powder room thrifty | A Pretty Window DIY and Finishing

Powder room thrifty — a quick note to anchor this piece for readers.

Powder room thrifty: Quick notes

This year I’ve been moving room to room, revisiting previous DIY projects and adding more character and decor details. They aren’t always HUGE updates, but it’s been fun to go back and tweak what I started years ago.

This week I’ve been tackling some small additions in our powder room.

Shortly after we moved in, I installed board and batten trim around the bottom two thirds of the walls in this room. A while later I changed out the wallpaper around the top of the walls:

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This colorful Juniper Forest wallpaper was such a beautiful addition! Smaller rooms like bathrooms are a great place to do something fun and be a little more daring with decor.

Back when I first installed the board and batten, I didn’t add a couple of small details that I decided needed to be addressed.

When I replace our baseboards throughout the house, I don’t always add shoe molding or quarter round. I like a simpler look without that added trim, and if I install anything I prefer shoe molding because it has a thinner, smaller profile.

But if you looked close enough in our powder room, you could see the openings where the hardwood flooring didn’t extend all the way to the wall, so some additional molding was needed:

Next up, I wanted to address the vertical molding I initially installed under the window trim:

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When I first installed this board and batten look, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to trim out the window, so I just angled the trim for the time being.

Eight years later, it was finally time to address it! 😂 I used a sharp razor blade to score the existing caulk on each side of the wood:

And then carefully removed it, since I was reusing this piece.

I used the same process to remove just the bottom portion of the window trim. I used some scrap from the garage to create a Craftsman trim look like I’ve done on a lot of our windows and doorways. It really beefed up the bottom of the window, and gave the vertical trim a spot to butt up against. While I was working on the window, I decided to change out my DIY privacy film I installed years ago:

This is such a great and cheap way to make a window like this opaque. Over time, the contact paper tends to shrink up a bit, so my original plan was to replace it with the same product.

Because I was using what I had, I didn’t have a piece big enough to cover the whole window width. If you look closely, you can see where I cut two pieces to meet up along that middle mullion in the window.

I loved the look so much, I ordered one more small roll and did the same to the top portion of the window as well. (It looked odd with just the bottom covered anyway.)

We loved the look of it so much, I took the roman shade down. Now this window is like a piece of art in the room:

Here’s a darker pic that shows the design on the window. You can also see how the new trim on the bottom of the window flows so much better now:

I absolutely love how this window turned out! So pretty.

My final update was adding 1×2 wood trim around the top of the board and batten molding:

It’s a small thing, but it really finishes off this trim work. It finally looks complete — I should have done this years ago!

I spent about $40 in materials for these small updates. So worth it to give this room the finishing touches it needed!

Now the gray vanity is feeling a bit sad…if you give a mouse a cookie. 😂 There’s a bit of this color in the wallpaper, but I feel like it’s looking out of place. I’m considering painting the vanity a beautiful green color. What do you think?

I would pull a color from the wallpaper for sure.