Out of all of my pictures, I know that when I post one of this bathroom it will get significantly more likes than the others. Which is kind of funny to me because of how long it took me to actually be inspired to turn this bathroom from a dark, sad space to debatably one of my favorite spaces in our home. I think one of the reasons I love this room so much is because I really embraced the attitude that I could truly do something myself, not spend a whole lot of money, and feel like I had achieved something unique and fun. So let's take a quick trip down memory lane, SHALL WE?
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Here she is! Dark, monotone, and carpeted. You can read more about those fun carpets and what we did with the floor here. Even without the floors, though, we still have a lot of other subjects to capture here! There was wallpaper AND panelling. This room was not for the faint of heart or those with a lack of imagination. I HAVE imagination and still had a hard time figuring out the direction this room should go. Before inspiration even struck I did begin to take down the wallpaper because it seemed inevitable. The process could've taken much less time, but because I lacked a road map for the room it took several months to get the motivation to totally remove the wallpaper. Not to mention the toilet pictured here didn't work, so between that and the graveyard of wallpaper on the floor, we tried our best to keep people out of this room. Once I had a good idea of where I wanted to take the room and actually had removed the wallpaper I painted the panelling. You can learn about that process in this post and find out what I did differently in this room than I did in the room entirely paneling.
I did the majority of this project before I had a blog, so unfortunately don't have a ton of pictures of the process. The good news is- the process is SUPER easy. It isn't perfect so if you're someone who needs measurements, lines, levels (like my husband who wasn't in the house when I did this HAH!) then you can adjust to your preferences!
Here's where the confusion for my bathroom happens... I DO use wallpaper. For the tile.
I went to Target and bought the bought this wallpaper. I used it because I wanted a more simple version of the classic subway tile look. Before I even put the "tile" up I painted the top half of the wall white. I decided to only do the top half because the "tile" would be covering the rest. Once the white had dried I cut three long pieces on painters tape and stuck them on the wall vertically with (here comes the part you measure-ers are gonna hate) about four fingers spacing between them. I KNOW... very exact work here. I poured some of this pretty teal color into a plastic cup and then dipped a foam brush like this one into it. I held the brush diagonally and just tapped the paint on the wall with the tip in a pattern, and then switched angles down the next row.
If you were more detailed, you might pre-measure the distance between each row, and put a strip of paint every so many inches and then go. I only used the three strips of tape and just moved them around as I went. If you look closely at thing pictures you'll see tons of imperfections. I, personally, love the character and whimsy of it. I know that's not everyone's thing, though! So do what works for your home! Once I finished all of the rows it looked like this:
You see that giant hole in the wall? That was from the medicine cabinet. Want to know a secret? I didn't fix the hole. One reason being when we move I plan on putting the old cabinet back and taking the mirror, but another because... YOU DON'T REALLY NEED TO. If you can find a mirror big enough to cover the hole, I wouldn't worry about it. We did the same in our full bathroom. Okay, I can't pretend like I NEVER measure or use a level, because that isn't true. I certainly could not have gotten away with it with the actual wallpaper. We measured how high we wanted to bring it up and then used a level as a ruler to draw a straight line horizontally across the walls to use as a guide. Then I measured the wallpaper out and cut sections that fit the height we wanted. There will be some waste with this as you do have to line up the "tiles" correctly so it's realistic. And some sections need very specific cuts. An exacto knife is a good idea.
(Sorry for the picture quality, I pulled it from a video) Again, looking closely you can see some "tiles" are longer than the others and some are square. To fix that I would've had to have a lot more wallpaper waste, and that just wasn't something I cared enough about to do. Once this part was over all I needed to do was put up the mirror and I installed a cute towel hook from Hobby Lobby. This bathroom was so fun to do and I love hearing you say how much you love the "wallpaper", but I wanted you to know how easy and affordable it truly was! I hope this helps or inspires you to be creative in your home! Thank you so much for reading!
Let's be Friends!
Amber