the Battle of the Beige continues...

House projects took a break while our little Bea was cooking [with exception of getting her nursery together, of course, and a few rooms that benefited from the week of nesting that took over me right before she arrived.  I'll blog those tiny updates soon!] But she's two months old today, and I'm itching to get back to making our house look like 'us.'  Specifically with our master bathroom.  The layout is pretty good, with the exception of a few things, but it's still very, very beige.  If you remember, every single room in this house was painted beige, so I've been waging the Battle of the Beige for almost two full years now, slowly painting over it [and in the case of the kitchen, getting the miles of ugly beige tile ripped out].  How many times can a blog have the word 'beige' in it?  I'm probably at a couple hundred by now...
Anyhoo, our bathroom is the last beige room of the house, and one of the worst offenders, which is why I'm ready to GET. TO. IT. 
Now, I'd really really love to rip out everything, get all new fixtures, a sleek vanity, and install a ton of tile in a pretty shape/color/texture, and make it new while keeping with the Mid Century Modern feel of the house.  Something like this:

found here. 

 And while you're clicking links, check out my bathroom Pin board to see lots of pretty bathroom inspirations

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BUT.  That would mean a major reno, and a lot of dough.  So it's pretty far down the list of areas to spend on, as we have a few big projects coming up, and we have 4 large sliding doors that need replaced.  Especially considering that the bathroom layout works pretty well, and its only downfall it the fact that it's very ugly.  So I'm going to do what I do best - paint it to make it prettier!

Here's what we're starting with [this is from a week after we moved in, in March 2014.  And it still pretty much looks the same - just a different rug, and I moved the laundry basket]

While trying to decide what to paint and what color, I thought maybe a nice olive green on the walls, since that's what is painted in the master bedroom [you can see a pic of it in the 'One Year' post.  Which, now that I dug back to find the link, I found a pic of the bathroom with the new rug and without the laundry basket.  Oops.]  The room gets basically no light - you have to turn on the lights at all times of the day anyway - so I'm embracing it and going dark and moody.

I fell in love with olive walls when I saw this bathroom:

[from one of my favorite blogs, Little Green Notebook - go add her to your feed now!]

So I took to Photoshop to add in the changes I know I'm going to make, and added in a muted olive wall:

I like it, but I'm pretty sure I really like the LGN olive bath because it's paired with black, white and grey.  It's so clean and pretty!  Since I'm going to keep my miles of beige tile [for now] it doesn't quite have the same effect.  

So I think I'm going to use my go-to color - grey.  In particular, a nice *slightly* warm charcoal. 

Better!

Because gifs are fun, and because it's crazy to see how little changes make such a huge difference [even making the cabinets black changed the look completely], here's a gif!

After watching the gif over and over [I can't get enough, haha] I think I maybe don't want big statement art in color.  Maybe black and white?  [most likely a photo, since I have a lot of those already, and as much as I'd love to paint something, there's just no time.  I can barely just keep the house at a passable level of cleanliness while making sure we all eat.  Ordering a print is very doable.]

So I made the quickly-and-crappily-rendered art black and white:

And I think that's it!  

It's not clean-lined or MCM by any means, but it's not beige.  I won't cringe every time I go in there, and we can put off the $10k reno for a few years.  Pretty soon I'll set to work on painting! [and I'm oddly excited]  I think I'll have $100 in the paint and hardware for the cabinets - not too shabby!  I'll decide on something for the light fixture [but I'll probably just paint that too, because I pretty much hate all fixtures of this type, and I'm not going to spend any money on something that I still don't like] and when it's all finished I'll blog the reveal and how much [or, actually, how little] I spent!