My husband & I bought our first home a little over 3 months ago.

We were very fortunate to find a house in good condition. The house did not need any major work – it just needed to be updated/customized to our liking.

It’s a pretty typical house for our area – 1970’s construction – that came complete with 70’s style bathrooms.

If you don’t know what I mean, let me just show you the before picture of the guest bathroom…

Yep. It’s blurry, but your eyes are not deceiving you.

Here are some close ups.

You can see why we had to remodel this bathroom immediately.

Apparently in the 70’s in South Florida, bathrooms came in funky patterns & 3 colors: mustard yellow, light blue, & pink. Our master bathroom is light blue – we can live with that for now.

There was just one issue my husband & I had when deciding what to do about this bathroom: money. We had a couple of other projects going on & didn’t want to spend a whole lot on this bathroom. Plus, the previous owner had replaced the toilets in both bathrooms before selling the house.

Yes, that’s right, the toilet in the pictures is brand new. The previous owner special ordered a new mustard yellow toilet. Bless his heart.

I was not about to get rid of a brand new toilet. I knew there was some way I could work around this.

I also knew I couldn’t be the only one with this problem, seeing as how this really was a popular bathroom color back in the day. I started searching online for inspiration. In my searching, I came across this post from Remodelaholic. They did a GREAT job on that bathroom! I loved the idea of embracing the yellow & using it as an accent color with some molding across the wall.

Our bathroom didn’t need quite as much work as they put in to theirs. We just had to demo ours a little bit first. That was the fun part!

Our friend lent us some demolition tools that made it really fun!

We removed the tile floor, sink & vanity, mirror, light fixture, towel bars, & toilet paper holder. We also removed the sliding glass doors from the tub. One thing we did not mean to remove was the shower tiles – but when we were removing the doors they all started coming down from both sides.

Oops.

Luckily, we were able to salvage them & reattach.

Once everything was removed, the bathroom looked pretty rough.

Before we did anything else, we laid new tile. My husband & I fell in love with the tile that looks like wood. The bathroom isn’t very big, so a couple of boxes of tile from Home Depot did the trick. My husband became well acquainted with the tile saw we rented. Instead of removing the toilet we tiled around it, which meant he had to cut some interesting pieces. He handled it like a pro!

I love how it turned out! My mother in law helped us out by grouting the floor & shower tiles. I repaid her in shrimp & grits. 🙂

As you can see in the demo pics, there were some holes in the walls after we took everything down. The walls in this house are plastered – another 70s trend apparently. It actually helped us out, though. After using a couple of drywall patches & spackle, the walls look good as new (in a DIY home improvement sort of way)!

Once the spackle was dry & sanded, we painted. Using the top of the shower tiles as a reference to where we wanted the molding to go, we drew a line with pencil & painted the top of the wall a bright yellow. I had found a shower curtain at Target with an ombre floral pattern – so I wasn’t too concerned with the different shades of yellow, knowing that the shower curtain was going to tie everything together. We painted the rest of the wall white, & once everything was dry we put up the molding with some adhesive.

Then came my husband’s time to shine. He installed the vanity & sink, the medicine cabinet, & the light fixture. I am so blessed to have married such a handy guy!

We decided on oil-rubbed bronze fixtures. When I first saw that you could replace your toilet handle, I thought it was a bit silly. But after we had installed everything & put up the new towel hooks, the silver colored handle stood out like a sore thumb…

It cost $14 – money well spent!

I didn’t bother with the shower fixtures, though. They are behind the curtain!

The only thing left for me to do was decorate.

We had these two canvases up at our last place that ended up matching perfectly in this bathroom!

The other wall originally had these two old-timey borderline-creepy pictures. Like the kind of pictures that, if this was a horror movie, would move when you weren’t looking. So I discarded the pictures, kept the frames, & made my own bible verse prints.

Voila! The bathroom is complete.

All in all, we completed this bathroom in about 3-4 days with about $400. I think it’s the room I’m most proud of when you consider the before & after.

It was a good bit of work, but now I know that my hubby & I can handle home improvement projects together. I love the yellow & oil-rubbed bronze combo!

Someday we might replace the tub & toilet, but for now I’m very pleased with how we were able to work around it!