Painting the New House: En Suite Bathroom

When we moved into our house in January, we did a lot of painting. I've already posted about our daughter's nursery (which I actually did in November/December), the accent wall in the dining room (which I completed in early January, the weekend before we moved in), and the green guest room walls (which I painted in January, between when we moved in and when our furniture arrived). There are two more rooms we also painted - and both were bathrooms. There was no real rush to paint these, since there wasn't any furniture to get in the way (a bathroom is awkward to paint no matter when you paint it - all the "furniture" are built-in things you can't easily remove!)... but I still wanted to paint them sooner rather than later, while I was still excited to have this new house, and motivated to turn our house into our home. When it comes to house renovations or projects, if you're inspired or excited or motivated - definitely do the project ASAP, before that inspiration, excitement, and motivation dissolve into the ennui of daily life. ;) With that in mind, I painted the en suite bathroom in late January, and the basement bathroom in early February, within that first month of moving in.

Our old house had a dark blue bathroom on the main floor. The vanity cabinet and countertop were white, and on the wall we had 1) a white collage frame of 4 postcards from Santorini, one of the Greek islands where my husband and I went on our honeymoon in 2011, 2) a mosaic tile in the shape of a seashell in whites, blues, and oranges to match the postcards, which I had commissioned from an artist I found on Etsy, and 3) an off-white decorative square tile, which we hung at a diagonal. I liked these pieces together, and the idea of a blue-with-white-and-orange-accents bathroom in general, and I wanted to recreate that somewhere in our new house. The bathroom that made the most sense was the en suite bathroom, which had white tile floor, a big white Jacuzzi tub surrounded by more white tile, and an arched window.

Because the en suite was a much bigger room than the small half-bath that had been our blue bathroom in our old house, I had to rethink the shade of blue a bit. I didn't want to go too dark, because with the room so big, I worried that would make it really dark. So I chose a medium blue called "North Pole Blue," a funny name for a wall to go with our Greek-Island blue-and-orange themed bathroom.

As with the other rooms we painted, we taped off all the edges - the trim, the tile, the mirror, etc. Ceramic tile is nice in that paint scratches off it pretty easily, so you don't have to be as diligent about not dripping paint on the floor as you do when you're painting over carpet; but I still wanted to minimize the amount of picking paint off the tile I'd have to do later on, so we put up a lot of tape regardless.

This is the room my partner helped me with the most. I painted our daughter's stripes, the dining room accent wall, and the green guest room entirely by myself, but for this bathroom, he was able to help me with the painting, and we split it about 50-50... and I gotta say, it felt like it went SO much faster to have someone there helping me. I'm sure part of that is because it actually was a lot faster - but just having someone else in the room to talk to while we painted also made the time fly. We put the tape up and painted the same night, we did touch-ups the next morning, and it was done in less than 24 hours.

Here are some "before" shots, when the bathroom was still a very pale green/gray:

Here are some in-progress photos of our prep and painting:

And here are some photos of the finished bathroom:

There is still a lot of wall space not being used, and I'm trying to think of what to add to them that will fit the Greek Island theme. There are also seashells on the tile around the tub now, but I haven't gotten the chance to take a good picture of them yet. I love the blue and orange combo!