Bathroom Update

We’ve been work­ing for the past cou­ple of months to update the bath­rooms in our house. We start­ed with the sim­plest update: replac­ing a pedestal sink with a small IKEA cab­i­net. We also repaint­ed, updat­ed the light­ing, and hung new art & a mirror.

First of all: we’re real­ly bad at tak­ing “before” pho­tos for some rea­son and it’s not like we had a lot of ran­dom pho­tos of our bath­rooms, any­way. So there’s not much to show for that. This bath­room nev­er had any stor­age and our pre­vi­ous clunky attempts at adding some nev­er real­ly solved that issue. So, the main update was to remove the builder-grade pedestal sink and to replace this with a cabinet. 

We got a small cab­i­net with two draw­ers along with sink & faucet from IKEA. Their Hemnes cab­i­nets have full-depth draw­ers. This is accom­plished by a very shal­low sink and a drain that has a cou­ple of hard 90° bends to go behind the draw­ers. Also, this requires that the shut-off val­ues and drain con­nec­tion extend less than 4″ from the wall. For­tu­nate­ly, we did­n’t have to make any changes to the plumb­ing con­nec­tions for this to fit. We did shift the cen­ter of the sink away from the wall, so as to not crowd the cab­i­net into the cor­ner. This gives it more of a “fur­ni­ture” look, which was the aes­thet­ic we were shoot­ing for (with the Euro-style open base and all). One piece of advice if you choose to do this: give your­self a few inch­es to paint the wall beside the cab­i­net. Oth­er­wise, you’ll have to call on your skin­ny-armed child to come do that and they might not be the best paint­ing labor.

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The light­ing also need­ed to move over to be cen­tered on the new­ly placed sink. The wall box for the light­ing was attached to a stud which was right where I need to place the light. So we opt­ed for a light with a larg­er wall cov­er­ing. I sim­ply cut a new hole in the mount­ing plate and wired through that. 

The mir­ror was one we had pre­vi­ous­ly used in anoth­er bath­room but would match the white on gray col­or scheme here. My daugh­ter paint­ed a scene from the movie Spir­it­ed Away and I decid­ed to make a frame for it. I got some poplar 1x2 from the big box hard­ware store. Poplar is a fair­ly fast grow­ing and there­fore cheap hard­wood and would be a lost cost, low risk way to prac­tice mak­ing a frame. I used a “float­ing” frame tech­nique by cut­ting a rab­bet along the inside, which gives the paint­ing the appear­ance of float­ing (well, a bit of a shad­ow line any­way). I also got a frame band clamp to help keep the frame togeth­er. I had to build in an inter­nal frame of scrap ply­wood pieces, as the pain­ing was­n’t on a can­vas but rather a board. I use what­ev­er white rat­tle can spray paints I had to cov­er the frame, which did­n’t turn out so well. But the frame was most­ly square with tight miter joints!

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We paint­ing the bath­room a nice gray (which we’ve now used in all our bath­rooms). The whole room feels much larg­er, even with the cab­i­net as there is no longer a tow­er of cub­bies for awk­ward stor­age next to the toi­let. And those draw­ers hold even more!