AGH! I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself! We’re officially doing our very first One Room Challenge!
If you aren’t familiar with ORC, it’s a twice-a-year design event that takes place each spring and fall where a group of 20 selected featured designers (along with guest participants, like us) completely makeover a room from start to finish in 6 weeks (or 8 weeks during these COVID times). As a guest participant, we (along with the featured designers and other guest participants) will share our progress in a blog post (posted every Wednesday) and on Instagram. Read more about this awesome challenge here.
That means for the next eight Wednesdays we’ll be taking you behind the scenes as we completely transform our guest bathroom from top to bottom, sharing the final reveal. We’ll be sharing the good, the bad and the unexpected of our real life room design and everything that comes with it.
A little about us
If you’re visiting us for the first time, hello and welcome! We’re Kristen and Nick and we live in the Austin, Texas area. Kristen does the blog writing, most (okay, maybe all) of the project scheming and has a pretty constant condition of rough “man hands” due to always working on said projects, and Nick is the sane one that’s somehow still super supportive of all of the schemes, helping me out along the way throughout just about every phase in one way, shape or form. Over the years we’ve challenged ourselves by flipping a house and renovating a vintage camper together, all the while DIY’ing and renovating our current ‘90s builder-basic home (that we’ve had for ten years now, come this July). Originally starting this blog to help keep our friends and family up to date with what we’re doing all the time, it has grown into a passion for helping demystify the DIY process and encourage others to start (or continue) to get your hands dirty along with us!
I initially wrestled with whether or not we should take on this challenge since it’s so easy for DIY projects not to go as planned, BUT as perpetual DIYers we often have multiple partially-finished projects in various stages of doneness around the house and (with Nick’s super support and encouragement to do so) saw this as an amazing opportunity to truly push ourselves to get ONE space completely done, and show you that it can be done (even with the hiccups that inevitably pop up along the way). One space that we could look at and love from head to toe without any of those nagging punch-list feelings hanging overhead. (P.S. I’m starting to think this is his nice, encouraging way of silently pleading for me to 100% finish a space before hopping to another one…)
Now that you know the background and the timeline, and get what is probably another confirmation that we’re a bit nuts around here, let’s check out what the guest bathroom looks like to start…
Before
It’s not completely 90’s anymore, however the blue and gold has been irking me for years now. YEARS.
When we moved in back in 2012, this was one of the first rooms we did and my first-ever attempt at wall moulding (which is so imperfectly wavy in spots that scream at me today). I had a vision I was going for – moody jewel tones and metallics mixed with Carrera marble and rich wood tones. A combination of almost a decade of design taste evolution, plus a blue that wasn’t quite what I had in mind, and an unfortunate case of “punchlist things” not ever fully being completed in here, I cannot wait to get in here with a proverbial sledgehammer to update it to match our current style. (On the punchlist included painting yet another coat of gold on the ceiling to hide the splotchy irregularities, and re-painting the blue to cover up the mismatching blue patches left from when we had to buy a third paint can at the end that wound up being slightly off from the other ones we’d already used to paint the whole rest of the walls.)
While an unfinished room is never something I really want to have around here, at least in most rooms you’re walking through/around … and aren’t a captive audience chained to a toilet where you have time to notice all. the. flaws. staring back at you.
While I’m ready for a complete overhaul, here are some of the particular spots that bug me the most – the blue wall irregularities, patchy ceiling, wavy bead board with visible nail heads, and a weird texture patch:
Plus some of the things that are way overdue for an update – plumbing fixtures worn from hard water, the original dated light fixture, a questionably-attractive original tub with some chips and a worn dingy finish, and a vanity with a finish is a little worse for wear:
The Plan
And now, the fun part!
The look is completely changing. The layout is not.
We’ll be keeping (but majorly refreshing) the original tub, making over the existing vanity (that we installed in 2012 when we ripped out the original ‘90s vanity), and keeping the floor tile (also done in 2012) and toilet. Everything else is going to be completely new – the shower walls, every fixture, the ceiling, the walls, the existing lighting, plus we’re adding more lighting to this dark little room. You name it, it will be new, or at least feel completely different from what’s been in there for just a few months shy of a decade.
The materials
The look we’re going for is considerably different in material and style, but in a weird way is kind of strangely similar (in theory) to what we’ve got going on now, or certainly what I was trying to achieve all those years ago. I’d like to think it will be a space perfectly suited to show how our style has changed and refined over the years, not to mention how our DIY skill and toolkit have grown.
We want something a bit moody, cozy and luxurious for guests, however made of materials that are still useable and family-friendly for any future nuggets that might ever use this space.
If you’re curious to see how it looked when we first bought our house, you can take a tour here.
So there it is – what we’re doing in our spare time for the next eight weeks. Aside from posting challenge updates every Wednesday, we’ll be sharing sneak peeks on Instagram, so make sure to follow along over there if you aren’t already. And don’t forget to check out all of the other talented One Room Challengers tackling their spaces this season.
Wish us luck!
