After the medicine cabinet and new light fixture went in, suddenly the towel bars started looking a bit… well-used, I suppose. And when I removed them in order to paint the bottom half of the bathroom, it seemed like such an eyesore to re-install these chrome bars, with their paint spatters, their rubbed-off edges, their blockiness. So I got new towel bars. I was initially hoping to get ones that would mount to the old hardware, so I wouldn’t have to drill new holes in the wall, but it turns out there’s no such thing as standard mounting hardware for towel bars. So I went ahead and drilled new holes, spackled and painted to cover the old mounting areas, and Dremeled when I forgot to measure twice, drill once. So now I have a 24″ towel bar, an 18″ towel bar, and a custom 23.25″ towel bar. And a couple small pieces of towel bar material. But my towel bars are lovely and even match my mirror’s edges. Now I just have to go back and buy the toilet paper holder to match.

Oh, and I don’t think I’ve written about this yet – the wall I was painting? At first we thought it was some odd board, made to look like tile, that you could then paint whatever color. But no, as I was working on the medicine cabinet project, I discovered that if you open the vanity and look behind the sink plumbing, you can see the layers of history of this wall… and once upon a time, there was some very nice pale blue tile on the entire bottom half of the room. Which someone then painted over in a very intense shade of blue. Really really bright blue. I almost want to see a photo of the bathroom at that point in its life, because I have no idea how that color would’ve worked at all. And then it was whited out with incredibly matte white paint. Which is what I’m painting over with glossy white paint. The sad thing here is that the original tile color isn’t that far from the color I’ve now painted the top half of the room. Poor tile. Really, who decides “I hate this tile… I’m going to paint over it!”? When you hate the tile, you take it down and replace it with tile you do like. Or take it down and paint the wall that’s left behind. I’m amazed the paint even adhered to the tile at all.