Basement Bathroom Makeover: Week 1 {One Room Challenge}

I’ve been pretty MIA on the blog lately due to a lot of other things that have required my attention this year {adulting is hard!}, but I have one more project that I really want to accomplish before the end of the year, so I’m giving myself a deadline. I just can’t get enough of the One Room Challenge because it provides just the motivation I need to prioritize a project and get it to the finish line! This time around, the project I’m taking on is our basement bathroom.

One Room Challenge

This is my 11th time participating in the One Room Challenge, so most of you are probably familiar with it by now, but I’ll start with a quick explanation in case you’re new around here. The ORC was started by Linda Weinstein of Calling It Home, and Better Homes & Gardens is the official media sponsor. The challenge was historically six weeks long, but it’s been extended to eight weeks for 2021 to take into account ongoing supply shortages and shipping delays resulting from the pandemic.

For the next seven weeks, I’ll be posting weekly updates to show you the progress as we take this bathroom from bold but boring to bright and sophisticated, leading up to the final reveal on November 18th! The best part of the One Room Challenge is that I’m not going it alone! Each ORC round, there are twenty amazingly talented designers who headline the event, posting their updates each Tuesday night. Participation in the ORC is also open to other design bloggers, referred to as Guest Participants, and we post our progress updates each Wednesday night. The ORC gets bigger and more exciting every round, often with more than 200 participants!

For me, that means sharing encouragement with lots of fellow designers… for you, that means endless inspiration for every room of the house in every style! All of the participating bloggers share the links to their weekly progress posts on the One Room Challenge website, so you can find all of the ORC progress posts and final reveals in one convenient place!

We Take Two Steps Forward, We Take One Step Back…

People often comment that we can’t possibly have any projects left to do in our house, but contrary to popular belief we still have a long list that we have been working out way through since we moved in 13 years ago, and the list continues to grow. I think that when you live in a house long enough (especially a house where you have plans to stay in the house indefinitely), the project list never ends. It’s more like you take two steps forward and one step back. Each project you finish leads to something else that you’d like to update. We’re always making progress and moving in the right direction, but I’m not sure we’ll ever be “done.” This has certainly been the story in our basement…

When we first moved in, we painted and minimally decorated each room in the basement – the family room, the bathroom, and the bedroom that serves as an office/craft room. We had lots of ideas and plans to do more with each of these spaces, but they were functional enough and just never rose to the top of the to do list. But during COVID, we started spending much more family time in the basement, and we found ourselves motivated to finally give the basement the attention it deserves.

This spring/summer we transformed our basement family room into the ultimate game room, and we LOVE it! Since completing that makeover, the game room has become the most used space in our home – from family movie and game nights to entertaining family and friends. But now that the game room is complete, I find myself cringing when our guests use the basement bathroom, and I’ve been itching to give it an update as well. Like I said… two steps forward, one step back.

For context, here’s a quick look at the basement floorplan. The basement is long and thin, with the bathroom at the far end, just past our new game table.

Basement Bathroom Then and Now…

Let’s start with a few photos of how the bathroom looked when we first moved in. The white subway tile and charcoal gray slate floor give this bathroom a great foundation, and in the interest of keeping this makeover on a very tight budget, we don’t plan to change any of the tile.

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If you know my style, then you won’t be surprised to learn that those beige walls didn’t last very long after we moved in. I love color, and I’m not afraid to go bold… and wow did we go bold in this bathroom.

I’ve learned a lot of design lessons over the years, and this one was learned the hard way… shiny white bathroom surfaces reflect the colors around them. So when you paint a bathroom orange, the white surfaces take on a “lovely” peachy hue…

Putting a shower curtain on each side of the shower helped to cut down some of the peachy reflection on the white subway tile.

We took down the large rectangular mirror that was originally in the bathroom, but we made a definite design mistake by hanging a round, frameless mirror that’s a bit too small for the space. A frame around the mirror would have helped to break up the orange and would have given the room the room another, much needed focal point.

Next week I’ll be sharing our plans to update this bathroom, but you probably won’t be surprised that first on the list is new paint. The other top priority for this bathroom makeover is adding storage – which means the pedestal sink has to go.

I hope you’ll join me each Thursday as I share our progress on this bathroom project! In the meantime, here’s a look back at each of my previous One Room Challenge makeovers…