Bathroom Remodel Day 2

I made some big progress today on the bathroom remodel.  I coated the painted counter top with a total of five coats of Polycrylic. That's probably overkill, but I figure you can never be too protected, right?  I finished the last coat at 3-something today, so by 3-something tomorrow it should be fully dried all the way through and ready for normal use.

As you can see, I began the border solution with a new border.  Ha.  I actually purchased a roll of textured wallpaper that resembles those old tin ceiling tiles and cut it in half length-wise.  I hung this where the border goes, and then I've painted it this lovely khaki color, which just so happens to be the same color as my master bathroom (there fore I already had the paint).  This part of the day took me a few hours, and it was tedious and annoying because you can't roll that stuff due to the texture.  Well, that's not true.  You can purchase fluffier paint rollers to use on textured walls I think, but I wasn't going to do that just for this one project so I painted it with a brush.  The great news is it will need a second coat.  Yay.

See the moulding leaning against the wall?  That I cut today with my fun new miter box and painted it white.  It's just a simple quarter round.  Tomorrow after the second coat of paint on the border, I will hang the quarter round along the bottom of the painted border to create a bit of a ledge (not really big enough to set anything on) to break up the space.  I just thought this would be a nice touch.  Originally I had planned to just paint a brown stripe above the moulding where the border used to be, however doing so would have meant that I would have to completely remove all of the old border (including the fuzzy backing still on the wall) and I just really didn't want to do that.  That's when I decided to go with the textured wallpaper stuff.  It's interesting enough that it doesn't look like wallpaper.

I also decided to paint the frame around the mirror black instead of dark brown because it might have been difficult to match the brown paint to the counter top exactly, and I already had black paint.  I'm going for a thrifty remodel, okay?  I decided I wanted the frame to be a little bit more substantial than it was though, so I bought a couple of strips of a fancy little decorative moulding and will be gluing it to the inside of the existing frame tomorrow after I buy glue.  Nothing that I already had would keep it in place.  It's also painted black.

I think I'm going to have to repaint the towel racks and toilet paper dispenser again.  They are that hideous ugly wooden set you can buy really cheap at Walmart or Home Depot, you know the ones?  Well I wanted to replace them but I didn't have paint to match  the wall color so that I could touch up where they used to be hanging once I replaced them.  So last week I decided to spray paint them silver because all of the fixtures and knobs in the bathroom are chrome.  That was all fine and dandy until I did the rest of this stuff, and now they don't look right.  So I think they'll get a nice new coat of black tomorrow.

If I was really going all out and replacing fixtures and the whole nine yards, I think oil-rubbed bronze would look so good in there now.  But since I'm not, I'll just have to deal with the chrome.