Yesterday, I shared my new plan for our future new kitchen. It’s a pretty drastic change of plans, but the more I think about it, the more excited I get about it. If you missed that, you can read about it here. The new plan seems so much more manageable than the previous larger, grander plan.
But one of the best things about this new plan is that it means I will keep the studio half bathroom. With the previous plan, this room had been slated for demolition in the future. When that decision was made, I closed the door on this room (literally) and never looked back. The door on this room has been closed and the room forgotten for well over a year now. In fact, I just looked back on the blog, and I can’t see where I’ve posted anything about the bathroom after November 2023. That’s pushing two years.
I know some of you might be wondering why I’d close the door and not look back on a half bathroom. After all, even a half bathroom that isn’t fully decorated and finished can be useful, right? Well, no. This bathroom requires a pump for the toilet and sink, and that pump stopped working long ago. And since this bathroom was on the chopping block, and I had planned to turn it into a walk-through pantry from the future new kitchen to the back doors of the studio that lead to the carport, I had no intention of spending the money required to repair or replace the pump. So I closed the door to the room and planned to never go back until I was ready to get started on the new kitchen and walk-through pantry.
So yesterday, for the first time in at least 18 months, I decided to open the door and see exactly how I had left it. It wasn’t quite as bad as I had remembered it, but it’s not great, either.
But after a while, I grew tired of the walls. And when I started working on my studio in 2023, I decided that the bathroom needed a makeover as well. That’s when I started taking off the wall tile and coming up with a new plan for the walls.
And this is as far as I got before I decided to go a different direction with the function of this room altogether.
But now, the plan is to keep the function of the room the same and finish it. And I have to say, I’m kind of relieved about that. I really liked having a working, usable bathroom on this side of the house.
The room is a mess, and it’s been forgotten so long that there are cobwebs in here. But I don’t think it would take long at all to finish it. The hardest parts — the crown molding, door trim, window trim, wainscoting, and vanity — are all already in place.
So at this point, I’m looking at a very basic makeover, not a remodel.
Obviously, the first order of business has to be getting this pump fixed or replaced. Without a working pump, this bathroom isn’t functional at all.
And then I can finish up with the walls and few decorative touches. I think it will be a relative quick project as soon as I get a plan in place.
When I started working on the studio, I had a plan to keep this bathroom really colorful and fun in keeping with the colors in the studio. I even designed a wallpaper for the walls.
But with the new plan, I don’t think I’ll be using this wallpaper anymore. The new plan is to make this bathroom the official guest bathroom. That will allow me to completely finish the bedroom suite, including turning the hallway bathroom into a much-needed storage room for Matt’s equipment. And it will allow us to get a new hot water heater which will go in that storage closet as well. The hot water heater is the last remaining fixed item in the sunroom that is preventing us from tearing down the sunroom.
So with this bathroom turning into our official guest bathroom (and the only guest bathroom we’ll have for a long while), I don’t really want it to be a crazy, psychedelic, seizure-inducing room. As long as we had that hallway bathroom available for guests, I was pretty much the only person who ever used this half bathroom. So I could make it as crazy and colorful as I wanted to. But now that it will have a larger “audience”, I want it to be a more generally pleasing room that isn’t covered in crazy color.
Don’t get me wrong. There will be color. And, after all, it is still located inside my studio, which is a colorful feast for the eyes. Lest you forget…
So guests will have to walk through this to get to the bathroom. But I’m okay with that. This room, more than any other in our house, is my color-loving personality in room form.
And everyone who has seen my studio in person has been very complimentary about it. Even if they wouldn’t want it in their own homes, people seem to enjoy looking at it in our house.
And I’m pleased to report that so far, my studio hasn’t induced a seizure in one single guest. So that’s good. I think people can handle walking through my studio to get to a bathroom.
But I would like to come up with a calmer and more generally pleasing plan for the bathroom. I could even carry the green from the back entry walls onto the top portions of the bathroom walls.
Green is a generally pleasing color. It would give me color, and obviously, it’s a color I like since I chose it for the walls of the back entry. I already know that it works well with the studio. And it would be relatively quick and easy to do some drywall repair, paint the walls, add some decorative touches, and be done with it.
So right now, the plan of action is this. I’m going to finish up the foyer and bedroom. Those areas are priority #1 right now. (I’m still working on the walls in the foyer.) As soon as those two areas are done, I’m going to finish this studio half bathroom. When it’s finished, I’m going to go back and turn the hallway bathroom into a storage closet so that I can get our bedroom suite completely finished with no projects left undone. And then, once the bedroom suite is 100% finished, I’ll start on my workshop.
It’s a slight change of plan from before, but not too big. And this way, we’ll have a completely finished bedroom suite with no awkward “middle stage” of having a guest bathroom inside our master bedroom suite. I’m very excited about the idea of it being completely finished with no awkward in between stages, and no projects left hanging over my head that I have to go back and address at some point in the future.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
