I Painted My Bathroom

Due to a busy year and a tight budget, we haven't done any house painting in a while. The last time we painted anything was about a year and a half ago, when we finished painting the downstairs walls. It was a big, busy job, and so it makes sense that we'd wanted to put further painting on hold. However, the remaining bare, white walls in our house have started nagging at me again, so it was just a matter of time before I took action.

As it happens, the moment finally came a little over a week ago. A friend of mine in our neighborhood had finished painting all the rooms in her house, and she mentioned on Facebook that she was giving away her unused paint. Included in the colors she listed were a bunch of nice-sounding "base" colors (grays, blues, etc.) that I thought might look nice on some of our unpainted walls. Once I arrived at my friend's house, I was able to see what her paint colors looked like on actual walls, and I really fell in love with her office, which she'd painted a nice bright blue. Without having a concrete plan in mind, I decided to take the blue paint home and then figure out what to do with it.

For the last several months, I'd been planning on painting the girls' bathroom upstairs. I have been putting it off, mainly for budget reasons, and also because I'm a little scared to paint bathrooms because of having to work around sinks/shower heads/etc. However, after seeing the blue paint, I changed my plans...instead of starting with the girls' bathroom, I was going to jump right into the more difficult task of painting the master bathroom instead.

Originally, I had planned on painting our master bedroom & bathroom last out of all the rooms in the house. After all, nobody ever sees them besides Nathan and myself, right? But seeing the blue paint got me excited; I wanted to see it on a wall in our house somewhere. And I knew I didn't want to paint the girls' bathroom blue (I am hoping to paint that room some shade of purple...hey, it's a girls' bathroom, I want to get a little crazy!). So I started thinking, Hey, blue might be a good color for my bathroom! And...things just went from there. As you may know, once you start painting a room, it is hard to stop until the job is done.

Taping the walls, as always, took forever. It is my least favorite part of painting. However, I spread out the unpleasant task over a couple of days. One advantage with having more time alone in the house? More time to get home improvement projects done! I ended up doing this project about ninety percent unassisted. Nathan helped tape one part of the wall, but then left me mostly to my own devices. He wasn't being rude; he had other stuff planned that weekend, and my sudden impulse to paint the whole bathroom caught him a little off guard.

Plus, after I'd gotten a good head start on the project, Nathan wanted to see how much I was going to be able to do on my own. The answer: most of it. Nathan did promise to help me out on the girls' bathroom, as well as the stairwell, which will hopefully be our next project. The dirty walls of our stairwell are becoming a source of embarrassment for me. Hopefully we can cover them up soon with a nice clean coat of paint!

In the end, I was pretty happy with the way it turned out. It was a long, sweaty weekend getting it all done, but at the same time it felt great to complete a big job like this (mostly) on my own, and to have our bathroom looking so fresh and exciting. Of course, now I will need to buy some new towels to match the new paint. White might be nice, but some other nautical theme might work as well. Yellow? Navy blue? Striped? I am sort of interior-design-challenged, so hopefully I'll make a good decision about this. Right now, I am grateful for my friend Emily, for donating her old paint and inspiring me to take on a new project. Hopefully I'll get to the girls' bathroom by the end of this year.

But in the meantime, I'll enjoy my bathroom!