The Master {Water Closet} Project

We have an awkward corner angle in our Master Bathroom Water Closet (which I found out is just a fancy way to say toilet room – haha, much more refine so I am sticking with it in this blog post!) Anyway, storage is an issue in our galley bathroom and this space felt like potential for something cute & practical!

Here are some “Before” shots – nothing fancy and super bleh:

I didn’t draw up a design but knew in my head kind of what I was looking to do… and figured it would evolve as I worked on it. First thing was installing brown board to do a board-and-batten treatment. I hung it the same height as in our master bedroom and kept the trim size/spacing similar as well to keep a cohesive look. I decided to paint it the same color (SW7675 Sealskin) too! This room gets tons of natural light from that small window, so I wasn’t worried about it being too dark:

In the awkward corner I decided to stop the wall treatment and instead of brown board I backed it with wood.

Then came time for some fun angle cuts for the shelves! I have zero experience with this type of thing, but decided the best way to tackle it was to just fold paper to fit in the space and make a template to cut the wood. This corner has multiple angles so doing the math just sounded like a headache and this “wing-it” approach was more my speed 😉 . I used left-over wood I had bought for another project (and randomly found in my garage…) I honestly don’t remember what it was called, but it came in a package and was 12″ wide and about 3/4″ thick. I had just enough to make six shelves… so six it was. I then used leftover sign “boarder wood” from my wood sign-making days for the shelf supports and pre-cut them with all the fun angles (which I am thankful I had a LOT of scrap wood for this part! because I did my wing-it methodology for this part too! Haha, Chris, my research everything-perfectionist-husband, would have died if he witnessed this part!). But once I had all the complicated cuts done – it was time to rock and roll.

Install was the best part. I decided the height of the shelves based on the items I wanted to place on each shelf.. and then glued the supports & tacked them in with my nailer. The shelves were set on top of the supports and then glued and tacked down as well:

I found I piece of wood in the garage that matched the top thickens of the board-and-batten and thought that would be a nice way to finish the top of the shelf and then used some left-over hemlock pieces to trim the sides of the shelves (haha, through this experience I learned my garage is a treasure-trove of random pieces of wood!). Anyway, here is what it looked like once I was done building it:

I am not going to lie, in my typically fashion this project stayed in this state for over a year. I got distracted with other projects and went back and forth a lot on what color to stain it. It was functional and so it didn’t really bother me that it stayed unfinished for so long.

Finally, after building some picture ledge shelves for my office and falling in love with the stain technique I used for that, I got the inspiration to finish these shelves the same way! Here was the “magic” formula:

1. Pre-Stain
2. White Wash Color Wash
3. Special Walnut Stain
4. Polyurethane

Before staining I decided that I wanted a basket to hide some of the bathroom items I didn’t want “on display.” But because this shelf had so many angles, I knew I couldn’t just go buy something… so back in my garage with random pieces of wood I went 🙂 to build a drawer-type bin. I used my paper fold method (pretty sure it’s a thing) to get the base shape and just started cutting, gluing and nailing things together. I am not going to lie, its rough and not something I would ever trademark… but it’s functional, sturdy (I used lots of glue 😉 ) and built completely from scrap wood so it cost me nothing!

| The Reveal |

And here is how it turned out!!

I could not be happier with how this shelf turned out! Once an awkward corner is now a beautiful [functional] built-in piece of furniture. I love it!! And it was the first project I did 100% solo. It has it’s imperfections – but honestly, I don’t even care!! It just inspires me that I CAN do these things and each time I try, I have an opportunity to learn more!

And of course, when I say I did this “by myself” I have mention I had a little shadow that followed me every step of the way… not sure I can say she was “helpful” but she kept me company 🙂

| Links |

There isn’t a ton to link here. All my pots were from HomeGoods and as mentioned all the wood was scraps from other projects. But here are a few decor things I used in the space!