31 Days of Pinterest Projects - Day 18 - Laundry Hamper Switcheroo

Slight problem. Our hamper doesn't fit real great in our new bathroom. It is righinsidethedoor and if it gets bumped it can even block the door from moving. Grrr... Also, it sits right in front of Dave's towel when it is hanging on the towel bar. Annoying.

Essentially, this hamper is just another one of those things that worked great at our old house but didn't translate well to the new place.

 And it is rotting. Yes, rotting.

We bought this elite hamper to replace our basic plastic one that had worked for years and years for a whopping $49.99 from Tar-jay about one year ago and it is rotting. It is worthless. Really wish I had my $49.99 back. It doesn't breathe well and so all the moist towels and clothes inside just sit in there and rot out the press board bottom until laundry day. Every week. This is what it looks like currently underneath the cute lining.

Yuck. Ew. I don't really want my clothes touching that. Even if there is a cute lining in between.

So one day on Pinterest I saw this:

Amazon

And I thought, "I want that!" But I clicked over to Amazon and realized I'd have to fork over an entire Ben Franklin for it.

Then today in the checkout line at Wally World I saw this puppy for just $2.97.

And I thought, why don't I take this and the other pop up hamper we already own but aren't using, set them inside our large vanity cabinets and pretend they're pull-out or tilt-out hampers? It will be a great use of all the space inside those cabinets that we currently aren't even utilizing.

The best part was I can save myself the $97. Sure, pull-outs are fabulous. But so is having an extra Ben Franklin lying around.

Here's our latest solution in action:

The other plus is that now the laundry is already sorted by color as we put it in here - lights in one, darks in the other, as opposed to when I had to take the whole hamper to the laundry room and then sort out the clothes. Should make laundry days easier. And I'll be able to carry half our laundry at a time eliminating back strain from that heavy hamper that held it all!

So what do you guys think? Where do you keep your dirty clothes till laundry day? I know some people have a hamper in their bedroom or closet but we like keeping ours in the bathroom.

For the rest of the 31 Days of Pinterest Projects series, click here.

Bathroom Organizing on the Brain

Last Thursday I decided to take on the beast that was our bathroom linen closet. *shudder* Don't judge me.

Since the day we moved in, whenever I unpacked a bathroom related box and found extra toiletries, I just threw them in there. In absolutely no particular order. This closet was like our best kept secret. I would have DIED if anyone had opened it up during a party searching for a band-aid or something. Er, not that anyone would do that. . .

At first glance it doesn't look that bad, but what you can't see is what is hiding inside those cute baskets. Sure, they look like they might even be categorized. But you could toss that illusion out the window the moment you pulled a basket off the shelf.

This is what you found inside those baskets.

Chaos. Mounded up, nearly overflowing, totally disorganized chaos. 

After buying 2 extra packages of Q-tips because I didn't even know we already had them (who wants to "check inventory" in a linen closet like this???), I decided it was time to tame this beast.

I dumped everything out on the bathroom counter (and in the sink!) and began sorting items and trashing things I no longer needed. The plus of having a double sink is that I could fill one up with junk and still have the other to rinse off leaking shampoo bottles, etc. Wow.

After only like 5 minutes of sorting and purging, we had ourselves a completely orderly space.

On the top shelf, from the left, is a basket for seasonal items (sunscreen, aloe, bug spray), followed by an ice cream container repurposed as a baby basket (baby powder, baby oil, wipes container), and a travel basket (contains our travel toiletry bag, extra travel bottles, etc.).

The next shelf down includes 2 matching baskets. The one on the left holds hand towels and the one on the right holds wash cloths.

On the next shelf down are some plastic drawer organizers that I recently purchased for paper organization in the office then realized I didn't need them once I actually filed...what a novel concept!?! So I repurposed them to contain our extra toiletries. There's one drawer for extra shampoo, one for extra bath soap, one for toothbrushes, paste, floss, and another for deodorant, and so on and so forth. 

And obviously the bottom shelf is for bath towels.

I still plan to label everything but if you've been following this blog long, you know that I ALWAYS procrastinate on labeling. I did the same thing back when I used to do scrapbooking, I'd always lay out the entire page with photos, borders, backgrounds, stickers, etc. and finish the entire book before I would ever start journaling and labeling photos with captions. So hopefully 2012 will be there year I actually get it together and label stuff. We'll see...I think I need one of those fancy schmancy vinyl cutter thing-a-ma-jiggers. Labeling would be more fun then. Or maybe that's just a marketing myth the creators of that thing want me to believe.

