Remodeled Spare Bathroom With Painted Stripes

Remodeled Spare Bathroom With Painted Stripes
contributed by Our Home In Progress

Here are the before & afters of our spare bathroom. It has come so far from it’s original state. I seriously cannot believe its the same room! Remember, we had to rip walls out, take off awful wallpaper borders, struggle with the stripes, and replace pretty much everything? Well, it was worth all of it! It is one of my favorite rooms.

*Forgive the photo quality, my battery started dying so the flash/colors came out somewhat off.

Before

After

Our Bathrooms were hideous when we bought the house. I scoured them just to get them fit for us to use during construction. Most of the time, I still refused to use them. They made me absolutely sick. We knew the spare bathroom had some water & mold damage in the walls and just to be safe, we ripped our both bathrooms down to the wood beams. Thank God we did, because we found TONS of mold damage in the walls. The contractor’s that built the house used regular sheet rock instead of Green Board.

My first order of business was buying new toilets. Blame it on the pregnancy hormones, but the thought of using someone else’s toilets made me want to lose my lunch!

So we decided to concentrate on the hallway bathroom and get that done first so that we had at least one decent bathroom.

Fast forward a few months and I was finally ready to decorate the space. I was inspired byYoung House Love’s Powder room and by a few other striped bathrooms on Rate My Space.

I wanted something a bit darker than what YHL used (I wanted the color to match the seashells that we collect on our vacations.) I headed out to Home Depot, and I came up empty. Nothing was exactly what I had envisioned in my head. I wanted neutral, but not to light, I wanted it to stand out without being too bold.

I ended up finding a pretty, dark, camel color in the OOPS paint at home depot ($1) and decided to mix my own color. I used some Behr pure white that we already had and mixed it with the oops paint until my little heart was content. I did it a few times until I got the exact color I wanted.

Garrett told me after this project that under no circumstances will he EVER do striped walls again. It was such a pain, and since he’s a bit of a perfectionist, this project nearly killed him.

We did one “test” wall to see how it would come out, and the paint bled through the tape (due to the texture on our walls.) We repainted it white and went to plan two. The guy at home depot told us that we needed to use FROG tape. So we tried the frog tape and it bled through again. I went searching online and I found several suggestions on yahoo that said to use painters caulk.

So, Garrett tore everything out of the bathroom (again), measured and drew out the lines.

He then put a line of painter’s caulk where the tape would be and spread it with his finger. He put the tape over the painter’s caulk and then caulked over the edges of the tape to create a seal. We let this dry for a few hours (6 or so) and then went to work painting.

Finally, there was something I could do! Garrett took a break while I painted the stripes.

We let them dry overnight before removing the tape. Needless to say, we were so nervous. Thankfully, the method worked and the stripes were perfect! We also found that using this method, the blue paint tape and the frog tape worked exactly the same.

I love them so much that I kind of wish he would change his mind on his whole “I’m never doing stripes again” policy.