Priming & Painting The Bathroom: a house log
When we last shared our hall bathroom adventures, we had took out the old wallpaper and were left with this:
Not only were the yellowed walls crying out for a fresh coat of paint, the mirror had some functional deficiencies. As in, John could not see his whole face when he looked into it. Simply about anything from the nose up was cut off, so while he could still perform is-there-something-in-my-teeth checks, if he was having a Something About Mary hair moment (uh, but not for that reason) he would not have even known.
Beyond having a too-small mirror, the other issue was that the light fixture drooped about 8″ from the area that it connected to the wall, so a larger mirror would be hard to cram into that space without bashing into the… legs?… of the fixture.
What did we do? We turned our frown upside down. Along with the light fixture. It is certainly not a permanent solution, but that in-the-meantime 180 degree spin freed up a lot more space to hang a larger mirror that we grabbed at HomeGoods. We enjoy the shape of the mirror and are not sure if we will paint the distressed silver-ish frame down the line, but for now it is a large improvement simply to see full faces. Look how much more of John you can see when he’s standing in the same spot!
We also made a few other swift updates, like removing this wooden toilet paper dispenser that we plan to replace with a plain oil-rubbed bronze one.
Then it was time to do something about the blue trim that ran around the bottom of the room and the bathroom door frame, so we taped off the slate to protect it.
It took four coats (two of primer and two of paint), so this is after about two primer coats I think.
While we were priming and painting, we chose the vanity could use some primer and paint as well. It was not strong wood (sort of reddish and dulled/scraped in a few areas) and there was an odor issue. As much as I scrubbed it I could not shake the scent, but I knew a pleasant coat of odor-blocking primer + paint would do the trick. I also thought it was a lively opportunity to bring some color into the room with a bright coat of paint on the vanity, paired with clean white walls. Sort of like this.
So on went the primer to the vanity as well as the trim (I did two coats of it on the inside as well, simply to squash that smell issue once and for all). This picture is simply of the first coat I think though.
Then it was onto those two coats of paint (this is coat #1). We used Simply White (OC-117) by Benjamin Moore in semi-gloss since we enjoyed how it came out on the trim upstairs that we already painted.
We painted both the walls and the ceiling the same white tone (Simply White in an eggshell finish to allow the trim to look glossy by comparison). I cut in and John rolled.
Two coats and a day later, we had this…
In person it is a pleasant clean-feeling difference. And although white is certainly more classic than risky, we think it’ll be lively to bring in color with art and a brightly colored vanity instead of simply defaulting to putting color on the walls.
We’d still enjoy to update things like the light and the sink along with possibly doing a more major upgrade down the line (grasscloth wallpaper? tiled accent wall? pedestal sink?). So you could call this first take on the hall bathroom Phase 1, which will simply be a combination of a few low-cost tweaks to make it more comfortable to live with until we save some money for a more “deep tissue” update later on.
It is certainly a far cry from what we began with a few weeks ago already…
Oh and you will notice in that second to last picture that we have began stripping some of the wallpaper in the foyer as well as attempting to de-blue all of the trim out there, but it is taking forever (this time we discovered a second layer of wallpaper and of course that crazy trim takes four coats) so we hope to be back with an update on those projects someday. You know, if we are not found hiding under the table muttering “blue trim…. blue trim… it is haunting my dreams… it is eating my soul…”
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P.S. Last night I swiftly snapped this instagram picture on the way back from our evening walk, and it one captures the green undertone in our teal door so it at last looks like real life. Leave it to the ol’ cell phone to take a more accurate picture than the fancy camera. #nofilter #instagrambeatsDSLR
