Forget the Clorox, Get the Sledgehammer!

To say our bathrooms are outdated, is a serious understatement. When my brother in law first saw this bathroom his exact words were - forget the clorox, get the sledgehammer. This bathroom is straight out of the 50's, white tile with a blue tile border - tile, tile and more tile! Which to me means - scrubbing, scrubbing and more scrubbing! Judging by the condition of the tile when we started I'll assume it hadn't been cleaned in quite some time. The bathroom also has a really odd layout...as you can see from  some of the pictures.

The before...

Remind anyone of a dorm shower?

The plan was to take the bathroom down to the studs, change the layout of the bathroom, and completely update the bathroom. Well, some of our New Orleans friends convinced us to give the vintage look of the bathroom a chance. I caved and said we'd give the bathroom a facelift and then if I still hated the bathroom we would demo it. So the scrubbing commenced, we used a combination of comet, bar keepers friend (this stuff it awesome, cleans and polishes everything!!) and very abrasive sponges.

Bar Keepers Friend removed these paint and rust stains, this stuff is seriously awesome.

I'll be honest, I was dreading the scrubbing this bathroom. So much so that I was willing to demo the bathroom before cleaning it, crazy right? Well I was pleasantly surprised when it only took a a few hours. I had my doubts but once we were done scrubbing the tile the bathroom looked SO much better. Pictures really don't do it justice, I swear!  

So shinny and clean!

With the tile nice and clean we decided to tone down the color of the bathroom by just painting the walls white. The verdict is still out on if the walls will stay white or if we'll paint them a very pale blue or like a blue frost color. 

This is how you spend your Friday night's when you're doing home renovations...

And here are the white walls. So much better, right?

With clean tile and newly painted walls it was finally time to accessorize! We originally wanted to go with a seersucker theme for the bathroom but we couldn't really find a seer sucker shower curtain we liked (and that was affordable!) We finally ended up at pottery barn kids torn between a Very Hungry Caterpillar shower curtain or a blue patchwork shower curtain. I REALLY wanted the Very Hungry Caterpillar one but when the woman asked me how old my kids were I decided maybe I needed to go with the less child-like shower curtain. 

We still have some pictures to hang up but it really is amazing what a little elbow grease and paint can do!

The after...