Our house has 4 bathrooms, but the master bath was the only one anyone ever felt comfortable using.  The powder room on the main floor has a window directly in front of the toilet that’s also right next to the front door and the curtains the previous owners had up didn’t do much for privacy.  The bathroom that’s connected to the laundry room on the second floor (the one that’s supposed to be used by the occupants of the non-master bedrooms) had a door that locked, but wouldn’t latch and always stayed a little bit open.  And the bathroom on the third floor is located in a dormer with a floor-to-ceiling window right next to the toilet and nothing more than a see-through lacy shade to provide privacy.

Since we moved in to the house, we’ve slowly been making progress on making the bathrooms a little more usable.  We started by hanging a wooden blind in the main floor powder room that’s shut most of the time to provide privacy and last week, we hung a similar blind in the third floor bathroom.  A couple of days ago, we also decided to tackle the project of fixing the door to the laundry room bathroom so that it will successfully close and latch.

We figured out that the problem preventing the door from latching to start with was that the bolt was hitting the strike plate about an eighth of an inch too low.  To fix it, we unscrewed the bottom hinge for the door, placed some plastic spacers behind the hinge to build it out from the door frame a little and then screwed the hinge back in place.  It took us a couple tries to get the right thickness of spacers behind the bottom hinge, but we were eventually able to build it out so that the door was raised enough to be at the right position for latching.  We then scraped some of the excess paint off of the strike plate (the previous owner painted everything and there were big runs of dried paint that made it so that the door had to be pulled closed with some force for it to actually latch) and we now have a working door again!

The spacers we used were plastic strips that had come with some of the blinds we hung up earlier this week.  They did the job just fine, but we’ve also used cardboard in the past and it almost seems easier to work with because you don’t have to pre-drill the holes for the screws.  The screws in the bottom hinge were a little short to start with and, now that we’ve built it out with spacers, even less of them is actually holding the door to the frame, so I think we’ll pick up some longer ones the next time we’re out, but, for now, I’m so excited to have a bathroom door that shuts, latches, and locks!

I’d like to update the hardware on the kitchen cabinets to something that doesn’t stand out quite as much as what we have now.  I think I’d like to do something with an antiqued finish since it seems like it would fit better with the rest of our house than something real shiny or modern, but I was surprised at the lack of options at the hardware stores.  It seems like most of the ones with an antiqued finish also have some unusual shape or theme to them … or they’re just too rustic.  I found a couple last weekend that I liked, though, so I brought them home to see what would work best and I also tried just taking the back plate off of our existing hardware to see what that would look like.  Here’s a photo of all of the options:

The handle on the right door is how all of them are now, with a shiny handle and back plate.  The right drawer is the same handle without the backplate.  The ones on the left are the new ones I bought to see how they’d look.  I think I’m leaning toward the one on the left drawer the because it updates the finish to something that blends in a little more, but is still big enough to cover most of the area on the cabinets that’s discolored because it was covered by the back plate.  It seems like the discoloration starts to fade after a while, so I’m not real worried about it, but I don’t really like how the narrower one on the left door shows so much of the discoloration now.  I do like the current handle without the backplate a lot better than with it, but I think I prefer the darker finish after seeing it against the cabinets.

When we installed the new binds in the kitchen a couple of weeks ago, we had to take down the old curtain rod that had been there so there would be room to mount the shades.  The old curtain rod was one of the standard white metal ones that was too small for the rod pocket of the valance I’d hung there and I’d been thinking about getting something different anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal that it had to come down.

After we started looking at our options for decorative rods, though, we quickly realized that there weren’t many options with small enough finials on the ends to fit between the end of the window and the corner of the room.  The only rod we found that was long enough for the window, had small enough ends to fit past the corner, and had brackets with enough clearance for the shades was this Allen + Roth “sheer rod set” at Lowe’s.  I saw it online first and was pretty excited to also find it at our local store, so I bought a curtain rod and a couple sets of the clip rings in the iron bronze finish last weekend.

When I got the curtain rod home and started unpacking it to hang it on the wall, I was pretty disappointed in the quality.  The finish flaked off of one of the mounting brackets as I was unpacking it.  We decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of exchanging it, so we went ahead and mounted it with the now shiny silver side facing up where we figured no one would ever see it.  We also figured out pretty quickly that the finish scratches off of the rod really easily just during the process of getting it hung because you have to slide the entire length of the rod through the mounting brackets and the brackets are rough enough on the inside where the set screws go to take the finish off.  If we had it to do again, I think putting a piece of tape on the inside of the brackets before sliding the curtain rod through would have made a big difference.

Once we had the curtain rod installed, I hung the valance from the clip rings (which the finish was also flaking off of), but had terrible luck adjusting it so that it didn’t look like a short shower curtain hanging above the kitchen windows.  Today I finally decided the rings had to go and took the whole thing down again to get the rings off and hang the curtain directly on the rod instead.  Because the mounting brackets are solid circles around the poles, I wound up having to cut holes in the rod pocket of the valance to accommodate the mounting brackets, but once I got it all positioned right on the rod again, I think it looks a lot better.  I’m not sure if I didn’t spend enough time on it or didn’t have enough clips or what, but I wasn’t able to get it to look anything like any of the pictures I’ve seen that I thought looked good … or even as good as what you see on the home shows on tv.  What a disappointment!

I think next time we’re in the market for a new curtain rod, we’ll be trying a different brand, but at least we have curtains up in the kitchen again … and it’s nice to not see the tops of the shades anymore …

Slowly, but surely, we’re covering up our bare windows at least enough that the neighbors can’t watch everything we do at night.  Over the last few days, we finally got around to installing the blinds I ordered several weeks ago for the laundry room and the bathroom on the third floor.  It’s so nice to feel like we have a little privacy now!

For the laundry room, I ordered custom Levolor Mark I Cordless aluminum blinds to match the ones we have in the other bedroom that faces the front of the house.  They went up without too much difficulty, but the mounting brackets are one of the trickiest designs I’ve ever seen.  I think we may have problems when it comes time to take them down.  They’re spring loaded and the blind is hung by clipping the front of the head rail on to the bracket and then pushing back to compress the spring enough that the back of the head rail can clip on.  We learned the hard way with a couple of the blinds in the other bedroom, though, that if you don’t push just right to release the blind when taking it down, the front of the headrail can become clipped in the wrong place making it about impossible to get down.  I’m not sure what the reason is for this design – we’ve ordered other shades from Levolor in the past and they’ve come with much more normal, easy to operate mounting brackets.  Hopefully, though, we won’t have any reason to take the shades down in the near future.  Besides the awkward brackets, though, I like the shades a lot.  They stack pretty small at the top of the window and could easily hide behind curtains (if we ever put any up) and they provide some much needed privacy for the bathroom/shower that’s connected to the laundry room … although I’m sure our neighbors will miss watching us walk around in towels in the morning.

For the bathroom on the third floor, I ordered a Natural Basswood blind (in white) from JCPenney.  The bathroom is tucked into one of the dormers and it’s a rather awkward space to start with.  To be able to fit the plumbing in for a toilet, it sits on a small step and the window is nearly floor to ceiling.  To make it worse, the shade that was there before (I forgot to take a picture before we took it down) was a pleated lace shade that could easily be seen through and it wasn’t quite wide enough for the window.  All of these things combined made this a bathroom that no one liked to use.  The new blind was easy to install, fits the window perfectly, has a much cleaner look, and provides a lot more privacy than what we had before.  It’s still a funny little bathroom, but it’s a lot nicer to have the option of privacy now.