That 70's Bathroom

I'm pretty sure I've whined about having bathrooms straight out of the 70's before...

But it's true!!

There's Harvest Gold fixtures and everything!  In the hall bathroom anyway (the master has the ever-lovely Avocado Green) which is one of the rooms I've been working on the past few days as I start to get stuff in shape for a visit from a wonderful friend I haven't seen since about the time we both graduated from high school 30 + years ago.  Sadly, for now we're stuck with the Harvest Gold so... I'm doing my best to rock that shade of awful!

Here's a couple of BEFORE photographs of this little bathroom I've all but ignored for the last 5 months.

I started with a good cleaning.  The bathtub, toilet, and sink are actually in pretty decent condition with all the muck scraped and scrubbed off... they're just uglier than sin.  Which is kind of funny since it's almost the same color as the bedspread in the bedroom that this bathroom services.  Once the tub and tile were clean, I hung an ivory shower curtain liner ($1 for the rings and $1 for the liner panel at Dollar Tree) and used some of the extra drapes from the bedroom (the windows at my old house were a LOT bigger!) around the bathtub.  It was tighter than tight getting the drapery panels on the shower curtain rod!!  But for a free fix, I can expend a little effort.

Better Homes and Gardens it's not, but I think we can live with the Harvest Gold a while longer now...

You can't see it in any of the pictures but we also traded out the wimpy little showerhead for a nice big rainfall style one.  And I spray painted a neon green mesh trash can (gotta love the stuff you can find at Dollar Tree!) white for this room.  Now to fresh up the towels, parcel out the wall decor between bed and bath, get some cute soaps and stuff and put down a fluffy rug to make this room ready for its AFTER shots!

Everything is pretty simple and basic still at this point... but I'm repurposing things we already own and the FREE part helps me appreciate what beauty there is.  The liner makes the shower functional and the curtains do add privacy and the beginning of some sense of the room being put together.  There's a fluffy rug on the floor that matches one of the shades of gold in the curtain that makes for a nice spot to step out of the shower.

Not too bad for just using the extra curtain panels from the bedroom?

Fresh clean towels are also out.  We're short on towel bars so... in both bathrooms the clean ones are just folded and kept on top of the toilet tank.  It works because we're also not flush on towels so all we own fits in that spot.

What's funny about these tan towels is that when we first looked at the house, the lighting in this bathroom was so bad we thought the tub, toilet, and sink were tan.  It wasn't until we'd moved and replaced the scary old light fixture that we realized everything was harvest gold...

I decorated the corner of the counter with shells from all over the world:  The conch and abalone were my Grandma Clarke's from a trip to the CA coast in the late 1940s.  The sand dollar posed on the lip of the conch and the smaller similar shell up front was collected by a cousin taking an adventure and travelling as an itinerant worker all around the country during the mid-1980s.  Most of the small tan and brown ones my dad gathered on the beaches of the Mariana Islands when he was there as a soldier during WWII.   And the really tiny shells and bits of coral on top are things I picked up relaxing on the beach in Antigua.

At some point we do want to re-do this bathroom with white fixtures and a smaller simpler vanity cabinet.  Not fancy even then, just brought into the current century.