Bathroom facelift

I felt we'd mostly solved the overall beige-ness of this apartment, but for some reason, the one room still plaguing me was the bathroom. Now, I've never cared that much about bathrooms. In fact, they've often baffled me. Flipping through a home and garden magazine, I'll marvel at the cavernous bathrooms--how much stuff could you possibly want to keep in there? I'll puzzle over the phenomenon of his and hers sinks--does marriage hit a point where you suddenly *need* two sinks? The only thing I ever covet in those photos is a whirlpool tub (relaxing). But all I really dream of is a bathroom with adequate ventilation. One day...

Anyway, consumed by the boringness, I decided that bathrooms actually do matter in their own little way. We finally used a housewarming gift certificate to give our bathroom a little facelift. (Note: You'll see from these photos that we still have weird fluorescent lighting. Not much we can do about that.)

Rather than aggressively fight the beige, we attempted to work with it, using sort of muted colors. We found sage green towels on sale and a super-soft oatmeal-colored bathmat.

They looked good hanging on our existing white towel rack, too.

We added a tissue box cover (an item I'd formerly deemed as useless) and stuck a bunch of dried lavender in a Ball jar we had hanging around. My glass jar of lotion blended in nicely, as did a little framed mirror that used to be in our NY bedroom. Three rolled-up white hand towels gave it kind of a "spa" look (the spa thing was all Chris!).

We also bought a soap dispenser, which was a big step for me. (True story: I kept the same plastic dispenser in NYC for 3.5 years.) Finally, we threw some of my favorite milk and olive oil soaps into a glass apothecary jar. (We have green and white soaps; I'd like to add a few lavender bars, too.) I love all of the things we found, because they're pretty neutral and we can take them with us to our next place. We'd still like to add a little piece of art to the wall, but Roger liked it so much already that he decided to move in.

You know what they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(Note: Very observant readers will see that the framed mirror is missing in photo 1. We added it later!)