HOME STAGING: Ugly Bathroom

This is one of the uglier bathrooms you will ever have the misfortune to see.  We had to try to make it look less scary to potential home buyers.  Here's how it turned out, and some tips if you have a similar scary room.

TIPS:
1. Clean it!  It's amazing how different things look just being thoroughly cleaned.
2. Make sure there is nothing obviously broken or missing.  We had been missing a light bulb for YEARS.  Finally made that easy fix.  Duh!
3. Freshen it up, even if you can't replace it completely.  We had a broken shower door, so we decided to toss the door, which fell off if you opened it.  We added a shower curtain, which makes the shower functional again, and looks nicer than the old door (or at least distracts from it!).  A new bath mat would help also.

REALLY BEFORE:
This was how this bathroom looked when we bought the house.  Apparently it didn't scare us off!  Notice the DISGUSTING toilet and the really bad area around the shower.  This was the only shower in the house.  We had to use this thing daily for months.  Ugh.

BEFORE:
Still pretty gross, but a few cheap changes helped.  We painted some of the trim white, we replaced the toilet with the one from the upstairs bathroom when we remodeled that room, we caulked around the shower.

 "New toilet"

 Still gross shower, but at least caulked (needs cleaning, though!)

Classy missing lightbulb

Shower door off and broken (it was working for the first few years we owned the house, but bit the dust while I was playing with Gavin in here last year)

Lovely mildewed trim - you want to buy this house, right???

AFTER:

 Shower curtain looks nicer than a gaping hole in the shower stall

 Ah, there's the missing light bulb!

 Still not perfect, but considerably better and not such a red flag

We painted over all the nasty caulk on the shower stall down onto a taped line on the floor to get a clean line.  Big improvement.

UPDATE:  In the end, just before our first showing, we decided to move this shelf unit we had behind the door over to the side of the shower stall.  It masked the ugly areas and made the bathroom seem bigger since the door could now open flush to the wall.

AFTER AFTER:

Don't you want to buy this house??

UPDATE:  Just to show that this method must have worked at least a little, after two weeks of being on the market, we have an approved offer for almost our asking price (which we raised above our actual goal just to give some wiggle room for a buyer's offer - so we got above our actual goal price!).  So, worth a try if your home is on the market or will be soon...