$19 Bathroom Makeover

Since we're only going to be living in our new rental house for a year until we buy, I'm going to try really hard to only reuse furniture and decor items that we already own. After all, I'd much rather spend money on stuff for a house we own, especially considering just how expensive home goods are!

However, as a birthday present to myself, on Saturday I splurged and spent $19 + tax to decorate our hall bathroom (Is it weird that I was giddy to decorate in a new color scheme on my birthday? Ah, well, I was!). I was inspired by the bright blue tile in the shower.

 (Photo taken when we were touring the house before we moved in. The tile is actually a bit brighter blue in real life.)

So Saturday we headed to Target for a ton of cleaning supplies, and I picked up a few towels in a bright yellow color (bath towel for $5.99 and hand towel for $2.99), to play off of the bright blue, for a cheery, happy bathroom color scheme.

I searched high and low for a cotton shower curtain that fit the colors I was looking for (different hues of blue with hints of yellow preferably), but couldn't find anything I really liked. Plus, then I would have been spending between $15-30 on a shower curtain, and another $6-10 on the plastic liner, which isn't really that much, but considering it's only for a year, I was looking for cheap.

So I bit the bullet and bought this adorable striped vinyl shower curtain, no liner needed (sorry, can't seem to find it on the Target website to link to). And I'm actually really happy with it, the plastic is thick and durable, and it dries really quickly. Plus, the colors are perfect for what I wanted, the bright blues tie in with the bath tile, the darker, more muted blues to go with a bath rug I already had, and it has a few yellow stripes thrown in for good measure. And the $9.99 price was great too!

So enough talking about it, here is what the bathroom is looking like now:

(You can see the nice new tiling on the floor pretty well in this photo. All three of the bathrooms have recently been remodeled, and even though they're all pretty small, they're quite nice for an almost 40 year old house.)

(If we owned this place, I would probably paint the mirror frame blue, or at least the outer edge of the frame. Or maybe put in a medicine cabinet, because there's not much storage. But since I can't, for now I put a blue candle and holder on the basin, to bring some blue over to this side of the bathroom. Some wall decor would help balance the color distribution in the room too, which I may or may not get to in the next year.)

Here you can see some of my reused items, including the rug, chrome garbage can and tissue box cover. The chrome works nicely with the hardware on the new under-sink cabinet doors and the shower faucet. I think I might need a yellow rubber ducky for the corner of the tub!

And finally, two things about our new hall bathroom that make me happy, other than the bright colors: a small round skylight, and crown moulding! Seriously, I have a deep love for crown moulding, and it's in every room of the upstairs of our house.

So there you have it, my $19 bathroom makeover. Amazing what 3 new things can do to brighten up a bathroom. One room down, 11 to go!

Have you ever been able to reuse home decor items after moving, or do you prefer to start fresh with all new home goods?