Powder Room – One Room Challenge: Week 2

If you are new to my blog, welcome! I’m Sanda Stojakovic and I’m the author of My Design Playbook. A year ago my husband and I bought a 1970 Colonial house that needed many updates but we were so excited about this purchase that we knew we could turn this house into our home. Ever since we started on this journey to modernize our house I realized that we really enjoy this type of work and it quickly turned into something we love doing together. Follow along as we renovate our powder room over the next few weeks for the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge and mark your calendar for the final reveal on November 12-22th.

Spring 2020 ORC | Fall 2019 ORC

If I could use one word to describe week 2 of the power room transformation it would be demolition. If you missed previous weeks post that goes over the powder room state you can find that here. Overall, the power room looks far worse now than what we started with. I have noticed that in all the One Room Challenges I have participated, we tends to be the week where the room I’m transforming goes from bad to worse. I keep tell myself, “it must look ugly, before it can look pretty” and this has been my motto of this week. Until things start looking better than a horror movie set, I’m only going to look at the power room with looks this lady in the portrait is portraying.

I think she has the whole, ” I got this, don’t questions me” look in her eye that I can get behind.

So what have we accomplished this week?

We pulled out the towel holder and toilet paper holders causing some pretty nasty holes in the wall.

We discovered an enormous hole in the wall after removing the mirror. Apparently the previous owners has medicine cabinet in the bathroom that they decided to remove and hide with a mirror.

We also ripped out the vanity and plumbing. My goal was to use the current vanity and just update the vanity top with marble and paint the bottom party white but after extensive research, it was more cost effective to replace the whole vanity than try to replace the vanity top with marble.

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Patching the holes for from the towel holder and toilet paper holder was fairly easy but patching the vanity mirror hole is still a work in progress.

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For the hole hidden by the vanity mirror, we used left over drywall and drywall compound to cover the hole. The image above depicts the second iteration of adding the drywall compound. We still have to sand the wall and review if we need to add another layer. The patching of the vanity mirror hole will definitely take some effort in week three to complete.

Towards the end of the week, also started installing trim work. Before installing chair rail I was not sure how high I wanted the chair rail to go. Typical chair rail is between 28″ – 32″ but that average can be thrown out the window in bathrooms because typically you want chair rail to be somewhere around vanity height or higher to protect your wall from water being splashed and boy do I need that wit the toddlers who love to play with water.

Here are some inspiration photos I found of various chair rail and trim work heights that are around vanity height, or higher than the vanity height.

First let’s take a look at few that are at about vanity height.

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Here are a few inspiration photos of chair rail and trim work above the vanity.

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Since we have only 8ft ceiling, we decided to go with chair rail that is on the lower side or exactly vanity height. The reason I prefer chair rails on the lower sides is because I feel gives the illusion of higher wall and ceiling and that is always the goal.

Here is what the installed chair rail currently looks like. I used painters tape to determine how big I want the shadow boxes to be. I think using painters tape is a great way to visual trim work and has saves me from being decisions that I would not have liked in hindsight.

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If you want to know more about how to cut and install trim work I have written two blog articles about this process which can be found below:

Tips for Cutting Wall Trim using a Miter Saw

Installing Wall Moulding

This week I also scored some vintage items from an estate sale that I think would look great in the power room. One of the items I found on Chairis is selling for 99 times more than what I bought it for. I paid $5 for it and it’s currently selling for $495. If you are interested to learn what the item is and how to recognize value vintage pieces, check out my Fall ORC highlight stories on Instagram under design.playbook . I will be posting daily powder room progress updates there as well.

Here is a quick to do list:

• Remove towel and toilet paper holder
• Remove vanity and light
• Install chair rail
• Install trim work
• Prime and sand walls
• Install wallpaper
• Paint ceiling
• Install vanity
• Source vintage mirror
• Install lighting
• Install vent
• Order towel and toiler paper holder
• Order small rug

Thank you for following along my journey. Don’t forget to check out other room transformations on the ORC blog page.