Home Improvements!! the Bathroom edition v.2.

I have renovated a bathroom once before in my life, and so this whole process was not that daunting.

We have a room in the basement that is ready for a bathroom. We use it for storage, and it's pretty full.
It is actually frustrating not having a bathroom in the basement, though. When you're working out it would be nice to get water and use a bathroom without having to go upstairs, and I would like a place to do handwashing. At first we were going to put in a whole bathroom, and then I said - why?! We need the storage space more, and what do two people need with 3 showers in one house? So we decided that we would not put in the shower and would install "standard and bracket" shelving for storage. I figure this is a good place for the seasonal decorations (read: Halloween!), and some personal archived things that you don't want in the garage.

Here is a photo of the room used for 100% storage - this would be the stuff of the previous owners.


And here it is as our "locker room style" basement powder room:


We will be installing shelving on the back wall in the next couple weeks.






We decided to go ahead and have our GC/handyman contractor, Ryan, do the main-floor powder room changes too.
We wanted this bathroom to look like it was in Africa.
Here's the powder room at the Rhino Post Lodge, which has the feel we were going for...




Here's a kinda before photo from the home inspection prior to purchase:





Our renovation:


We will be putting up photos of animals from our South Africa trip on the wall you see when you walk in.


Eric will be building a shelf to go above the toilet and hold a towel.
I want it to look like this (not white, natural wood... thank you Martha Stewart Living):





LOVE the tile! hard to capture the color in an artificially-lit bathroom.

And there you have it...
slowly, we plug away at making this house more of the home we want it to be.