Anyways, moving on, I just love Pinterest. Not sure if you've joined but you need to. It is amazingly inspirational. Scouring that site for fantastic design ideas is my #1 favorite past time lately. And more often than not, I guess cuz I'm a nerd at heart, I'm drawn mostly to the Organizational Solutions.  So while we have bathroom organization on the brain, why don't you check out these 5 fabulous ideas I've pinned lately?

• Contain bathroom counter top clutter with a cute little tray like Dana did over on House*Tweaking. She doesn't necessarily like having it all out in the open, but it's a temporary solution for their current apartment living situation.

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• Constantly keep hair dryers and straighteners tucked away inside the cabinet or a drawer by installing an outlet under the bathroom sink. We had an outlet under out bathroom sink in our old house and we LOVED it. I kept the blow dryer plugged in all the time but just took it out when needed.

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• Build storage cubbies inside the walls between studs in really small bathrooms, just like an inset medicine cabinet!

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• Repurpose jam jars as toiletry storage. Here I am on the whole canning jar kick again. Haha...

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• Use PVC pipe for curling iron storage on the inside of the sink cabinet door.

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What other fabulous bathroom storage solutions have you all come up with? Tamed any beasts in your home lately? I know I sure feel better after cleaning up that linen closet!! I don't know why I put it off for so long. It seriously did not take very much time.

Day 14 - Clutter Free Shower

Does your shower look something like this?

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Do you find yourself frustrated beyond belief when you're constantly knocking all those bottles down?

As usual, the key to organization and clutter free living is to PURGE. But how do you do that with your shampoo and body wash? You NEED all these bottles, don't you?

Well, I'm here to tell you that maybe you don't. Now before you right me off as a lunatic and assume I never shower and smell bad...hear me out.

Dave has always LOVED handmade soap. He would occasionally buy it at a festival or at Cracker Barrel. Well, last August, right after Levi was born, he decided to make his own lye soap using Red Crown Lye that he had bought at an Amish store and lard from a hog he and his brother butchered together. (He even went to the extent of building his own "soapbox" for the soap to cure in, out of repurposed pallet wood. So we like to say that now he can actually get up on his literal soapbox.)

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This may sound crazy and totally "old school" but that lye soap was the most fabulous soap we've ever had. I actually thought it smelled a bit like bacon grease, but it got us so incredibly clean. We were able to use it to wash our faces, bodies, hair (it even conditioned!), and I even used it to shave my legs since it lathered so well. We've since bought some lye soap from an Etsy shop and although it is good, it does not compare to that batch we made ourselves. And I honestly think it is because we were not able to separate out the lard like the real butcher does so it was more greasy and brownish tan colored than the pure white lard you can buy from a butcher. Ours actually did a lot better job cleaning our bodies.

So, anyways, during the time that we were using the lye soap for washing every possible body part, we completely eliminated all other bottles/bars of soap in the shower (facial cleanser, body wash, shaving cream, shampoo, conditioner, etc. - they all left!). All we had in there was one bar of lye soap. And my clutter-free-loving-self was ecstatic!

If you're at all the "homesteading" type you should definitely look into making your own lye soap. Or at least buy some on Etsy. It's totally the way to go. Just make sure you get lye soap made with animal fat. The other lye soaps that use other oils like olive oil as opposed to lard irritate our skin a bunch.

Day 13 - Clutter Free Bathrooms

Day 13 - we're almost halfway through this Clutter Free series!

Today you're taking a tour of our bathroom cupboards. Doesn't get much more personal than that, does it? Anyways, I hope that someone finds this info helpful. :)

I'm going to throw a little Before/ After action at you. Our master bath is about 5 ft x 7 1/2 ft. There's a medicine cabinet above the toilet and another one over the sink and there's some cabinet space underneath the sink.

Soon after we finished remodeling this space, I noticed that the cabinets were quickly headed towards disorder. Here are the Before photos:

The medicine cabinets weren't all that terrible but there was not a lot of order to the contents and it was pretty easy to knock several bottles off the shelves at once due to how crammed together they were.

But underneath the sink was kind of a jumbled mess.

And here are the After photos:

I purchased the blue baskets shown above at JoAnn Fabrics in a dollar bin - I think I got all 5 for $1. It was a great deal. And they are the perfect size for categorizing and storing skinny little toiletries in a not-too-deep medicine cabinet. The only thing that would make it better would be labels. Still haven't done anything about that. There are a couple baskets on the top two shelves for organizing medications, and the bottom shelf baskets hold hair products and deodorant/perfume, respectively.

