Bathroom Break

One room I really should be delving into with great excitement is the baby's room. So far, we've acquired and assembled furniture, and Devin spent 3 days painting. It sounds like it's all coming along, but actually I'm going a little crazypants about it. I'm crippled with indecision. And I can't figure out how to nicely arrange the approximately one million new things we have.

To avoid losing my mind, I decided to give myself a break and work on something I knew I could handle: Painting the bathroom.

This is how it was.


You're probably thinking, "Can we get a better angle? I can't see very well what's going on here."

No, you can't because this is the smallest bathroom in the world. This is me standing in the doorway and there is nowhere else to go.

You may also be asking yourself, "Where is the toilet?" Trust me, there is one. It's to the left, in its own dark little nook that gets blocked off whenever the door is open.

While I can't really do anything to increase the size of the bathroom, I could at least do something about the color. Its original combination of narrow and bright yellow gave one the impression of what standing in a stick of butter might feel like.

It also needed some help beyond paint color because it has no counter space. Only this:


I had to stand in the bathtub to take that picture, by the way. To solve this surface area problem, I obtained a little 3-shelf cart from Target that was easy to assemble and fit close to everything I needed. It's not ideal, but it would suffice.

On painting day, which was 2 Sundays ago and did not turn into painting day until about 15 minutes after I woke up and nominated it as such, I started off by giving the bathroom the kind of thorough cleaning I suspect it didn't receive before we moved in. The floorboards were grimy, the tiles were caked with black and pink mildew, there were hairs stuck to the ceiling (?).


There, that's better. Don't look at the floors. They're beyond hope. No, I said DON'T LOOK and then you looked. Jerks.

Now that the room was sparkling clean, it was time to run out to the paint store. I wanted to find a color that was more soothing, but the trick would be finding something to complement these darling gold flecked tiles. Aren't they a treat?


I had a feeling navy blue would be the answer and I tried to conjure up an image of how I'd perhaps decorate the guest bathroom in my house on the Cape. It seemed to make sense. Devin came along to the store to assist my color picking because I never seem to get it quite right. Turns out, all of this interior decorating is rubbing off on him and he was able to carefully consider each swatch and offer up analysis like, "That one's going to turn out more blue than navy. You need to go darker."

We settled on Patriot Blue. How could a name with so much promise ever lead us astray?

Once home, I spent an hour and a half and a full roll of blue tape prepping all of the edges. I also remembered a tip my sister told me for covering the toilet. It can be hard to paint the wall behind the toilet, with limited space and awkward angles. And my particular situation was further complicated by my big ol' belly. So, if you just remove the top and pull a garbage bag over the tank, you're free to just mash blindly around back there with a paint brush.

Finally, with only about 2 hours to go before I needed to leave for our childbirth class, it was time to get to work. Luckily, the actual painting part never takes much time. The first coat looked like complete crap with lots of yellow speckling through. But later that night, the second coat went on nicely.

And, with the addition of a window shade, a new toothbrush holder, and a shower curtain, we have the finished product:





It's certainly dark, but I'll take it over that cheery yellow any day. The shade on the window is not only a nice way to complete the room, but it was also necessary as the sun came in severely and at an intense angle every morning when I tried to do my makeup for work and highlighted every peak and valley on my face. It wasn't a good confidence boosty way to begin one's day.

Here's a secret though... the paint won't exactly dry. I mean, for all intents and purposes, it's "dry." You can't really tell unless you touch it, but over a week later it's still slightly tacky. I think after I wiped down the walls to remove years of messy neglect, I didn't let them dry out enough. I'm hoping it'll dry eventually... right?

Anyway whatever. I'm checking this room off my list!