You know what’s not on the internet anywhere? (To my knowledge?) Photos of my guest bathroom.

For most people, that’s completely normal. But here I was thinking my guest bathroom had an “internet presence:” a few before-and-after shots and a blog post dedicated to it, at least. But I just realized I never did post about that room!

So today I sat down to write a (brilliant, thought-provoking) post about a few little tweaks we just made in that room, and realized I need to start from the beginning: with before-and-afters. The post about the tweaks we just made will come later, which means the brilliant, thought-provoking aspects will be lost forever — probably leaving in its wake overwhelming mediocrity. Sorry guys.

When we bought our house, the guest bathroom was a shade of pink I like to call “pepto bismol:”

The floor was dirty, stained linoleum…
And we never got a photo of the ballerina border across the top. It looked something like this and was a nightmare to remove:

This is what it looks like today:

We replaced the vanity, hardware, lighting… everything? The only thing we kept was the tub and surround, which was totally salvagable, though not ideal. As much as I wanted to tear it all out and tile the whole shower surround, we decided it’d be wasteful to replace it. Which means I still need to google how to rid a fiberglass tub of previous-homeowner-stains. But back to the new stuff.

We finished this room about two years ago, and it’s funny looking back how much my tastes have changed already. This room would be completely different if we redid it today.

If fact, when I post rooms we redid a while ago, I always catch myself wanting to comment on the things I still see that it needs – or the things I would do differently if I could do it again. (I’d choose a different color scheme, maybe. And definitely different art… you get the idea.) Mostly so you know that I know that this room is not perfect.

But I’m trying to learn how to be more content – seeing the room for what it is instead of what it could be. Being thankful for the clean, new toilet, and not worrying so much that I didn’t use a beautiful, elaborate mirror, for example.)

We replaced the floors with these 4-by-4 inch slate tiles that Andy installed in a running-bond pattern (like how bricks are laid – not in a perfect grid, but offset from the one below it.)

Here’s another view of the floors, which I still love years later — and that’s really saying something. You can’t really see all the different colors in these photos, but the dark slate is beautiful. So many different blues, greens, even purples and reds in the natural stone. LOVING it.

Since we’ve had so much company recently, we’ve made a few tweaks in here. I’ll show them to you in the next post, which will now be remarkably underwhelming. On a scale of terrible to brilliant, it will rank “fair-ish.”

Not really. It will change your life. It will make you want to climb upon your rooftop and shout proudly to the world: “I now know how to make small tweaks to my own bathroom and am inspired to be the change I want to see in my bathroom!”