The cabinet above the toilet was organized easily with these 2 wooden "baskets". I got them on clearance at Home Goods. I think they were $3 each. I was able to basically use this cabinet for extra toiletries.

The baskets we were using in the cabinet underneath the sink worked, but they weren't all that convenient. I wanted to somehow be able to stack items and use the vertical space. I considered buying something like this from the Container Store but they seemed a bit flimsy and were still pretty open.

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Then I got the fabulous idea to move in this plastic drawer unit that I already owned. I just removed one of the drawers so it would fit (since the unit was too tall for under my sink). So even though my vanity didn't come with drawers - now I have some! Woohoo! And it is not quite as tempting for my one year old to get into these drawers. Again, labels would be nice.

I use the top drawer for my baby wipes, makeup, hair dryer, brush, etc. The next drawer is Dave's - his electric toothbrush and electric shaver chargers, etc.

The next drawer contains feminine products and a mirror. And the bottom drawer holds the hair clippers. Toilet paper resides behind the trash can.

I also upgraded to a larger trash can since our smaller one filled up too quickly. I really like keeping the trash can inside the cabinet because it makes the bathroom look neater and Levi's less apt to get in it.

Another nice feature that leads to a clutter free bathroom, is that we installed a GFI outlet under our sink. You can see it in the before photo. It is really nice because then I can keep the blow dryer, Dave's electric toothbrush, etc. plugged in at all times, inside our drawer unit. I am no longer tempted to just leave the blow dryer plugged in and out on the countertop like I used to (before kids!) since I knew I'd be using it again tomorrow... Now it stays plugged in inside the cabinet and I never have to deal with the cord. It's ready to go at all times.

Once again, we keep our bath towels on shelves in the Master Closet.

So there you have it. For about $7 I was able to totally re-organize our master bath cabinets. Now we know where everything is at! Who's going to do the same?

Marble Heated Floor Tutorial

In case you are wondering how we went about installing a heated marble floor in our Master Bath, I thought I would share the process with you. (And for more on the rest of the bathroom renovation, check out this post.)

When it came time to tile the floor of our master bath, my husband insisted that we find a way to heat it. We feel there is NOTHING worse than stepping out of the warm shower onto a freezing cold tile floor. We love the look of tile and knew that's absolutely what we wanted in there but we didn't want to have to jump from rug to rug just to be able to stay warm.

So, we looked into heating the floor. There are several different options but we ended up choosing an electric heat system. It was the simplest of the options and most economical for our application.

We purchased a Warm Tiles Cable Kit and Thermostat from Menards for around $180 to do our 5 x 7 bathroom (less than 25 sq ft of that would actually be tiled).

Here are the steps we followed:

1. Lay down backer board (as we would have done for any floor tiling project) so that you're not tiling directly to wood that can expand/contract like crazy and result in cracking grout and tiles within a small window of time. Believe us, this advice comes from experience!

2. Lay out heated floor cables per spacing instructions on the Cable Kit packaging. You can see that we would have 4 rows at 1" spacing following by a 3" gap then another 4 rows, etc. We were careful to lay cables no closer than 2" to any fixtures such as the toilet, sink, tub or walls. (You can also purchase already laid out Warm Tiles mats that take care of the spacing for you, but I believe the cable kit is a bit cheaper.)

3. Install wiring connecting the floor cables to a thermostat on the wall. You can even purchase a fancy schmancy programmable thermostat that will turn on, say at 5 a.m. so the tiles are nice and warm for you when you wake up in the morning. We did not do this. And we ended up running our Warm Tiles system 24/7 last winter. It really did not raise our electric bill by that much.

4. Bury the cables in self leveling cement. Admittedly, this was probably the most nerve wracking of the steps since we'd already had carpet laid in the adjoining master bedroom and walk in closet and I was concerned the cement would get in our carpet! We used painters tape and scrap lumber to contain it, in our case.

5. Lay tiles on top of the dried/cured self leveling cement using tile mortar. Then grout and seal away as normal, per instructions on packages. We installed marble tiles (that we found on clearance at Lowe's for $1 / sq ft I believe). Gotta love a clearanced item!

