World's smallest bathroom (well, it's at least in the running...)

Before the woman who briefly lived here before us, a couple owned this house since the 60s. Our realtor told us how, as they got older, they no longer wanted to have to go downstairs (especially in the middle of the night) to use the restroom. So, they had a toilet added into the closet that sits above the full bathroom. That was the extent of this "bathroom:" simply a toilet in the closet, and a bare light bulb on the ceiling. No sink, no toilet paper holder, nothing. There's not even really any room to turn around.

Here it is:

I think the last owner didn't really know what to do with the room, either. She never added anything to it and might not have even used it. When we went and looked at the house, we were even asked, "What did you think of that weird toilet in the closet?"

When Andrew and I talked seriously about putting in an offer on the house, I asked him what we should do about that closet. Should we pull out the toilet and have the sewer line capped? He thought that would be silly, especially since we have little kids who might need to go potty in the middle of the night. He made sense, so I started brainstorming ideas for the water closet. I decided I didn't want the room to be an apology. "Yeah, we have a toilet in the closet. Weird, right?"

So, I decided to own it! Plus, with tiny spaces, you can do things you'd never even consider doing in a standard-sized room. I decided to try wall paper for the first time. I decided to hang pictures. I decided to add a mirror (a basic one that I brought up from the main bathroom downstairs. That room is a whole other story for another time). We got a towel ring and a toilet paper holder. Here is the finished bathroom:

Because of where the sewer line was, there was a big gap left behind the toilet. By big, I mean 10-11 inches!

So, I filled it will a shelf! I looked everywhere and finally found a floating shelf on Target.com that fit the dimensions of the space almost perfectly.

See something different in that picture? Yes indeed, I found a toilet tank sink! It is actually the coolest thing I've ever seen. I got it online from SinkPositive, and it's an eco-friendly sink. Instead of going into the toilet tank when you flush, the clean water from the line first goes through the faucet. You wash your hands with that clean water, and the used "gray water" then fills the toilet tank. So, the water automatically flows as soon as you flush the toilet. I took a video of it because I think it's so neat. At the time of the video, the bathroom wasn't yet completed.

                       

Finally, we replaced the bare bulb with a simple pull-chain light with a cover. We also swapped the bulb to a CFL so no tall people would burn their head stepping into our bathroom closet. Powder room. Water closet. WC. I don't know what to call this room.

One final look:

The room is simple, obviously. But I just think it now looks like a bathroom instead of a weird toilet in a closet. And that makes me happy :) I now consider our house to officially be a 1.5 bath!

Home Improvement: Living Room

Here is our finished living room.

Almost everything in this room has been replaced since we moved in nearly four years ago. The front door was really old and rotten, and parts were held together with packing tape! We replaced it a couple of years ago, a generous gift from Andrew's parents. I painted the room a natural green color called "Witch Hazel." We pulled out all of the old, icky carpeting from this room, and Andrew and my parents replaced it with laminate wood flooring. The floor was a housewarming gift from my parents, so we really lucked out in some of these expenses. My mom helped me install new baseboards to replace the old, fake-wood ones. We hung new curtains, and I bought a new floor lamp from IKEA.

Here's a before and after photo that shows the old room color, old door, and old carpet.

Planter Gardening

Our HOA replaced our front lawn with a xeriscape. Because the climate is so dry in Colorado, it's impossible to maintain a lush lawn without daily watering. Many people have replaced their front lawns with xeriscaping, which is basically done with decorative patterns of rocks and drought-resistant shrubs and plants. Xeriscaping always looks very naked when it's first placed, but, when it grows in, it can be quite beautiful. It takes time to get used to it, but people are starting to appreciate it more because it's so much better for our state and our scarce water resources. You can see some examples of xeriscapes here.

Well, ours is so new that the plants haven't fully grown in yet, and it looks bare. I added a few planters of flowers and borrowed a bench from my mother-in-law to help fill the space. I filled my oak barrel planter with petunias and snapdragons, and then I bought an already-filled planter from the Home Depot to fill the corner by our stoop. It makes a big difference, and hopefully it will be more appealing to potential buyers! This is their first impression of our home, after all.

Here's my little garden helper:

Home Improvement: Stairwell

Andrew's an outdoorsy kind of person, and we like having a little "nature" in the house. You can't really see the detail very well, but the glass in our new light has a light leaf design in it.

We also chose this wall sconce from Lowe's with the leaf design.

Here's the finished stairwell! All of the changes we did included replacing the outlets and outlet covers from brass to white, painting the walls, putting on new handrails, putting in new flooring (including the carpet), adding new trim, scraping off the popcorn ceilings, and updating the light fixtures.

New Carpet!

We finally, finally got new carpet yesterday! When we moved into our house, there was a powder blue carpet that wound from the entry way, through the living room, up the stairs, and into both bedrooms. It was a outdated, but that wasn't the big problem. It had a faint smell of dog pee (better than cat pee!). It also had numerous stains and large bleach stains in places.

We removed it entirely from the downstairs when we put in our laminate wood floors. Of course, it had to be replaced everywhere else, but we kept putting it off. What's the point in getting new carpet when we were about to have a baby? Babies spit up and poop everywhere! So we waited. And waited.

