Blue Bathroom

In my medicine cabinet makeover post, I hinted that there might be bigger changes in store for the bathroom.  It didn't feel high priority, but I've been toying with the idea of painting the bathroom for awhile since a) the walls are in need of some love, and b) the space is so small (especially since half of each wall is tiled) that I knew it would be a relatively quick update.

After the medicine cabinet project, I decided to bump painting the bathroom up on my to-do list, partially because I'm procrastinating on other bigger projects. I thought a light gray would look nice, but there's already a lot of gray and yellow in the room and I worried it might be a little too much. So I decided to keep it nice and easy and use leftover paint that I already had on hand from the front hallway project (which I used in the nightstand and filing cabinet projects too... what can I say, I love robin's egg blue).

First off, here's what the bathroom looked like the start with (sorry, it's absolutely tiny which makes it hard to photograph):

(the walls look kind of gray in this photo, but they're actually just an old dingy white)

I love this shower curtain, which I got from CB2 a few years ago. Behind the shower curtain is...you guessed it, a shower and tub. There's a window on the outer wall of the shower (which fortunately has a tree directly in front of it so the neighbors can't peep into the shower), which gives some nice natural light in the room even though we typically keep the shower curtain closed just for aesthetics.

Across from the sink is the toilet and the small set of wicker drawers we keep our toiletries in:

And that's it. It's super small, but laid out well so I never have any complaints unless I'm trying to do something unusual like bring in a chair to stand on for painting (so I was cursing its smallness at times during this project, but also praising it because bigger means it takes longer to paint).

It took me about 3 hours to paint all the walls blue (2 coats) and give the door and door frame two fresh coats of white paint. After finishing the blue paint I was very tired (I had to keep the door closed in order to reach everything and so it got really hot in there, plus a lot of the painting involved balancing on the edges of the tub while doing precision painting along the ceiling...so it did require some mild acrobatics), so I contemplated not repainting the door. But frankly it was gross (see Exhibit A, below), and I knew that paint would go a long way.

And here it is, freshly painted! (this series of photos may give me the push I need to invest in a new camera...as usual, sorry they're so terrible....)

The exact shade of blue is really hard to capture in photos, but here's a photo of the hallway I took once that capture it decently:

(It looks totally different than the bathroom photos, right? The one of the hall I took with my old camera before it died -- rather than the iphone -- which is one reason I think I just need to suck it up and buy a new camera.)

I need to figure out new artwork or something for the wall behind the toilet (the circle sculpture thing we had hanging there doesn't go with the new color scheme), but that's a challenge for another day. You know I'll let you know what I decide!