As a side note, before we officially mortared our tiles down, since they are a natural stone that varies quite a bit and our clearanced tiles had a lot of chipped corners, etc. we took hours and hours to lay them out ahead of time and decide exactly which tile we would place where. We even numbered them on the back with a carpenter's pencil: 1 thru 30 or something like that and also placed numbers on a sketched out grid on the cement so we could take the tiles outside, cut them to fit their location on the tile saw and then know exactly where they went when we came back in. It really helped us out.

We used 1/8" tile spacers on our floor.

Here's Dave mixing up the tile mortar in a bucket. You can buy already mixed up mortar but it is more expensive and actually has an expiration date.

About 3/4 of the way done! I was driving David nuts throughout this project. He finished it just a week or so before Levi was born so I was pretty antsy to get done.

Even though we used the spacers we realized the tiles were not always perfectly square, nor were the walls. We live in a fallen world! So Dave would sight down the grout lines to make sure they were staying straight and when they looked perfect he would use painters tape to also hold the tiles in position overnight till the mortar dried. There are probably not a lot of people that would be as picky as us, but what can I say? We're detail oriented people around here.

A few days later we were ready to grout the tile. Woohoo!

We also tiled above our shower and bullnosed 3 x 12 cut down tiles for a frame around the shower and a baseboard. Like this:

All in all, heating our bathroom floor was a relatively small expense in the whole scheme of things, especially considering it was not all that much space to begin with, and the heating along with the marble tile just makes our master bath seem so much more luxurious! There is not a day in the winter that goes by that I'm not thankful for it. I even turned it on this morning on the chilliest morning around here since May.

I'm linking this up to Homemaker on a Dime's Creative Blogger Hop & Party today.

A "Cosmetic" update that turned into more...

When I was about 3 months pregnant for Levi, we decided to tackle our Master Bedroom/ Bath. We wanted this space to be finished before the baby was born so we thought we'd play it safe and begin it 6 months ahead of time. After all, we only planned to do a little cosmetic update to this bathroom. We had ended up gutting and redoing the entire hall bath to the tune of about $2,500 and we did not want to spend that much on this bath. We wanted to keep it as cheap as possible.

We planned to replace the shower with the same type of set up that was in there. We would have just kept the existing one but our water heater had been corroding for a few years and dumping a ton of iron into our water resulting in anything that was subjected to hot water to take on an orange cast.

It was nothing to really get excited about but it worked and, like I said, I didn't want to spend much.

We also planned to paint / refinish our sink base, medicine cabinet. And put in new flooring.

But our friends Nick, Seth and Justin came over to help Dave one Friday night. And that's when we unearthed the nightmare....After they pulled up the bathroom linoleum we found this water damage.

The shower had been leaking. When we got into the crawlspace we saw why. When we had the home inspected before buying it, the inspector stated that the shower drain was leaking. We asked the previous owners to fix that before we bought it. They said they did. Apparently all they did was spray a GIANT puff of "Great Stuff Expanding Foam" all around the drain. Being naive 20 year olds who had no idea how to repair plumbing, we didn't even think to check their work. So 7 whole years later, there was some damage. The leaking drain had caused a bit of water damage on the surrounding floor joists and subfloor and had wicked up the walls and damaged the studs and drywall. We determined we would have to gut this entire area and start from scratch to be sure that we were eradicating all the water damage. So we tore out the walls and subfloor, sister up the damaged floor joists with new joists and then put in a new subfloor and walls.

So much for the budget friendly cosmetic upgrade!

Look at this bad boy surrounded by expanding foam.

And the wet floor joists.

In the photo below you can see the doubled up floor joists:

After a day of demolition, here's half of our house in a trailer in the driveway!

Since we basically had to rebuild this entire section of the house anyways, I set to work on determining a better layout for this area...

Here are some floorplans for you to see what I will attempt to describe.

We never liked how the bathroom was basically a hallway between the laundry room and master bedroom. Who likes bathrooms with more than 1 door anyways? Especially when they don't lock? It's always a bit nerve wracking to try to go to the bathroom in that scenario. So, we decided to close off the doorway to the laundry room and make this bath strictly a "master bath" off the "master bedroom" creating a lot more privacy.

We would eliminate the closet in the laundry room (on the right side) and use that space to make a larger Walk In Closet off the Master Bath. We considering creating access to the WIC from the bedroom but liked the idea of more wall space in the bedroom for furniture, etc.

