I cannot emphasize enough how excited I have been to share our latest house project with you… Partially because I’m so pleased with how it turned out, and in large part because we started working on it an entire year ago. Uh, yikes! We had good intentions, but we got burnt out fast from the build and our work on the house came to a speeding halt in the thick of life.
If you’re part of the blog community over on Instagram, you’ll likely remember the process of helping us sift through seemingly endless tile and vanity selections for our fourth bathroom around this time last year. As to be expected at this point with all of our home projects, I had a very specific vision for what I wanted in this space and it was important for me to be thoughtful in tying in elements with the rest of our basement design. The hexagons, black and gold, grid details, and mix of antique and masculine elements will appear throughout our next few downstairs projects: finishing the bar, the family room, and the guest bedroom.
After what felt like hundreds of home improvement and flooring store trips to select the perfect tile for the floor, in addition to picking out and hauling home a vanity that I ended up hating once we got it down there, this project just didn’t take off quite like the rest of the construction and design projects had for us. Between Clayton being physically drained from the labor expended in the build and me being mentally drained at this time last year, we just… quit. For a while, anyway.
We spent quite a bit of time downstairs over the winter and somewhere along the way we regained steam and motivation to finally finish this project, and I’m so ecstatic with how it turned out. It has the exact antique bar feel that I had in mind when we started the process, and it gives us a great reference point to complement the rest of the design in the downstairs spaces that we’ll be starting on soon. All of the items you see in the bathroom are linked here, with the exception of a few that I found similar options for.
The black wall was a super simple hack for achieving a shiplap look on a budget. We purchased luan, which is an underlayment board, and ripped it down with a table saw to the width we wanted. We used a black stain, but paint would be an equally viable option. We worked from the bottom up and nailed the boards down with the spacing we liked in between. The total cost of the wall using this option was under $50 as opposed to what would have easily been several hundred dollars had we used shiplap.
Now that we've finally got this one behind us, we are eager to tackle the rest of the downstairs projects. Stay tuned… Hopefully those won’t take a full year from start to completion!