Guest Bath Redux: Pay it Forward

Yesterday I gave an update on our guest bath purchases, and today I spent the morning taking inventory of all of our purchases in the storage closet guest bedroom and listing anything we won’t be using on eBay. We have been fortunate to score some pretty great deals thus far in our remodel, so it only seemed fair to sell what we have decided not to use. Hopefully we can help someone else out with there own updates or remodel.

some of what we scored: tub & shower handles from eBay  (shown with shower diverter escutcheon from Period Bath)

So, in case anyone is interested- up for sale are:

A Delta Victorian faucet spout (we were planning to pair it with the metal cross handles purchased from ReStore in this post but changed our minds). Spout and seals only, does not include valves or handles. $15

A vintage porcelain shower diverter escutcheon (not needed, since we splurged on one from Period Bath). Period Bath actually has the same escutcheon selling for $75, and I’d bet this one would look just just as good after a short soak in boiling water. $20

Look familiar to anyone? If you answered “hey, isn’t that the programmable thermostat you just bought?” you would be correct! Funny thing, that eBay. Apparently some sellers do not feel the need to be specific about which model of the Honeywell Vision Pro 8000 series they are selling and they don’t accept returns. And some buyers are Buy-It-Now happy when seeing a thermostat for $50 less than retail price. True story.

Anyway, this is the TH8110OU1003 model. Otherwise known as a 1 Heat, 1 Cool model for Conventional and Heat Pump systems, so long as they don’t have auxiliary heat from heat strips. Our house has heat strips, rendering this useless to me. $90 (or willing to trade anyone with a TH8320 or RTH8500 model they don’t want).

I also may be willing to sell these two light fixtures:

former guest bath fixture, as seen at the top of this post

bought for the guest bath but may be too small in relation to mirror

So there you have it. We’re definitely not trying to pressure y’all into buying anything, most of this is already listed on eBay, but I figured I’d mention it here in case anyone is interested. (And if anyone is interested, feel free to comment here or email me at thehernandohouse@gmail.com for more information.) We’re not looking to get rich off of any of these items, just recoup what we spent on them. Anything that doesn’t sell will be donated to our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore.

Colorful Additions and a Paint Question

Complete cop out on post titles tonight. I’ll try harder next time.

Just a short post to show you the new pictures of the Art Room that I didn’t have with me when I posted earlier.

This yellow chair was picked out of the neighbors’ trash one rainy evening about a year ago. After a coat of $4 spray paint later it’s looking quite cheery.

We found this vintage pulldown map on eBay. It’s about 68×70 inches, and with shipping and the french cleats we bought to hang it the total came to about $90.

have I ever mentioned that the clock is from my childhood bedroom? it hung over the closet there, too

I forgot to mention earlier that we’re planning to change up the desk surface in the Closet Office. We were going to use a Lagan Countertop from Ikea, but the cost to drive to the closest Ikea plus that of the counter itself comes to about $100, and that’s just not feasible right now. Fortunately we have quite a few more of the 50 cent Ikea L-brackets we used for the current desk surface, so we are plotting cheaper options for a new. longer desk.

Otherwise, the only real plan we have is to paint the closet before installing the new desk. We have about half a gallon of the same color we painted the hallway (Valspar’s Churchill Hotel Hazy Yellow), and most of a gallon of mossy-green Oops paint. Other ideas we have kicked around are terracotta red, navy, gray. The conservative (and cheap) side of me says to use the paint from the hallway, especially with all the other bold things in the room. The impromptu poll I conducted on Twitter voted navy, but I don’t know how that would look with the blue walls everywhere else in the room. There are 10 paint chips over the monitor on the right at the moment, and I can’t pick.

Anyone have any ideas about closet colors? Desk options? I’m tempted to just go the cheap route and use the hallway color and construct a desk from all the scrap wood we have hanging around.

PS- I still owe you an updated design board, but Robert should be home from class soon. Maybe I’ll have knock-off Emeco chair pictures and a design board tomorrow.

The Room With All the Art

Wow, thanks for all the sweet comments on the last post! I guess I may have to talk about our budget more often!

I’ve had a quirky, not-everyone-will-get-it style for most of my life, possibly even before the days of reading my sister’s cast-off Seventeen magazines (the “My Room” section was always my favorite). Of course, in those days I mostly daydreamed about what my room would look like and focused on expressing my quirky side with fashion. (I use that term loosely; it involved thrift store tshirts and a lot of pining for a leather biker jacket. If I had remembered to put a zipper in my Target bag dress I’d probably have worn that, too.)

These days I’m a little more West Elm than Spencer’s Gifts or Pottery Barn Kids, and I no longer want to paint clouds on my ceiling, but the soft spot for rustic & quirky mixed with bright colors remains. I’m beginning to realize that our style is probably best described as eBay Chic, or Rustic & Repurposed. I know it’s en vogue now to decorate in what people call the “collected” look, but around our house we just call it “buy what you love” and/or “make it work”.

I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but I feel like certain rooms in our house embody our style better than others. The rooms that feel the most “us” are probably the Art Room, the Library and the back porch (or at least what the back porch will one day become). Others are a constant struggle, like the living room and dining room.

those green chairs are so gone, and we added a little something-something to the wall

desperately in need of paint, a new chair, desk surface, and maybe a new curtain

The Art Room is very, very slowly shaping up. I didn’t really touch on it in this post, but it pains me to work on this room sometimes, since I don’t get to actually use it as my office every day. In spite of that, I’m trying to make it a space that makes me happy, both because I spend a lot of time in it (granted, usually with my head in the Closet Office blogging) and because it’s visible when you walk down the hallway.