We would then build a closet on the other end of the laundry room to enclose the water softener and put the plumbing that was coming out of the floor (the big black blob in the top left corner of the Before drawing) back inside the walls. This would also give us a place to tuck our coats, purses, etc.

We also wanted to determine a way to have a larger shower, possibly a shower/tub combination in this bathroom. We determined that a standard unit would be 60" long. And our bathroom was only 58" long. So we moved the wall between the bath and laundry room 1" into the laundry room (2" would have ran into the exterior doorway) and then framed the wall with 2 x 3's instead of 2 x 4's to get our extra 2" so we could fit a tub in.

This is what we ended up with in the bathroom after about 6 LOOOONG months of work (and I have no idea how much money....I stopped counting!):

It was finished about 1 week before the little guy in the picture above was born.

And please check back tomorrow morning for a step-by-step tutorial on how we heated our marble tile floor.

Hall Bath Renovation {Post #2} - Details & AFTER PHOTOS!

Hello, I'm back with the post all about how we redid our Hall Bath. For more info on this renovation check out my first post in the series here. In this post I'll try to reveal some of the details of how we got from here:

to here:

Bathtub Selection. There are about 50 in-stock bathtubs at a big box store to choose from. We had no idea how to choose the right one when we went to buy one for the Hall Bath. And then my very practical and wise husband, Dave, pointed out that we should just climb into the floor models and try them out. I have to admit that it feels extremely odd climbing into a bathtub in the middle of a Lowe's store with your clothes on and no water, but it works! You'd be surprised at the HUGE differences between bathtubs! We ended up choosing the widest, deepest tub available in stock at the time - this one. I think it was about $240.

{As a side note, a year later I chose a tub/shower combination like this one for our Master Bath. I'm very disappointed. We wanted an all-in-one tub/shower and this was the widest, deepest that I found in the store but it is not near as roomy as the Hall Bath tub that we chose. In the end it is not all that enjoyable to even take a long soak in the Master bathtub...When going to the trouble of putting in a new bathtub or shower be sure you get something you absolutely LOVE.}

Plumbing. So, back to the Hall Bath renovation, before Patrick headed back to his home 3 hours away, we took full advantage of his vast knowledge of all things plumbing related. He helped Dave to re-plumb the bathtub drain {which involved lots of crawling around in the nasty crawl space...ugh!}, sweat the copper pipes together for the new shower head, and install the new bathtub faucet. Here's a photo of Dave attaching the pipes to the new tub. {Side Note: Do not sit a new bathtub on top of your piano bench. It leaves scratches...part time piano teaching wives do not appreciate this...}

Patrick was very proud of his sturdy copper pipe installation. The old copper pipes for the bathtub faucet were not strapped to the studs and held secure in any way so they could move freely. Not cool...Here he is demonstrating how you can push and pull on the pipes and they don't move anymore.

{Please note the new insulation that I helped install between the studs. This was an added bonus of gutting the bathroom. The blown in insulation that had been in the walls had all settled to the floor resulting in a very drafty bathroom so we now had the opportunity to update that. I was proud to be participating in the project in some way...see, look how happy I was!}

Electrical. Next we decided to go ahead and install the ceiling fan/light. We had never had one of these. So the process involved cutting a hole in the ceiling to fit the box necessary for the fan. Then we vented it into the attic. And Dave had to go up in the hot attic and run wires to it and back down to a switch just inside the doorway. I remember being absolutely amazed that my husband could do this and wondering why we had lived in the house 6 years before he put a ceiling light in this bathroom. The change was absolutely amazing! I love well lit spaces. Especially bathrooms and kitchens. Zero eye strain here.

We had to cut a second hole in the drywall right inside the door for a double gang outlet (I wanted to be sure we could plug in his toothbrush, shaver, my blow dryer and curling iron all at the same time) and the current double gang switch box would now house 3 switches (1 switch for the fan, 1 for the ceiling light and 1 for the vanity light).

Here they are installed.

Drywall. Dave's friends Aaron & Jason came over one evening and helped hang the new sheets of drywall (we ended up re-drywalling the entire bathroom because we already had to do about 75% of it due to water damage and it was going to be next to impossible to make the remaining 25% look nice after our attempts at removing the wallpaper...hhh...) We hung backer board in the shower area since it could potentially be exposed to water and we were planning to tile over it.

Once the drywall and backer was all screwed in, we taped all the joints with mesh tape and mudded over them 3 times with the drywall mud that's already mixed up in a big bucket, tapering out as much as possible with each round of mudding.

