Spruced up bathroom

A few weeks ago, I read on Holly's blog about how she fixes up her home even if she is in a rental. 

"I’m also not one to wait until I own my home before I properly decorate it. Never have been. I remember gut renovating my first apartment when I was 22 years old living on my own in Boston. "

I'm not as brave as her. I usually keep my apartments in pretty much the shape they were in when I got there, but this apartment is a bit different. For one, they are tearing it down in the next year. I'm 99.9% sure we'll be the last ones to ever live in it, so Princeton doesn't really care what we do to it. The other thing is we are getting to the point that our home is actually pretty clean most of the time. By pretty clean, I mean minus the dishes it takes under an hour to clean the whole house. Lately, it's been closer to 45 minutes. 

It's weird how having a clean house gives my brain room to think about my home in a different way. Suddenly, I have time to think about functions of a space and how I feel when I'm in the room. One of the rooms that I really hated in our home is the bathroom. It always feels dirty, smelly, and damp. There is no window in the bathroom, and it's tiny. I think it's 5'x 6.5' totaling just under 33 sq ft. 

So this week my goal was to make it a more functional space.

My objectives

- organize closet

- get rid of both towel racks so our towels wouldn't be bundled up on top of them

- get the bathroom door to open all the way 

- try to make it prettier

First thing I did was go through the closet in the bathroom. There is a picture of it when we first moved in, in this blog post. I got rid of any unopened lotion, perfume, and shampoo and had it donated to a women's shelter. The other things that I used once or twice I put up on freecycle. A cute teenage girl picked it up.

 After that I took down both towel racks earlier this week and replaced them with hooks. This helped so much with the dampness of the bathroom. The towels dry so much faster now.

Then all I had left was to put up "art".

It should have been pretty easy, but everything went wrong. One of the frames, we bought broke, so we had to get super glue. Then we ran out of dry wall anchors, and then we ran out of spackling. Then finally when we thought everything was hung, the door kept hitting the shadow box! We were finally able to call the project done yesterday morning.

It's been almost a week since I put the hooks up, and I am going to do that in each apartment we live in for now on. It looks better, smells better, and it's so much easier to keep clean. I haven't had to run and check on the bathroom every time someone comes over.

It's really nice change. I know it's not at all like the designer blogs, but it's way better than it was before. Hopefully it will stay clean, so I can avoid explaining to five year olds why women wear bras in the future.