The Harry Potter Bathroom

Our second bathroom is in the basement. It’s a small, but very handy room with a sink, a toilet and a huge shower. It happens to be underneath of the stairs. Because it’s a “room under the stairs,” it was nicknamed the “Harry Potter Bathroom” by my aunt.

We loved the location of the basement bathroom since we have a bar/pub-style basement, when we’re hanging out down there, it’s convenient and there is direct access from the back door, down six stairs to get to it… which means it’s accessible for guests at outdoor gatherings without them needing to take off their shoes and hike up a floor and a half to use the bathroom.

Convenience aside, there was one thing wrong and one thing creepy about the bathroom:

• It didn’t have a mirror. (I’ve lived without a bathroom mirror before, but the room really needed one)
• It had far too many lobsters.

The bathroom was outfitted with a pretty modern light fixture that fit our tastes, but did not play well with the pirate ship feel, so we made the bathroom fit the light.

In order to start the facelift at home, we got Piranha wallpaper removing spray gel that provided the least messy way to remove the borders from both bathrooms. The spray gel didn’t run down the walls and get all over and the borders just slid off the wall leaving nothing stuck to the paint below. If you use it to remove wall paper, you need to score the paper before spraying and scraping. For two bathrooms’ worth of border, we only used a quarter of the bottle. For the Harry Potter Bathroom, that was perfect because we decided not to repaint this bathroom. ( DIF gel spray is a similar product that came highly recommended to me for this project, however Home Depot only had Piranha.)

The lobsters, old shower curtain (+hooks) and toilet lid cover disappeared. I fixed a small problem with the flooring, reorganized everything under the sink and gave the bathroom a scrub while I was at it.

To finish off  the bathroom I:

• Hung a basic, square-framed mirror ($6 from the Lowe’s college collection)
• Put up the polka dot shower curtain from the 2nd bathroom at our old apartment with stainless circle hooks
• Hung a painting that Brad made a very long time ago
• Added a night light, making it easier to find the light switch for this bathroom (someone has actually hiked up all the steps before just because she couldn’t find the light switch!)

In total, we spent $6 on this bathroom because we had everything else (including the night light and wall paper remover). I was able to complete the whole “project” by myself in an evening.

One other tiny thing I loved about this bathroom was the crystal doorknob. My grandfather had doorknobs like that in his house.