Dave went ahead and installed the trim around the window when the mudding was done so that we would know where to start and stop the tile surround. {Yes, we have the infamous window in the shower dilemna... But tiling the surround allowed us to work around it and we caulked and caulked this area to avoid water damage issues in the future.}

Tiling. And then Dave's brother Patrick came back for a fun-filled Fourth of July weekend of tiling. Thankfully he had some tiling experience to share with us. But surprisingly it was not as hard as we had imagined. Here's the process in a nutshell:

1. Slather mortar (which you can buy pre-mixed in a bucket or the mix yourself powder kind in a bag) on the back of the tiles (or directly to the wall, but we found it's easier to get it about the same thickness by putting it right on the tiles)
2. Stick the tiles onto the wall or floor, position them with tile spacers and then let that dry
3. Remove the spacers and grout the joints.
4. Later you should seal the tiles.

Do all this according to directions on bags/boxes. And be sure to use caulk (which is more flexible than grout) rather than grout around the edges (for example, between the tiles and tub where there will be shifting and grout would just crack).

I believe this photo below shows what we had done after a long weekend of tiling, eating and talking with Patrick. (Food is ALWAYS involved in this family.)

{Side Notes: We used painters tape to hold the soap trays in place until the mortar holding them up dried. Also, we have since realized that we made an error in the floor tiling process. We chose to tile directly onto the wood subfloor to save a step rather than using backer board underneath the tile. After 2 years of the wood floor contracting and expanding, the grout is cracking and needs to be repaired. We believe the backer board would have eliminated this problem.}

And the rest of that summer was filled with a lot of really late nights of me and Dave tiling. This is a frustrated Dave around 2 a.m. one hot summer night when he just wanted me to hand him a tile I'd just cut to fit rather than take a picture. They say if your marriage can survive remodeling then it can survive pretty much anything.

Here's Dave, still tiling...

Looking back, the reason this tiling project took so long is not only that it was our first project but that we also chose one of the most complicated projects. We chose small 6" tiles that were cut on 45 degree angles along with other accent tiles. This resulted in nearly every tile being cut to fit some special way. Using 12" x 12" tiles would have saved many hours. In fact, that's what we ended up doing in our master bath the next summer. But still, the end result was gorgeous.

Grout. Finally, we moved onto the grout. I was adamant that we choose a darker grout color so that we would not have to scrub our grout lines forever and ever in the future to keep them looking nice and clean. Turns out that was a great choice for someone with Indiana well water. Here it pretty much looks like tar but it dried much lighter!

For someone who hates messes, this was pretty daring for Dave to do...

And here we are on our 7th Wedding Anniversary celebrating an almost done bathroom (about 3 months after the project began...)

Toilet. At this point, all we had left to do was set the old toilet back in place. This was the only thing we planned to reuse (however we planned to swap out the wood grain seat with a nice white one...) 

However, the old toilet had a hairline crack in it and when we tried to tighten it back down on the new wax ring the bottom of the toilet broke off. We turned the water back on to test it, but it began leaking all over the place. Out it came and back to Lowe's we went to buy a new toilet. We really had wanted to reuse our old toilet as we had seen my parents purchase a new low flow toilet in the 90s and only have headache after headache with it. But since our old one was not reusable we were forced to buy a new one. 

In the end, that was the best $120 we spent on the entire project. Our new toilet, the Kohler Wellworth, has a 4 star (our of 5) flush rating at Lowe's. Dave likes to say that you can "flush with confidence" with this new toilet. It works incredibly well and we have yet to deal with 1 clog 2 years later. TMI probably, I know. But it's the truth!

Here's the finished bathroom:

I purchased the shower curtain from Home Goods for like $9.99. And the vinyl insert for just $4.99. Home Goods is now my only source for shower curtains. I later got a tan rug from Home Goods as well. Gotta love that place.

Here's a nice shot of the new sink with tiled backsplash, lighting and medicine cabinet. We also installed a brushed nickel train rack (from Target) over the toilet for towels. It comes in handy when guests are visiting and using the bathroom. No searching around for towels.

And here's one last shot of the bathroom before renovation to remind you what we started with. Even though we went WAY over budget, I love our new bathroom and wouldn't EVER go back.

Do any of you have fun bathroom renovation stories? Are we the only ones who've ever grossly under-budgeted a project?
I'm participating in this party over at Homemaker on a Dime:

Also linking up to French Country Cottage Feathered Nest Friday.