Mini Home Project: Downstairs Bathroom

The downstairs bathroom in our house has been on the list of to-dos since we moved in. It’s not in bad condition at all – our house is pretty much a new build, with only one set of owners, but owners that had interesting colour choices and went for the standard decor in most places. The hall and stairways were our priority with colours (and I STILL haven’t shared pictures of that – it’s a difficult space to photograph!) as they were, well, yellow. Bright yellow. Like lemon yellow but brighter. This space is now a lovely shade of grey that I’m addicted to that’s so much more grown up and sophisticated.

But the downstairs bathroom when we moved in was pink. Shell pink. See what I mean with colour choices? It’s a small room – although when we looked round, I exclaimed: “You could fit a SHOWER in there!” to which the estate agent nodded vigorously. It was only after moving in that I opened the door and realised that, no, you definitely could not fit a shower in there. We now laugh, wondering if I’d somehow magically looked through a portal into a different room at least twice the size. Anyway, it’s small but not tiny – home to only a toilet, a pedestal basin (with a very small section of beige tiling behind it) and a window. We did have a shoe rack wedged in between the sink and wall but it really was wedged and messy, and coat hooks on the wall, but you couldn’t quite fit round the mass of coats to get in properly, so they’ve now moved.

We decided after a few months of being in there to tackle the downstairs bathroom slowly. We moved a small mirror in there (the one seen here) and decided to paint the walls. The shell pink was quite…intimidating and really didn’t go with the beige tiles. We decided to go for a pale grey – we worried that a darker shade would make the room seem smaller and white was too “boring” for us at that time. Having little experience in paint at this point, we bought a nice shade we liked and painted it on. Turns out we picked a brand that we’re now not fans of – the pink showed through massively despite two coats of it and we ended up with a shade of kind of lilac where patches of pink show through because we realised that we weren’t going to end up with the colour we thought so left it at that.

So that’s been the state of our downstairs bathroom for about a year. I know, lazy. I then bought a super awesome beautiful green glass soap dispenser with a gold pump and a brushed gold tray from H&M (seriously, they win with their home stuff) to put cacti on (see pictures above and at the top of the post for these details), and now I want to focus the room around these. Problem is that I can’t decide quite what colour for the walls will go with green glass and gold. We got a tester of dark green, but it turned out to look like a pair of wellies on the wall (makes sense to me, I swear) so that’s a no. This is the lovely pink when we moved in:

And here’s what it’s looking like now (not a fan of sharing this, but shows what it looks like!) – lilac-ish walls with patches of pink, green tester patch, boring sink, yellow/beige tiles that don’t really go with any colour schemes I like, and an empty space:

But now I have plans. I have ideas. And I’m hoping to make them reality soon!

1. Spray paint the mirror frame gold.

I already have gold spray paint from this IKEA hack project and I’m a leeeetle bit addicted to gold, rose gold and copper right now.

2. Paint the walls

I’m thinking mid-grey will do it, and in a proper brand that we’ve tried and liked. Our hall way is in Valspar with a dupe of Elephant’s Breath – it looks quite a bit darker in real life on our walls! Possibly a shade lighter, but I do love this colour.

3. Possibly tile or board the walls

Okay, so possibly just a dream. But the tiles around the sink are not going to match my planned colour scheme. They need removing and replacing with something that will work. But my dream is to have wood paneling around the walls. Will that work in ours? No idea, but I still want it!

4. Get something on the walls

In an ideal world, I’d have a super awesome shelf created out of gold piping and would have pretty cacti (that would NOT fall on my head) on it. But these are expensive and I’m not sure if I’ve got the time to DIY one up at the moment. But I really want a gallery wall. I’ve wanted one ages. I think it was this post on Tieka’s blog a couple of years ago that made me decide I needed one at some point. Now I just need to start preparing for one. I’m going to get some more photos printed (I used a company I’m not best pleased with right now as they automatically printed my last set as premium so the credits I’d purchased didn’t cover them…paid twice basically. Then apparently these credits expire in 10 days now so the money I paid for them will just disappear if I don’t use them – photos anyone?!). So I need to get photos and prints sorted and saw this video which looks much better as you can print straight from your social (which is awesome because I’m currently trawling through photos on my computer to find good ones) and they create little pictures that look like they work well on gallery walls:

5. Box in the sink

Possibly just another dream that I can’t really bring to reality without spending some actual money or DIYing, but how nice would it be to have the pedestal part of the sink hidden away? They look so much prettier and tidier, plus it might create some storage in there too which we’re severely lacking in in our house.

Any other ideas for me for my downstairs bathroom? Any inspiration? I’m collecting all of my inspiration in my House & Home Pinterest board here – addicted!