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Designing A Bathroom Mood Board That Will Attract Renters
We can finally see the end of the tunnel on this rental bathroom renovation. It has been a journey! Here’s how it started:
We ripped out the old vanity, mirror, light fixture and 2 layers of floors. Then we realized we had to rip out the walls to replace the old cast iron plumbing stack that goes from the roof to the basement. There was a leak in the shower water lines as well so we had to replace those as well.
Once all the issues were resolved we were able to start patching the walls with drywall!
Now we’re ready to make our mood board for this space come to life! We’re going to install new LVP floors, add bead board treatment to the walls, new vanity & light fixture. I wanted to keep the design for this space clean and classic to attract a wide range of renters. What do you think of the mood board?
I did add the art, basket and plant to the mood board because I will be doing some staging of the bathroom for taking pictures for the rental listing. I may thrift the decor or take some things from my house but this is how I’m imagining the space!
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Sneak Peak of the Plans for our Guest Room
The blue room in our house is finally getting adressed! We barely ever go in here right now and it’s used for storage for camping gear and other things (like my wedding dress that’s been hanging in here for almost a year…). We desperately need to get on top of our storage. The closets in this house are small and maxed out. We also would love to have a room for guests to stay with us! The plan for this room should address both of those needs. This is the picture of the room from the original listing:
Dark blue paint, wallpaper ceiling border, and old carpet. Last summer I removed all of the carpet in here to reveal original hardwood floors:
We had our floors professionally refinished in October (read that blog here) and this room quickly filled up, see below how it looks now. Yikes!
I am so ready to tackle this room. We’re not doing anything crazy, just paint and new furnishings but I think the transformation is going to be stunning! We’ll be painting the walls a gray white (Snowbound by Sherwin Williams) and the trim will be a slightly contrasting gray (Repose Gray by Sherwin Williams). This is the same colors we painted the living room!
This is my mood-board so far for the guest room! I am going for neutral, cabin-cozy vibes. I’ll be adding some things I already own to this plan as well, like a vintage luggage rack. I’ll be starting this weekend and hopefully it will be a straightforward project! I can’t decide if I want to keep and repaint the window shutters or remove them completely. What do you think?
- Plaid Curtain Panel Light blocking and cozy cabin vibes
- Mushroom Wicker Lamp this whimsical lamp is so sweet
- Storage Cabinet we’ll be using this for camping organization! Great dupe of the Studio McGee cabinet at target
- Ikea Photo Frame classic black frames for a great price
- Pine Art I’ve been waiting to use this print in the house
- Woman Reading Art
- Loloi Area Rug
- Duvet Cover I’ve bought alot of duvets from Ikea over the years and they’re usually great quality!
- Schoolhouse Light I love the pop of gold on this vintage inspired light
- Black Side Tables made of wood & metal
- Bedside Fan every bedroom needs a fan!
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Vintage Audubon Bird Art Prints You Need In Your Home
I’ve slowlyyyy been curating spaces around our home. I finally finished the dresser in our bedroom that I started painting two years ago. Now that it’s done it’s a blank space for decor! I prefer home decor that is pre-loved, beautiful and doesn’t break the bank.
Downloading art prints from the public domain and printing it out to put in a thrifted frame is such a great and inexpensive way to decorate your home. There is a lot of open access art work out there and it’s kind of a headache to sift through it all. Kadie, the writer of A Home is Announced blog, wrote up a super helpful guide that I reference often for finding art prints on the public domain. She also has different curated collections of art that you can browse and download. Read her blog here.
I was searching for artwork for our dresser refresh (see that reel) and came across a bunch of Audubon bird prints! I decided on the whip-poor-will print for our bedroom. All I had to do was download, resize the image, and print at the store! I put it in a frame that I picked up at the thrift store. I’m in love with the way it turned out! It’s added so much character to our bedroom.
Today to save you the trouble I’m sharing 9 of my favorite Audubon prints that I found while searching for art for our bedroom. These would be perfect for a gallery wall or even a frame TV background. I’m thinking about printing a few to hang up in my dad’s cabin on his property in the woods!
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Refinishing our Original Hardwood Floors
The year is coming to a close which means we’ve been living in our little house for just over a year now. Crazy! We moved an hour west from Columbus, OH to Springfield, OH to be closer to my new office. This is our first single family house we’ve lived in and we’ve been excited to dream up and start tackling home projects.
When we got the keys last December the first thing we did was start to rip up the old, thick dark gray carpet that covered the first floor of the house. The hardwood floors in the dining room were exposed and we could tell it continued into the living room under the carpet.
Photo from the house listing Spencer was nervous of the condition of the floors and what scary things lay beneath the carpet… but I’m more of a “let’s just go for it and we’ll deal with whatever it is” type of person. We were both pleasantly surprised with the condition of the floors. They were stained an orange-ish red color and there were some pet and paint stains, but overall they were in great condition.
The first area of carpet we removed We moved in that same weekend so we didn’t have time to remove the rest of the carpet in the two bedrooms, 4 closets and the hallway of the first floor. We were also busy planning our wedding so this project was put on the back burner until July. We also didn’t want to spend the money to rent a dumpster to take away the carpet all at once or have it all piled up in the garage, so we removed it room by room and set out small amounts with our weekly trash pick up.
The night we got our keys! The final room to take the carpet out of was our bedroom. In order for us to remove the carpet in there, I had to remove the carpet from our finished attic and paint the floors up there to have as our bedroom (a whole other project see pictures of that here).
The hardwood floors on the first floor run continuously in the same direction from room to room so if they were going to be redone they all had to be done at the same time. This is why we finally decided that we wouldn’t be refinishing the floors ourselves. We thought about this for a long time and knew it was a project we could tackle ourselves, but we are living here so packing up moving all the furniture from the first floor and learning to refinish 800 square feet of floors would be too much of an undertaking. We also decided that it’s such an impactful feature of the house that we wanted them professionally done.
During the sanding process! After I did a bunch of research on local floor refinishers we got an estimate from Leininger Hardwood Floors and we ultimately decided to go with them. They fit us into their schedule super quickly. We had to work overtime to finish removing every single staple and every piece of the quarter round trim before they started sanding.
Worst of the stains in the hallway 
After sanding with no stain and water-based finish! The Leininger team was efficient and communicative. They started on a Monday and they were finished by Thursday afternoon. During the week they reached out to us that they were concerned about the pet stains that were too deep to be sanded out, and suggested that we might want to go with a darker stain to cover them better. The stains were most prominent in the hallway and one of the bedrooms. Our inspiration photos we fell in love with were all of natural and light floors. We decided to chalk the stains up to character and move forward with leaving the floors their natural color! After seeing the finished floors I have no regrets. Check out the floor reveal reel!
Before 
After! The cost ended up being $4.50 a square foot which is cheaper than new hardwood floors would be, and they’re original to the house which keeps the character of our 1940’s home intact. We did the natural wood color (so no stain) and we went with a water-based finish instead of oil-based. The water-based finish prevents the floor from yellowing over time unlike the oil-based finish and is just as durable.
We are so happy with the finished results! The floors have completely changed the house and it was totally worth the investment to hire this project out. This was the first big project we had to budget for before we could start with any of the other ideas we have for this place.
Before 
After
