Guest Bath Mini Makeover

When we first bought our house, Max and I had a professional painting team come in to paint the entire inside of the house. I'm so glad that we did this - the inside definitely needed a little facelift and there was no way I was getting anywhere near the tops of the open two-story ceilings. We had a limited number of overlap days where we would still be living in the rental, so our time was a bit rushed. I chose just two colors for the entire house - a cream color for most of the walls, and a deeper tan for all of the rooms and bathrooms. For the most part, this turned out well. The cream contrasted well with the new hardwoods and the tan was a nice color for the bedrooms. But as soon as I walked into the baths, I knew it was the wrong choice. I could literally hear David Bromstad from HGTV's Color Splash gasping in horror. By painting the bathroom walls tan, we were left with a monochromatic bathroom. Yes, everything was varying shades of beige. The floors, the cabinets, even the counters. Blah.

With a very long list of house to-do's (we've been baseboardless downstairs for over a year now), the bathrooms have been overlooked. Until now ; ) I started by looking for a blue-gray color to give the walls some life. Unfortunately, that meant several trips to Dunn Edwards. I kept picking samples that looked blue-gray on the cards, but showed up bright blue on the walls. I eventually went with a gray, which looked absolutely gray on the card, but blue-gray on the walls (the bottom color in the photo).

Before I could paint the walls, Max helped by painting the beige cabinets white (all of the cabinets in our house started off in the 80's whitewash beige color, and we're slowly painting them all white). He used his trusty air compressor and a paint gun which made the process so much faster (that is, after we discovered the trick: when you're painting with a sprayer, the viscosity of the paint should resemble milk. We started off with a consistency closer to honey before we thinned the paint, which was a disaster to work with).

Ho-hum, painting prep:

Mid-spraying the cabinets white:

Did I mention the hubs is super safety conscience? (I see our moms smiling out there.) He used a respirator as he was spraying in a closed space.

I tried it on for fun. It was not.

Max even remembered to change the filter on it:

I stood back where it was safe to breath but got this fun little message:

Max took the removable parts outside (i.e. the actual cabinet doors and drawers that opened) to spray then brought them in when they were done:

After all the parts were put back and the blue-gray was added to the walls, we ended up with a lovelier, brighter guest bath:

It's definitely not our dream guest bath - we'd love to gut it someday and try our hand at tile work! But mini steps so make me happy!