While responding to your fantastic comments to my recent post about reglazing tile, I remembered that I had come up with another solution several years ago.
The bathroom in question was in the first condo that my husband and I bought together.
The vintage: 1940’s. The tile: grey that was fading to various shades of green and grey. It sounds kind of pretty, but it wasn’t.
I first painted the bathroom orange. (Of course.) When I walked in and saw the painters finishing up, I gasped. It looked like hell. The place. Halloween Hell.
I was too shaken to take photographs. I asked them to prime it and just leave it; I simply could not make a decision about a color.
One weekend months later – we didn’t have kids yet, and maybe my husband was away? – inspiration struck. Armed with a t-square, a pencil, leftover paint from the other rooms in our house, a bag of small foam paintbrushes, and a stack of big red Dixie cups, I got to work.
I drew, as best I could, a grid on the walls and the ceiling (did I mention we didn’t have kids yet?) and started mixing paint, cup by cup. It was actually a relaxing process. And very loose for me, because there was no grand plan as to where the colors would go. I mixed a color with the blue, green, and white paint I had, and just painted squares here and there until the paint ran out. Then I’d mix a new color.
The end result was kind of cool.
And because the sheens had been different – eggshell, semi-gloss, maybe some flat – the sheens of the squares were different, too. Made everything look more interesting. I can’t imagine a paint manufacturer approving that kind of behavior, but hey. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
I’d forgotten that I’d wrapped the squares onto the ceiling.
I did mention that we didn’t have kids, yet, right? Crazy.
The window treatment, by the way, was a single sheer bought at Linens ‘n Things, mounted on a $5 tension rod inside the window frame, and trimmed with a pair of scissors. Who has time to hem? (I was too busy painting squares.) If the end started to fray, you just pulled a string off. Simple!
Any other bathroom solutions out there? Bossy color would love to know about them.