{home tour} Modern Powder Room

The home tour continues, and this week I'm giving you peek into our main floor powder room. {You can also catch up on previous home tour posts}

This half bathroom is located on our main floor, just off of our kitchen and around the corner from our entry.

It's a small room, so I can't really show you photos from different angles, but I will show you the before and after, and then walk you through some of the details and the changes we've made to this little room.

When we bought our house, the powder room had beige walls, a beige countertop, an unframed mirror {I know it kinda looks framed in the photo, but that's just the reflection of the door frame}, and a black light fixture with amber colored glass.

For the first three years that we lived in the house, it continued to look just like this, other than some art hanging above the toilet, but when we decided to do our kitchen mudroom addition, one thing led to another, and we ended up making some improvements to the powder room as well.

How did the kitchen mudroom construction lead to upgrading the powder room? I'm glad you asked!

It all started years before when we took a vacation to Costa Rica, and someone {who shall remain nameless} offered to house sit and accidentally sat a hot pot on our grey HanStone Quartz kitchen countertop, leaving a permanent white ring.

A year or so later, the kitchen mudroom plans included tiling our kitchen backsplash, and we knew the time was right for replacing the damaged section of countertop {it would have been much harder to replace later once the backsplash was in}. This meant removing about a six foot long piece of quartz. Since only a small section of the removed countertop was damaged, we wanted to find a way to reuse the remainder. We used one small piece below the cookbook shelves in the new mudroom space, but what to do with the rest?

We had never particularly liked the beige countertop in the powder room, and it always bugged me a little that it didn't match the grey counters in the adjacent kitchen, so it made perfect sense to use the remainder of the grey HanStone quartz from the kitchen in the bathroom! Swapping out the powder room countertop also gave us the opportunity make some other upgrades, including a new sink, faucet and backsplash!

I had always been a fan of vessel sinks, but had been hesitant to add one to our home because I'd heard people complain that they are harder to clean. But since the powder room sink only gets used for hand washing, and not teeth brushing or any other potentially messy activities, I decided to go for it!

The kitchen wall just outside of the bathroom is painted a slightly grey-ish teal, so we selected a very affordable frosted glass vessel sink from Lowes {only $73!} to help pull that color into the powder room. Then we selected a Price Pfister Kenzo vessel faucet that has a waterfall-like spout. Because of the depth of the vessel sink, we had the faucet installed to the right of the sink, rather than centered behind it.

We also dressed up the new countertop and sink with the addition of a tiled mosaic backsplash that features a combination of glass tiles in shades of teals, greys and black, as well as a few stainless steel tiles here and there.

We decided to keep rolling along with the powder room updates by also replacing the mirror and light fixture.  Since the bathroom has very high ceilings, we searched quite a while before finding the perfect mirror for the space. Most framed mirrors we found were either too short to fill the space. Or, if they were tall enough, they were also too wide. At last we found a great mirror on clearance at West Elm that had just the perfect tall thin proportions. The mirror's dark wood frame also ties in nicely with the dark cabinet and the other wood furnishings on our main floor.

With the new frosted glass vessel sink in place, the old light fixture with its amber colored glass had to go. After looking at what felt like a million light options, we selected a chrome fixture that provided the sleek, modern look we were after.

Room by room we are banishing the beige from our house, so of course this room also had to get a new coat of paint. Because the room is small, we wanted to keep it really bright - and what is brighter than white? Rather than a basic white latex, we decided to up the ante with Shimmer Metallic Paint in Snowflake White from Modern Masters.

We started by priming the room white, then applied the shimmer metallic paint using the recommended metallic paint extender.

The shimmer metallic finish is very subtle, but it really does help to brighten up the room and make it look a bit more dressed up than a standard flat or satin white. It's hard to capture the shimmer in the photographs, but in person it's very beautiful.

Finally, let's talk about the art above the toilet. These are my own creation, painted on thick stretched canvases in colors selected to tie in with the decor of our adjacent kitchen.

These paintings were very simple to create {I'll share a tutorial in the future}, but they are very personal! Each of the white circles are actually sections of newsprint taken from the many published reviews of my husband's theater performances. {Have I mentioned before that, in addition to his other career, Scott performs professionally in plays and musical theater throughout Colorado and around the country? I'll have to tell you more about that later!}

Thanks for joining me on the quick tour of our small powder room.  It's come a long way since its builder-beige roots and I am really happy with the way it turned out! Don't forget to that you can tour more of the house on the Home Tour page, where I'm currently adding a new room each week!