About Michael P. Reed

I’ve spent over a decade obsessively renovating, testing, and rethinking powder rooms — starting with my own and eventually everyone else’s. I’m not a licensed interior designer or a contractor. I’m a hands-on homeowner who’s repainted the same wall four times to get it right, and eventually started writing down what I learned so I’d stop making the same mistake twice.

How this started

It started at a friend’s housewarming party in 2014. A college friend had just closed on an older brick two-story, and mid-party I ducked into the powder room off the front hall, expecting nothing more than a toilet and a sink. Instead I found a small jewel box of a room: dark green grasscloth wallpaper, a pair of brass sconces flanking an antique mirror, and a pedestal sink that looked like it had always belonged there. It was the smallest room in the house, and the one I remembered most on the drive home.

I went home and looked at my own powder room — off my own front hallway, beige walls, a builder-grade light bar, a contractor mirror — with completely different eyes. That weekend I repainted it and swapped the mirror. It wasn’t very good. I did it again. Then again. Over the next few years, that one small room became the place I tested everything before committing to it anywhere else in the house: paint sheens, wallpaper types, vanity styles, lighting temperature, tile patterns.

Friends and family started asking me to look at their own powder rooms. I started writing down what worked, what I’d redo, and what I wish someone had told me before I wasted a Saturday and $80 on the wrong thing. That’s this site.

What I’ve actually worked on

I don’t invent a new project for every article — I draw from a handful of real rooms:

  • My own powder room — off the front hallway of my Columbus-suburb colonial, renovated in three phases: a 2014 first pass (paint, mirror, light fixture), a 2018 full gut (wallpaper, vanity, tile floor), and a 2023 refresh (hardware, art, lighting).
  • My in-laws’ basement powder room — added during a basement finishing project, under 20 square feet, with a corner sink and a wall-mounted toilet. My go-to reference for small-space work.
  • My daughter Emma’s first apartment half bath — a rental, done entirely with reversible changes: peel-and-stick wallpaper, no re-tiling. My go-to reference for renter-friendly and budget work.
  • That same college friend’s 1920s bungalow powder room — years after the party that started all this, I helped him fully redo it. My reference for historic and character-home work.
  • A neighbor’s builder-grade tract-home powder room — the same beige-and-brass starting point mine had.
  • And somewhere north of 20 powder rooms total, counting the smaller favors for friends, family, and neighbors along the way.

Why powder rooms, specifically

I think it’s the most underrated room in the house. It’s low commitment and high impact — the one place you can be a little bold, because guests don’t linger there long enough for a bold choice to wear on them. Most of what I write about here comes back to that idea.

What I’m not

I’m not a licensed interior designer, I’m not a certified contractor, and I don’t hold a design degree. What I have is over a decade of actually doing this: measuring, testing, redoing what didn’t work, and writing it down. Where something on this site touches code or structural work serious enough to need a real professional’s sign-off, I’ll say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise — see How We Test for how that works in practice.