Main Bathroom Remodel {Phase 1 - The Dark Side}

Our  bright-yellow-walled, orange-oak cabinet bathroom has crossed over to the dark side.  In stark contrast to the rest of the renovations we've done to our house, we've painted a room darker.

Much darker...

Two weeks ago we prepped the bathroom walls and put on the first coat of Benjamin Moore's Champion Cobalt.

And this past weekend, we put the final coat of paint on the walls, and started work on the cabinets.  Our house is almost 20 years old, and I'm 99% sure the bathroom cabinets are still as they were when the house was built, just showing 20 years of wear and tear.  Here's a close-up of the middle portion of the cabinet below the sink to show what I mean:

There were several other sections on the cabinet where the poly and stain had worn completely off, not to mention tons of dings, nicks, gouges, scratches, you name it...  Basically, they were looking tired and beat up, and were in desperate need of a face lift.

After prepping everything, we put on coat of antique walnut stain on everything, bringing us to this:

The lighting is kind of off in this picture, because it's really hard to get a good picture in a small room with dark walls, with bare lightbulbs, when it's cloudy outside, (with a baby strapped on your back! ha!), but you get the idea. ;)

We stained the cabinet doors in the sunroom, and the pictures of them more accurately depict the stain color:

Yep, it's gorgeous.  I'm in love.  I really like the color they are now, but they're still a tad orange-y for my taste, you can see it's not too much of a change from the original color so far:

We're hoping a second coat will tone down the orange a little, and help the cabinets not be as streaky as they are after just one coat.  We had originally planned to put three coat of stain on everything, but I'm beginning to think two coats might be enough.  Since the walls are so dark I don't want the cabinets to be super dark, I just don't want them orange anymore.  

We've still got a lot of work to do in this room including:

-putting at least one more coat of stain on the cabinets
-putting a coat or two of poly on the cabinets
-changing out the cabinet hardware
-replacing the towel rack
-replacing the ceiling light fixture
-adding a new window treatment
-hanging art/decorations
-adding crown moulding
-doing touch-ups and clean-up, (blue paint is EVERYWHERE!)

Eventually, we might also replace the flooring.  The tile in the bathroom is original, and there are a couple of cracked tiles.  They're fine, (albeit a little boring), for now, but depending how long we stay in this house, and how long it takes us to tackle the rest of our enormous wish list/to-do list, we may replace the flooring.  We would really like to do something like this:

So that's where we stand with the main bathroom right now.  I wasn't going to do progress photos all along the way, because I thought they might be super boring to read, but my blogging has been so sporadic, (non-existent), lately I thought I would explain why.  We are up to our eyeballs in bathroom renovation!  

I know it's a little bit of a departure from our painting everything white, (see living room, sunroom, mantle, and trim), but I am so incredibly excited about this room.  It still gets lots of light and is bright during the day, so it doesn't feel too dark claustrophobic, and I love the color!

Hope you all had a great weekend!  Is it just me, or weekends seem like they get shorter all the time? 

Happy Monday!

Jennifer