The Best Gray Paint Color: Rockport Gray: a house log

Yup, our formerly beige-on-beige master bathroom is officially rocking Rockport Gray. And we enjoy it as much as we did when we saw it in this kitchen. Here she blows without the shower curtain hung back up yet (we snapped some pics with it up as well, which we will get to in a second):

But let us back up. Before applying two coats of paint to our bathroom (we shared our little mood board for the room yesterday) first we had to remove that unused-shelf-and-towel-bar (read why we did not use them here)…

…to make way for some art on the only wall that is not tiled nearly all the way to the ceiling. So we did (using an allen wrench kit like this).

And then we hit some metal anchors that were ripping the drywall apart when we took out them (the bathroom is part of an addition from the seventies, so the walls are drywall instead of plaster, which would have crumbled even more likely).

So after learning our lesson with one, we chose to do this instead:

Yup, I banged them into the wall a bit with a hammer and simply spackled right over them for a pleasant seamless look. Here is what it looked like before I sanded it smooth (pardon the especially blown out picture, I forgot to white balance).

See how it is sort of rough in the middle of this picture? After using a sanding block it was good to go (that is my pointer, since a sanding block stays pleasant and flat like the wall, instead of being floppy like a loose piece of sandpaper). The spackle we used was Dap Crackshot (with the blue lid), but we hear stores sell low-VOC spackle now so we are itching to try that out soon.

Once the walls were spackled and sanded it was time for paint (note: priming after spackling is not a bad idea but we have skipped that step on a few occasions without any issue, so perhaps paint formulas are getting good sufficient to cover well on their own these days?). Anyway, on went Rockport Gray by Benjamin Moore (we first saw it in person in Portland when we House Crashed this casa and totally fell in love). We only needed a quart of semi-gloss, and we picked up Natura paint (since that is BM’s no-VOC line). The room needed two coats since it is semi-gloss paint in there (which is so slick that painting over it nearly consistently results in a terrible looking first coat…

… but then the second coat looks strong.

So here is the room all painted with the shower curtain back up. Of course I did not get to make the cream trim bright white before painting the walls, but I will do that soon sufficient (I have painted walls and then trim a bunch of times so it is not too bad of an order for a painting fool like me):

Here is a flashback “before shot” simply to show the contrast and crispness that the less monochromatic color brings to the room.

The gray in the tiles is so fairly next to the darker toned wall color. And the funny thing is that the gray in our little tree accent tiles looks pleasant with the new paint on the walls. We can picture the room looking even more like us with soft frosted gray glass subway tile as the accent someday, but it is pleasant that the trees work better with the new wall color in the meantime.

This freshly painted wall is simply begging for some art (scroll up see the “before” perspective from this POV). And the room in fact feels more open, even though the wall color is darker because there are not shelves and bars that feel like they are all up in your area when you walk to the john.

You can see how the slice of white in the curtain looks with the tan and gray tones. Cannot wait to make the trim in the room a true glossy white color along with the toilet and some other accents to tie that color in more consistently.

So now our bathroom to-do list looks a little something like this:

• paint the cream trim white <– it looks white in the pics, but the bright white light switch next to the cream door trim makes it painfully obvious in person
• paint the walls so they have some contrast
• craigslist the toilet and replace it with a classic white one
• replace the boob light
• hang some bathroom-friendly art
• do something to add privacy to the window
• replace the border tile around the room (perhaps in phase 2?)
• replace the floor tile down the road (simply to break things up since there is so much of it)

The good news for anyone putting off painting a small bathroom is that it does not in fact take that long. Each coat likely took us less than an hour (I cut in and then John rolls, and then we repeat that process for coat two). John’s mom once painted her whole bathroom with a paint brush. I remember thinking how remarkable that was (and still think about how remarkable that is, in fact). Must’ve taken forever, but it was only one thing to wash at the end of it all. Haha.