Home Tour: Powder Room.

Yikes.  It's been a while (thanks for your frequent reminders, mom and Ellen).  But let's ignore that and focus instead on the fact that I am finally getting around to showing you our powder room.  Who doesn't love a good before and after?

Basically, the before was a massive snooze-fest.  Complete with a bad brass and chrome faucet, a claw-like light fixture, pale yellow walls, two toilet paper holders (why?), and a toilet and sink that were undersized.  Needless to say, this room didn't do anything for us and needed some major help.   

     

And here's the after!  Bye bye snooze fest, hello gorgeous (if I do say so myself). 

Absolutely nothing from the old powder room stayed.  I'm all for re-using what we could, but in here, there was nothing worth even working with.  I knew right off the bat I wanted to do some bold wallpaper in this room.  If you can't be bold in the powder room, where can you?    

And for some detail shots . . .

My mom bought this vintage mirror and it was exactly what I was looking for.  She was sweet enough to let me have it for the space.  I love the detailing on the frame and the contrast the dark frame provides in the space. 

The light fixture proved to be more difficult than I thought it should have been.  Probably because I kept envisioning sconces in the space (that wouldn't fit) or a chandelier (which would require us to re-wire).  I also wanted to add a touch of brass in this room via the light, but wanted to keep it simple.  At the end of the day (and lots of searching), this fixture fit the bill. 

I struggled with what to put on the walls for two reasons:  (1) I didn't want anything to compete with the wallpaper; and (2) I was scared to put a hole in the beautiful paper.  I'm happy with my choice to go with simple black frame (that works with the mirror), which has a large white mat to provide some separation between the picture and the wallpaper (and only required 1 tiny hole).  Win, win, win!  The picture itself is one we took of a street in Paris right by one of the hotels we stayed in.    

As a bonus, here's a before shot of the hall that leads to the laundry room and garage with the powder room off of it (the door on the right). 

And here's the after.   You can't tell from the photos, but the wood floor and the handrail were all stained a darker, richer color.  And we replace the ceramic tile in the powder room with some fun black and white mosaic tile.  We still need to paint the laundry room, but that's a subject for a different post.

Oh!  And we added the chandelier in the hallway.  I mean, why not?  Since we didn't want to redo the electrical to put it in the powder room, we did the next best thing . . . we put it right outside the door.  It's actually perfect there.  I love the way it totally glams up the hallway.  Some things just work out.  (In case anyone's curious, the wall color is Benjamin Moore Silver Chain.)

If it's something that would be helpful, I will do a post with the sources.  So what do you think?  Much better, right?