master bath restyle #1: hooks! lovely hooks!

Spring has officially sprung here in the Pacific Northwest...the rhododendrons and hellebores are blooming and the cherry trees are beginning to wake up as well.  So naturally I started itching to do some refresh and wake up projects in my own home.

who's with me? you're feeling it too, right?

I began this year's journey in the master bathroom with a super simple inexpensive project: replace the towel bars with hooks. Before I frighten you with the before picture, here's the lovely after shot.

[after: lovely hooks]

Ok get ready for the before. My apologies for the dark photo, our bath is on the east side of the house and there's a forest behind us, so tons of natural light kind of eludes this room. Especially in March!

[before: less than lovely messy bars]

So these horizontal racks have always bugged me. [A]: you can see there isn't even enough room for 3 towels without them overlapping, and [2]: unless you hang them just right it simply looks messy. also, I'm convinced that they don't dry properly when they're folded in half like that.

Behold the genius of hooks! They're a gorgeous dark bronze with copper tips and edges [look closely at the round part and you can see the copper! yum]. Unfortunately my Home Depot didn't carry the bronze finish in the store so I had to order them but they were well worth the wait.

[after: lovely hooks]

I purchased a wide piece of MDF from  Home Depot and painted it to match our existing moulding. After cutting it down to 51 inches to fit the space, we screwed it to the wall. Normally we would've nailed it so as to have only small nail holes to fill, but we were lucky in that there were wall studs behind 4 out of 5 of the places that we wanted to hang the hooks. So we used long drywall screws behind 4 of the hooks, sunk them in and just placed the hooks over top. Joy!

now we have 5 places to hang towels, washcloths, and PJs [ahem, hear that dear? you no longer have an excuse to toss your PJs on the floor when you get in the shower!]

materials:

white MDF moulding: $8

hooks: $4.97 each [Liberty Contempo Pilltop Bronze and Copper]

paint: Kelly-Moore Dura Poxy+  untinted semi-gloss [teeny tiny amount used from our existing quart sized touch up can; less than $1]

drywall screws [less than $1; scrounged from the garage]

sweat equity: minimal

I keep finding excuses to go into the bathroom and marvel at these lovelies.
So what are you all itching to work on this Spring? I've only got a million more little things on my list...