One Room Challenge Week 1: Peaceful Modern Bathroom Remodel

This Fall David and I decided to participate in the One Room Challenge!  You are probably wondering, what is the One Room Challenge? Well The One Room Challenge™, currently in its fourteenth season, is a widely anticipated biannual event every April and October. Each round, twenty design influencers are selected to take the challenge and transform a space. Every Wednesday, the designers document their process while sharing their sources and professional advice over the six weekly posts.

In addition to following along, everyone with a blog is welcome to join the fun as a Guest Participant.  Each Thursday, the internet and social media are flooded with interior design inspiration, ideas, and encouragement.  This year Lilies and Life is participating as a Guest Participant! Yay!

So now you are probably wondering which room we choosing for this challenge?  We chose to remodel our upstairs bathroom! 

This bathroom is the only bathroom in our house with a working shower.  This is the bathroom David and I use every day. There is something unique about this space though.  There is a smaller room right off of the upstairs bathroom that we call the vanity room. The vanity room only has a sink, a vanity and lots of storage.  Here is the layout of the entire space we will be remodeling for the One Room Challenge:

I am so excited about this challenge and can’t wait to show you the progress we make!  So this first post is all about our plan to make this space peaceful and gorgeous!

When we first moved into this 1978 house, this bathroom was definitely out of date.  I did a few things to improve the space right away like paint the vanities and add new hardware, but now that we saved up to do a complete remodel I can’t wait to get rid of everything 🙂

I know I wanted this space to feel modern airy and peaceful.  This space is smaller and does not have a lot of natural light so I knew I wanted to keep things lighter in color and then have the vanities be darker for contrast.  Onto the details of our design plan!

Ceiling

The first thing we did when we moved into our house was scraped every single square inch of the popcorn ceiling off!  It was SO much work, but it was worth it!  Check out my post on how we scraped 2,500 square feet of that nasty stuff! So this task was done about two years ago.

Wall Color

We chose Zircon from Sherwin Williams for all the walls in this space.  This is the same gray color we chose for our powder room remodel and we loved it so much we want to use it for this project as well.

Custom Vanities

Unfortunately for our budget, the sizes of the two vanities are not standard so we will have to order custom vanities.  I want the vanities to be a darker blue-gray color.  These are the colors I am thinking of using, but haven’t settled on one yet:

We are getting new doors for the storage cabinets in the vanity room as well.  Those doors will be white.

Hardware

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We are going to use these cabinet pulls for the majority of the cabinets.  I plan on buying a few unique pulls to put on the drawers of the storage cabinets in the vanity room, but will show you that detail later 😉

Countertops

To save money, we plan to use remnants from a local countertop shop.  I am hoping for a white quartz of some sort.

Shower tile

We are going to use white 3×6 tiles in a brick pattern with a gray grout for the shower.  I think this will keep the smaller space bright and crisp!

Floor Tile

Flooring has been the most difficult for me.  I want a lighter gray simple tile to offset the darker vanities.  I’ll keep you posted on this.

Lighting

We need to update both the vanity lights and the ceiling light above the toilet.  The ceiling light needs to be an exhaust fan as well because we have no ventilation in the bathroom right now.

Timeline:

We are separating this project into two parts.  Part 1 is the shower and bathtub and Part 2 is everything else.

Part 1 (week 1):

1. Shower: We will need to demo the old shower, install a new tub and faucet and then install new tile surrounding the entire shower. This will hopefully only take a few days! Pray for us 🙂

Part 2 (weeks 2-6):

1. Flooring demo
2. Install floor tile
3. Install toilet
4. Paint custom Vanities 
5. Install vanities and plumbing
6. Install new interior doors
7. Paint storage cabinets
8. Install new doors on vanity room cabinets
9. Trimwork
10. Install new vanity lights

Decor:

1. Decide on wallpaper for vanity room
2. Decide on fun knobs for vanity room
3. Mirrors
4. Rugs
5. Wall art
6. Window covering
7. Decor Accents

I hope you have fun following along with our One Room Challenge project!  Watch for a shower update next week.

Make sure you follow along on my Instagram stories for real-time updates!  Also, you can check out all of the other ORC participants and their room makeovers here!