When we bought our house, the previous owners had given the insides a brand new coat of white paint. I was a big fan of this because I love how open, bright and airy clean, white spaces look. Plus it gave us a totally blank canvas to work with as we thought about how to make this home our own. 

The one room though where the white looked more sterile than clean, bright and airy was in the small half bath on our first floor. So I decided we needed to give this room a bit of a refresh.

Our half bath is long and very narrow. You can see how awkwardly I have to jam myself in next to the toilet to take the before and after pictures to give you a sense of the room. 

It was screaming for us to do something with it, add some color and give it some life, but it took me over a year of living here to figure out what to start with. 

One day in the spring, I decided I was sick of looking at the white vanity, and needed to do something about it.

The existing vanity wasn't the fanciest, but it had one thing going for it that I wasn't ready to give up. It provides a massive amount of storage because it goes completely wall to wall. In a small city house, you do not give up extra storage for no reason.

So instead of ripping this out and replacing it, I decided to refinish it in a fun color and update the hardware to match the other fixtures in the room.

Also the existing hinges were a hot mess because someone had painted over them. Why, oh why is this a trend in our bathrooms? It's not that hard to remove the doors if you want to paint and salvage your hinges. So yes the existing hinges definitely had to go.

We had this funky backsplash behind the sink that reminded me a bit of sea glass, and I decided to draw on the nautical color scheme in choosing a color for the vanity.

We tested a few colors, then it was time to tape things off, take off the doors, and prime everything.

See what I mean about storage! Look at all those cleaning supplies we can fit in there!

I only ended up needing two coats of paint, which made this an incredibly fast job.

Reassembled and with new hardware.

In real life, I think the color looks more like this more overexposed picture. It's a bit like a sea-foam green, and I love the way it turned out.

The only other thing this room needed was another pop of color or two to balance out the tall white walls. I found a cute little plant and a painting that tied all the nautical colors together.

Don't mind me squished in next to the toilet again.

I'm really happy with this refresh. I'm still considering adding some shelves above the toilet, but for now this feels like a big improvement from the sterile bathroom we started with.