Author: Donna Altomonte
Since the purchase of our home six years ago the housing market has been booming in Toronto. The sight of a big garbage dumpster barely able to fit on the tiniest of front lawns always peeked our curiosity. What was the new home owner going to do to transform their 90 year old home? Everyone was renovating and spending a lot of money. Today we're all facing some tough times and all those renovation projects are sitting on the back burner - so rather than renovating perhaps you should consider a quick and inexpensive lift to update a room. The bathroom is an easy room to transform until you're ready to rip out some walls.
When we bought our house the woman who owned the house proudly stated "I just updated the bathroom, it's new." She was 90 and clearly lost all track of time because what she considered new, was new...in the 70's. So needless to say we inherited a retro bathroom. Because we had to renovate the entire main floor of our house our budget did not allow us to renovate the bathroom as well so we decided we would give our bathroom a temporary face liftfor the time being.
For approximately $500 we were able to transform our bathroom from Retro to well, let's just say it's less retro. We still have the yellow tub and the avocado tiles so that qualifies as retro but we were able to update many of the other features which really made a difference.
The easiest thing we did was to paint over the wallpaper. Ideally we should have removed the old wall paper first but because this was supposed to be a temporary face lift we felt it wasn't necessary to spend time doing that. We primed the walls and then painted them in a soft cream colour to make the room appear brighter. The original vanity was an orange and green swirl pattern laminate with a gold sink. We bought special paint (we chose a silver colour) to cover the laminate counter top and replaced the gold sink and gold toilet with a white sink and toilet, which will eventually be moved to the basement bathroom. The vaniety cabinets were originally an offensive dark brown colour so we primed and then painted it in a light cream colour, added new silver hardware and then embellished it with a small decorative medallion. For the floor we simply bought inexpensive vinyl peel and stick floor tiles and stuck them right over the existing floor. I bought a few new accessories and for the artwork I bought a silver frame from Ikea and used it for photos I had taken of my parent's home town in Italy. It wasn't the luxurious bathroom I was dreaming of but it was certainly a lot more liveable than it was before.
Six years later we still have not renovated our bathroom so our $500 went a long way. So if you're in need of a bathroom renovation, a temporary fix or in our case a long term fix, just may be the answer.
Check out my blog to see photos of the before and after images.
About the Author:
Donna is the founder of City Home and Garden http://www.cityhomeandgarden.com, an on line store featuring custom crafted home decor products, many of which are made by American and Canadian Artisans.
In addition to selling beautiful home decor products, City Home and Garden offers a blog and a monthly newsletter with helpful decorating tips as well as offering discounts only available to newsletter subscribers, http://www.cityhomeandgarden.com/i11/REGISTER-AND-WIN/information.html
