“I knew this bathroom was dated, but I bought the house anyway.” That is how the video opens, with the homeowner standing in the bathroom doorway, one arm stretched toward a shower alcove under a yellow arch with yellow tile inside it. A white caption on screen reads “this room is a dream, but it needs some work,” and a second overlay names the project: “Yellow Bathroom Reno.”
The creator is @maggiemcgaugh, who posts as Maggie McGaugh, and her caption says she is giving “this yellow bathroom a makeover.” She does not pretend the room is a blank slate. “It’s got some cool features,” she says, “but let’s renovate it. I love this look. So let’s demo. Just kidding.” Then: “This bathroom is a dream. We just need to tweak some things.”
The first thing she wants gone is the medicine cabinet. “We don’t need this medicine cabinet look. It’s so old school. But unfortunately, it’s in the wall,” she says, then calls for her husband, and the next line is “Okay, it’s out.” She adds that she now has to “figure out what to do” with the opening, and admits the way she is working is “not the right way to do things, but it always ends up okay.”
She also explains what the house was like when it came to her. According to the video, it was a rental for a year before she and her husband bought it, “so it just had a lot of caulking and white paint everywhere.” The previous occupants had also done “this faux wood finish on all the doors, which is hideous,” she says, and she painted over it.
The design plan is playful. “I want pink stripes, like, cartoonish, not perfect lines to kind of make it a little fun,” she says, so that they “pop against that yellow arch.” She is keeping the yellow rather than covering it, and the stripes are meant to work with it.
The most useful moment is the tile repair. “Sadly, there are a lot of cracks in the tile, but I found out you can use crayons and a hair dryer, and it will melt into there,” she says. Her verdict: “And look, it’s way better now.” She follows it with a smaller boast, “I did a better job than them with the caulk,” meaning the earlier work in the room. She also points to fixtures she calls “rusted and ugly,” then says they “look so cute against the cartoonish stripes.”
The video ends without a finished room. “I have a lot more to do,” she says, “so stay tuned for the reveal.”
Two steps follow from what she shows. Deal with the wall opening before you pick a finish: the medicine cabinet is recessed into the wall, so removing it leaves a gap she has to solve, and it pays to check what is behind a built in fixture before you take it out. And try her crayon and hair dryer fix on a small crack first. She says it melts into the cracks and looks better afterward; test it somewhere out of sight, since she only shows the end result.
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