I am drawn to a variety of styles, and sometimes it takes me a while to figure how the best way to mesh everything together. Fortunately with the advent of Pinterest the direction of the room seems to have gotten clearer (or maybe I’m just more confident in that fact that my ideas are not completely wacky).  I am still smitten with Sara’s art room, but I also pinned a bunch of fun, colorful, slightly rustic rooms on my Art Room Inspiration board.

A while back we found this chair in a neighbor’s trash and painted it yellow. Since then I had Robert spray paint it a brighter, more golden yellow (that coincidentally matches our curtains perfectly, though I didn’t even have the fabric when we picked the paint). I know that I could have spent a lot of time sanding it down, staining it, and giving it a nice glossy coat of poly, it would have had a very nice Chilton Academy-esque look to it, but it was destined to replace another curbside chair in front of the rolltop and I thought that would have been too much wood.

For the Ikea Jonas desk we are working on a chair that is very similar to the Emeco Navy Chair With Wood Seat, which we were lucky enough to get from my dad’s garage a while back. The Closet Office will get another chair we found in the neighbor’s trash, which we hope will look like this Pottery Barn chair when we are done with it (though we may not stain ours quite that dark).

from Flickr; pinned here

Ironically, the walls in the Art Room are almost completely bare (aside from the shelves we added a while back). Fortunately browsing Pinterest often reminds me of things I’ve wanted for years but then chalked up as never-gonna-happen and tried to forget about. Most recent example: pulldown maps. I have wanted one of these maps pretty much ever since watching Sleepless in Seattle. (“Look, one, two, three, four, there’s like twenty-six states between here and there.”) After seeing the above (and several others) I decided I finally needed to make it happen, so we ended up buying one on eBay (similar to the US map here).

seen on Design*Sponge; pinned here

Also, after seeing a lot of fantastic linen and burlap pinboards I remembered seeing a pinboard made with a coffee bag a while back. Fortunately Google came to my rescue, and a few minutes later I had found the Design*Sponge post I was thinking of, and also ordered a coffee bag of my very own from Etsy.

I should have an updated design board, pictures of the pulldown map, yellow chair and maybe the Emeco-lookalike for you tonight, as Robert will be in class late.

 Anyone else drawn to several different decorating styles? Or want to paint something like clouds in your childhood bedroom?

Guest Bath Redux: Budget Tracking

After planning out what we want to do in the guest bath, I went to ReStore on Saturday to see what they had in the way of tile (sadly no subway tile), and ended up finding a couple of things for the bathroom. I snapped up 8 of these metal cross handles for 75 cents each, and the shelf was $9.

My dad texted me about the time I was picking these up, so after a bit of looking at $20 sinks, we grabbed lunch, made a brief stop at another store where they treated me to exact bathroom shelf that they bought me for my birthday last year (and later returned because the size didn’t work with the bathroom layout at the time) for $9. I forgot to take a picture of it, but it’s the style most often referred to as “train shelf”.

$20 sinks (sorry for the iPhone pictures, I snapped them for reference)

At the outlet store, I found a white, chair height, elongated bowl, dual flush toilet, a shower head, and a larger $20 sink with more space to put soap/contact cases than the ReStore ones.

I have picked up a couple of other odds and ends online, as well. I bought a faucet spout (which we’re hoping to use with two of the cross handles from ReStore, otherwise I’ll buy a couple of matching Delta faucet handles), a shower arm, and a shower diverter escutcheon (which was a major splurge at $65 from Period Bath, but it makes me laugh).

For those of you playing along at home, that brings out total for fixtures to $326. We do still need …. well, everything else, but we’re feeling pretty good about how we’re doing on budget so far.

Next up? Tracking down a tub spout (Ryan has sensibly forbidden me from using Glacier Bay for the tub/shower because they tend to fail and require ripping out the wall. Which.. yeah, no thank you.), DensGuard, green board, tile, grout, bead board (for the walls other than the shower surround), etc etc etc. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

Handled That

With the holiday, we didn’t really do anything project-wise over the weekend other than pricing/planning the shower plumbing. While we were looking at galvanized pipe we noticed that the $11-each handles I saw on the Lowe’s website were special order, so I got to work hunting down two vintage shower handles on eBay for $7.50 (that includes shipping). Score!

Though we have yet to measure or talk to Ryan, our current plumbing plans are sort of a cross between these designs (below). Fortunately for us our shower won’t cost as much as either of those.

source

source

Ideally I’d like a porcelain or metal handle that says “shower” for our shower diverter (like the second picture), but if we can’t find one we’ll use some sort of gate valve (as opposed to the ball valves in the first picture). I’m only slightly bitter that I missed out on the handle below (it came with a “hot” handle that we didn’t need, though, so I guess it’s ok).

source

So, until I find what we want (or am convinced that something else will do), I am That Person who emails eBay sellers, vintage hardware websites, etc asking is they have a single porcelain shower handle they’re willing to sell me. Ugh. I wish there was a good architectural salvage place around here somewhere! Here’s hoping that all the begging/pleading/emailing pays off (or I’ll just say “screw it” and special order two of these or rig up a gate valve & a hose bib handle).

Is anyone else neurotic about details like this? Hopefully I am not the only one… Until then, I’ll the crazy woman wandering the plumbing aisles.

Edit: Mariah at Historic Houseparts has been so helpful in answering all of my questions. If you’re looking for anything specific be sure to check them out, and also their plumbing division Period Bath Supply Company. They even have air vents like the ones I was looking at a while back.