I cleaned the carpet a number of times with a carpet cleaner. It helped with the smell, but, on rainy days, you could get a whiff in the air. It was so unsightly that we almost never had anyone go upstairs.

Now that we're planning on putting our home on the market, we couldn't put it off any more. Carpet was more expensive than we'd thought, but it had to be done. We went with the second estimate (Carpet Exchange). They did a really good job with the install, and I love the new carpet. I only wish we'd done it a little sooner so we could have lived in the house long enough to get some use out of it!

Here's a photo of our room looking very spiffy with the new carpeting. There's something else new in our bedroom, too. My friends Aminta and Olivia went with me to Whimsy Paint & Sip yesterday with some vouchers from Living Social. We had a blast, and I got a new piece of artwork for the house!

My painting:

Kitchen Updates

Here are our before and after photos of the kitchen. Some of the improvements were made a while ago, but the lighting in the kitchen is brand new.

Blog Absence (Plus Dining Room Photos)

Andrew and I have been working nonstop all week. The kids have been mostly entertaining themselves, and we've eaten take-out more than we ever have since having kids. I'm sure the kids now hate home improvement projects. We're meeting with our real estate agent on Saturday, so our workload won't slow down until then. My blog entries will be pretty sparse (and mostly about home improvement) for a little while longer.

Here are some updated dining room photos that show off our hard work. We started scraping off the popcorn ceiling last Saturday. Popcorn ceilings can have asbestos, so be sure to get your ceiling tested before tackling a project like that. Plus, it's a huge mess. Dust is still settling in our home.

Early in the week, we did patching and repairs to the ceiling. Andrew's friend came over to help us finish spackling and priming. We textured the ceiling, painted it, and then repainted the walls near the ceiling. My dad is an electrician and came over to hook up our fan and other new lighting.

We used to have a sliding back door and replaced them with French doors a few months after we moved in. The door was busted, and we were trying to install a new handle to fix it when the glass shattered. This is the only photo I have of the old flooring, old floor grates, and old back door. The flooring wasn't installed well. There were large gaps in between the boards, and it was laid over the existing flooring. There's my late, great dog, Bailey. I miss that old girl!

When we got the French doors installed, I thought they were pre-primed and painted them. After a few months, the paint started peeling. Last week, I finally got around to removing all the paint, priming them, and repainting them. Like I said, we've been busy!

Home Improvement: The Kitchen Sink

Have you all seen the pin on Pinterest to put peel-and-stick tiles in your kitchen sink cabinet? It looked like a super cheap and easy home improvement idea, so I pinned it and finally got around to doing it one night last week.

The project cost under $15, and it took me about 2 hours from start to finish.

Here's the "before" photo. Yuck, huh?!

And here are the after photos:

I feel like I got a lot of bang for my buck! The only problem I encountered with the project was the tiles I ordered had arrows on the backing paper. I made sure all of the arrows pointed in the same direction. I realized when I was halfway through the project that the arrows didn't point in the same direction on all the tiles, so some are upside down. It kind of made me mad, but then I decided it doesn't matter that much, and it definitely looks very much improved!

I realized I never posted about my cabinets, either. A couple Christmases ago, Andrew's uncle gave me a gift card to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I ordered a bunch of cabinet pulls because our cabinets looked very outdated. I took off all of the cabinet pulls, cleaned the cabinets, polished them with wood polish, and then screwed in the new handles. The project would have cost about $100, but it only cost me the wood polish!

Here are the before and after shots of the cabinets:

Close-up:

I really love it when simple changes make a big difference.

Our New Toilet

The top photo is our new toilet, and the bottom is the old one.

Andrew and I have a new toilet! Haha, it's funny what's all exciting when you're a home owner. Really, though, it's quite the improvement. The last toilet ran all the time, used gallons of water to flush, and was really (really) gross. I don't think the last owners were fans of cleaning their toilets, to be honest.

We removed the last toilet, and the last floor, and the last baseboards, and the last sink & cabinet. We also removed the toilet paper holder because it was crazy-crooked.

Since then, we've gotten the new floors in; we put in the new, thicker baseboards; and, today, my dad installed our new toilet. It's so exciting! Once we get the piece we need, we'll put in the sink, add the mirror and towel ring, hang a few photos, and call it good!

New Floors!

The flooring is offically done in the dining room, kitchen and living room! Once we get our bathroom pipes moved on Tuesday, we'll finish the flooring in there, too. It looks so much nicer in here, and it feels great to be rid of all the stinky (literally) blue carpet.

Tearing out the Flooring

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Ah, fun with home ownership. My parents want to get Andrew and I new flooring as our housewarming gift. Unfortuantely, as it works, before the new stuff comes in, the old stuff must come out.

The kitchen and bathroom floors were raised about two inches higher than the rest of the downstairs flooring. We knew, of course, that this meant previous owners had failed to remove the layers of old flooring before adding on their new choices. So it came down to Andrew and me to remove the layers (and layers) of Pergo, linoleum and sub-flooring.

OK, so Andrew did most of the work. I scrubbed down the kitchen appliances as they were moved, though, and that was pretty much the nastiest task ever.

At this point, half the kitchen is down to its subfloor, and the other half has one more layer of linoleum left. Thankfully, it doesn't appear to be glued down. Point one for us. On the other hand, it's held down by approximately 2.3 million staples. It appears someone had a little too much fun with their staple gun...