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When we first moved into this house, the hall bath upstairs was one of the first rooms we dealt with. It didn’t have any mirrors (the house was a foreclosure), so we went ahead and bought mirrors and painted the walls and called it done.

It was way overdue to get a little love. But it had to be some Gift of the Magi style love on a budget. But as anyone who has ever sobbed her way through The Gift of the Magi while her children mock her (this might or might not happen every Christmas here) knows….that is the BEST kind of love. Even if it makes for a rather overwrought short story.

So in here we used a lot of paint, a few things we already had, and a very few new purchases, but kept the old cabinets and countertop, plus the light fixtures and faucets.

It all started with this sea monster shower curtain:

I originally bought if for my master bathroom, but it ended up not really working in there in the end. And then I tried it in our travel trailer for awhile, but that didn’t seem to be its proper home, either. But I’ve always loved it, so I wanted to finally give it a chance to shine….and the rest of the bathroom kind of fell into place around it.

I stuck with my usual “when it doubt, paint it blue” philosophy and used my go-to Benjamin Moore Newburg Green yet again (that’s four rooms now, for those keeping score, although one of the rooms was Abe’s nursery which has since gotten a new paint job). It’s a very deep teal that’s almost a navy but still has a lot of green in it, and it looks good with a remarkable variety of colors.

We would have loved to put in a new countertop and switch out the light fixtures and faucets, but [here I was going to insert a joke about how you can’t sell your hair anymore, except I just found this Wikihow about….how to sell your hair. At any rate, I don’t think my nondescript, graying, middle aged hair would fetch a very good price, even though I AM desperately overdue for a haircut]. I do like the light fixtures (that came with the house) and the faucets are fine, but I would have replaced them with something more modern and…probably brassy if I could have. The yellow-y cultured marble counter is not my favorite, though. Ah well.

Anyway, though! Back to what we DID do!

I knew I wanted round mirrors (vaguely nautical! portholes!), and I found these on facebook marketplace. They’re these Kate and Laurel mirrors.

And then we added the circles around them to make the wall a little more exciting and pick up that aqua from the shower curtain. I’ll be doing a separate post on how we did the circles. The paint color is Valspar Beach Blanket.

….which is the same color I was considering painting the cabinets. But I was too nervous…that it would be too whimsical, or that there would be too much aqua in here, or that the light paint color would show dirt too much in a bathroom shared by several boys.

So instead we went with a dark gray, specifically with Valspar ocean storm (so it might be one of those paint colors I picked mostly because I liked the name. There are a LOT of different grays out there). And we still got our dose of whimsy (and aqua) in via the knobs:

These were supposed to be less whimsical than they ended up (and less nautical). I bought enough of the green milk glass knobs for the whole thing (there were no knobs or handles on the cabinets at all before), but THEN it turned out they stuck out so far that we could close the door. This is a bit of a problem with a bathroom, so we decided to take some whale knobs off the dresser that used to be in Abe’s room and use them on the drawers (and stick with the milk glass for the cabinet doors). Both the old whale knobs and the new milk glass knobs are from D Lawless Hardware. Incidentally, if you buy these milk glass knobs, be careful not to overtighten them or they can break. We lost one that way (so it was lucky we had to use some whale pulls or I would have needed to order more).

There’s not a great place for a towel rack in here (we use an over the door one for bath towels), so we hung up these simple brass hooks (I’m including the photo with the link, since I neglected to take a picture without towels on them in my actual bathroom):

And we also got the matching toilet paper holder.

This is a relatively big bathroom with surprisingly little wall space–what with the tub and windows and linen closet and mirrors and all–so the only thing we hung up in here aside from the mirrors and towel hooks was a photo of the Bluenose II I took on our trip to Nova Scotia last summer (frame from Michaels):

The hand towels and accessories on the counter are from Target (incidentally, I always expect to be able to find more exciting hand towels than I ever actually can).

And that’s it for our budget bathroom makeover! We all even managed to hold on to our hair and family heirlooms!

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