Shanna's Surprise Mini Makeover: Master Bathroom

I mentioned back in our house tour a few weeks ago that we had a leak coming from the master shower.  We had our trusty plumber* out last week to fix it and it was a tad more involved than anyone expected.  When our plumber looked at the leak, he determined it was a crack in the master shower floor, which was unfortunately coming right into our den.  Eek.  The only real solution was for him to replace the entire shower floor.  Ba-boom. 

Of course, this would have been a great time to redo the entire bathroom, but that is not remotely in the budget right now, so we asked him to do what he could as inexpensively as possible, keeping in mind our plan to gut and redo the space in a few years.  Here is the shower before our plumber got to work.

You know my feelings on shower doors, so I told him it was fine to leave the doors off and I'd replace them with a pretty curtain.  He got to work and discovered that the shower floor was poured concrete.  Apparently it was a bear to get up, but he did it.  He also had to take up a couple rows of tiles in the shower.  The next day, he started installing the custom-sized floor (unfortunately the shower is a non-standard size so we had to do a special order).  He also started retiling.  The third day, he finished tiling, grouted and caulked around the shower and patched the holes in the den ceiling that he cut open to test for leaks.  It was a three-day process, and those of you who have done bathroom renos can commiserate at the insane amount of dust that it created.  See?

But once the dust settled (uh, literally), I was left with a nice new gleaming shower floor that does not leak!  Here it is before I did some work on it.

I scraped off the caulk that was once around the shower doors, pulled out the red anchors and filled the holes with white caulk.  Then I clean-clean-cleaned that bathroom and our bedroom.   While I was at it, I decided it was high time to paint the brown doors and make them white.  Here they are before.

Here's the rest of the bathroom before my mini-makeover.

And here is the space now!

I wanted the room to read more white than blue (as much as possible anyway) so I went for an all white shower curtain.  I found this one at Target (of course).  I also picked up the terrific roller rings to hang the curtain at the Pottery Barn Outlet, which Jamie and I visited last weekend - the very same roller rings that Jamie got back in January (by the way: we've decided to make our trip to the Pottery Barn Outlet a bi-annual thing - yay).

I am amazed at how much more white than blue the room now looks, just by virtue of painting those doors white!  It was super duper easy and took an hour total for both doors.  I just primed with white latex primer I had on hand and painted with my beloved Sherwin Williams Dover White for woodwork.

Finally, you can see the changes that a white bath mat, some art work and removing the blue & white decals on the tiles can make.  If you scroll back up, you will see several blue and white patterned tiles. They had windmills on them.  I took a really close look and realized they are actually decals!  It took all of one minute to remove them.  What a difference.

What do you think?  It felt good to do a mini-makeover, even if it was totally unexpected and not at all per my new To Do list.  Here's one last shot for the cheap seats in the back.

See you swoon,

* Philly-area locals: if you need a plumber recommendation, shoot me an email.  I absolutely love and completely, 100% trust our plumber. He also does heating and cooling.  He is reasonably priced and an all around good guy.