Home Design

Neutral Modern Farmhouse Powder Room Makeover

June 30, 2022July 8, 2022

Updated: Oct 10, 2021

At this point, I don’t remember what led us to redoing the powder room in the first place, but I feel like I remember there being a reason why…maybe a small toilet leak or something along those lines. It could also have very well been me itching to get my DIY on. We thought it would be a two day project, so we said [I said] “Hey, let’s give this baby a facelift!” Well, two days turned into close to a month but it was all worth while in the end! That’s what I’m suppose to say right? Truth is, I really wish it only took two days but it’s like having a baby; painful at the time but now I don’t even remember it being bad!

So where did we go wrong? We really didn’t, but as anyone knows or at least can suspect, whenever you’re renovating an older house, you’re bound to uncover a bunch of little treasures. Ours was the subfloor. We pulled up the linoleum flooring and ended up replacing the subfloor because the toilet had leaked in the past and the floor was damaged. If you’re going to do something like this, you have to do it right…so out with the old and in with the new. Once that was glued and screwed down, I decided to tackle my first ever tile job! I love puzzles and am super OCD, so this was fun for me, and surprisingly easy! We used the 12″x12″ mesh backed tile sheets. My husband, Rob, picked out the pattern actually! Design tip: typically in a smaller space, using the smaller tiles gives it the illusion of being bigger!

I then selected the perfect shade of slate blue, after sampling like 5 different colors, and went to work. We replaced the small vanity with a pedestal sink [that was a huge pain, because we needed it to be a certain width in order to fit with the toilet.] Home Depot to the rescue! We actually bought nearly everything from THD. We got the new door, door handle, toilet, sink, the paint, tile and all supplies there. I got my Moen faucet and matching fixtures on amazon because I was looking for a vintage style, chrome finish and sometimes you just can’t find that specific of an item in the store. [They’re all linked at the bottom]

This whole theme idea came from a West Elm light fixture that I purchased from someone on Facebook Marketplace…that ended up getting smashed by our contractor one day during the major part of the renovation. [Insert scream here] As mentioned in my instagram post, for those of you who caught it, the major reno also caused some nail pops in the powder room. We ended up with 2 quarter sized circles that needed to be spackled and then touched up with the blue. No biggie. Well, I came home from work one day and that same contractor messily spackled the whole wall! [slaps forehead] Fine, still not the biggest deal. I have enough leftover paint to do this one wall over…until I come home from work one day again…and the whole bathroom is repainted with the new color, polar bear. Essentially, white. Thank you Mario!

At this point, I don’t have enough paint to redo the whole thing and I’m not going back to THD for the 372,956th time just for this, so I switched gears and redid our newly redone powder room, leaving vintage inspired behind and going all in on the modern farmhouse!

I’m not mad about it anymore because, while it’s still a work in progress decor wise, I think it really came together nicely. Rob is the one who, I think jokingly, suggested wallpaper because he got super nervous when I started showing him options. I searched long and hard to find the perfect one and we love it! He’s totally on board. It’s Magnolia Peel and Stick “Pick Up Sticks” by Joanna Gaines, from…you guessed it, The Home Depot.

Before doing the wall paper, we actually decided to do the board and batten window panes along the bottom half of the walls. We mapped it out with tape, then Rob did it himself, using 4″ trim for the top and 3″ for the vertical. He glued and nail gunned them on. We redid the window and door trim too, when we replaced the door…that we had just replaced. But hey, everything has to match, right?

So, we get everything done and there’s one thing that’s driving me nuts…that natural gray color grout that we picked to match the blue walls and chrome features! After talking to my cousin about how she brought her grout lines back to life with this grout pen, I started to look into the concept further and found a whole world of grout paint pens! They’re just like the paint markers I use to use in the classroom, or like what you would write on a car window with…super easy. Shake, press, paint! They make chisel tips and thin tips, depending on the spacing you have, you should choose appropriately. Once you paint the grout lines, you wait a few minutes for it to dry and then go back in with a magic eraser or a Clorox wipe and scrub/wipe off the paint that got on the tile. So simple!

So, because grout doesn’t stick to grout, I would’ve had to scrape out all of the old [which I was not doing with a 3.5 year old, 1.5 year old and nursing a 2 month old.] This needed to be done, and fast! Grout pen it is! I decided I wanted black grout to pull out the black lines in the wallpaper. One quick amazon order and a few hours later, I had a newly done tile floor…for $11.