The Reveal: My Master Bathroom is Finally Finished!

So. Last time we talked about my master bathroom, I was feeling just a teensy bit emotional. We had just gotten new tile installed, which I expected to love. But it felt like a total FAIL to me because I hadn’t realized that the black grout we chose would line the edges of the room. And that it would look an awful lot like black mold…

Here’s a snapshot I took of it at the time from the bedroom, and you can see it didn’t look too bad from a safe distance:

But if you looked more closely, you could see that in the process of laying the tile, the black grout had stained the woodwork pretty badly and left a nasty black edge around everything:

I got lots of great advice from you guys about what to do about it.

Most of you suggested that all we needed to do was install quarter-round along the baseboards to cover it up. We got some trim that was a little smaller size than that for $20 bucks, and it only took a couple of hours for us to put it down. It turned out to be an easy and effective fix. Hooray!

Here’s how one corner of the room looked with the black grout lines before:

My neat-freakiness couldn’t handle that “dirty” look in my bathroom. Here’s how it looks now with the edges cleaned up:

When I stepped back and saw the difference it made, I heard angels singing. Ahhhh!

We touched up the baseboard paint while we were at it, which had gotten kind of beat up by all the grout-slinging, and went around the door frames (where there couldn’t be trim) with white silicone.

Let me just back up a bit and show you where this bathroom started. It’s come a long way. Here’s an overhead shot I took of it from a ladder when we started painting it. The wall color was originally something pretty bland, called “Camel.”

And, as you can see, we had old carpet in the vanity area and vinyl in the water closet. It wasn’t pretty.

After we painted our bedroom a teal-blue color called “Ocean Voyage” earlier this year, we had to bring the color into the bathroom because the two rooms are vaulted and open into each other. That’s the first thing we did:

We tried to get that giant plate-glass mirror off the wall, but it wasn’t budging. So we did the next-best thing and framed it with moldings. But it wasn’t easy.

My husband Dave has worked a lot with crown molding and trim, but this turned out to be a new kind of challenge for him. Why? Because you have to glue it to the mirror. You can’t just nail it into place. And the trim was a little warped after sitting in the garage overnight to dry (after we painted it). That normally wouldn’t matter, but look at the (frankly ridiculous) lengths we had to go to to hold it in place until the glue dried:

When it came time to hang the top piece, we were stumped because there would be nothing to hold it up there overnight. Then Dave had the idea to wedge a ladder into it–and it worked!

The mirror looks a little less “naked” now:

We also trimmed out the window (which was a much easier job!) and painted the bench black. Here’s that corner of the bathroom before:

And after:

I just hung window treatments I found on sale at Pottery Barn (Elena Palampore Linen Sheer Drapes–don’t you love the fancy names they give them?). From the bathroom you can see the heavier lined Alessandra drapes in our master bedroom, so they had to kind of coordinate.

In case you missed my earlier post about it, the tile I chose was a design that reminded me of something you’d find in an old house like the one I grew up in. It’s called Sausalito.

Our laundry closet is directly to the right behind double doors. There was supposed to be a giant tub there, but I knew I’d rather have my washer and dryer in my bathroom so I would never have to haul baskets of clothes downstairs and through the kitchen. I’m lazy like that.

We put a tub in the water closet instead. That freed up the laundry room off the garage to be a dedicated mudroom, which I honestly don’t know what I’d do without.

In this next photo you can see how the bathroom is open to the bedroom. I don’t know who started that trend, but this is the second house we’ve lived in that had this set-up and I HATE it.

We added the double doors between the bedroom and bathroom, at least. Otherwise it would have been completely open.

Those mirrored doors lead to our walk-in closet, and the laundry is on the left. It’s a pretty efficient set-up. I pull clothes right out of the dryer and hang them up in the closet.

So there you have it–my pretty-much-finished master bathroom. I’m still tinkering with some of it. Since I took these photos I hung some hammered-brass sconces and a few other things.

I feel like our master bedroom and bath makeover took up most of my decorating energy (and budget) for 2012. Now I’m trying to decide what to focus on in 2013. Lots of rooms need new flooring, including our bedroom. I think our finished basement will get some attention, and I’m itching to redecorate my family room. Do you have any “house goals” for the new year?

P.S. I used the same tile but with white grout in my daughter’s bathroom:

 And you can see the post about my bedroom makeover here:

My Boring Bedroom Gets a Wake-Up Call

(Visit my new “My House” page to see more!)

Tagged as: American Olean Sausalito tile, bathroom design, bathroom makeover, before and after, Decorating, how to frame a mirror, Pottery Barn curtains, teal blue bathroom, trimming a window with molding, Valspar Ocean Voyage