Bye Bye Beige in the Bathrooms

When we moved into our Chicago pad, we decided to paint the entire place with a fresh coat of gray. Well…I shouldn’t say entire place. We did most of our new condo, but decided to forgo the bathrooms.  Just because bathrooms can be very difficult to paint…I mean c’mon…who wants to crawl behind the toilet so they can brush it with some paint? Ew…not me.

But after living in our place for three months, I decided that it was time to tackle our bathrooms. I just couldn’t stand them any longer. Take a look for yourself at the gross before…

Okay, it’s not terrible. But it isn’t great either! It was this kinda shiny beige color and it was just very…”blah.”

Plus, I felt like it was just beige, on top of beige, on top of beige. Nothing was pure white, instead it all just looked kinda dirty.

I also had a really weird towel bar situation going on. For some reason there were 2 towel bars installed above the toilet. Weird, right? I knew that if I painted the bathroom, I could get rid of one of them and it would look a lot more normal above our porcelain throne.

So I decided to take 1 day, suck it up, and just get them done! First on my to-do list, get rid of the towel bar! I unscrewed the bottom one off and pulled that sucker off. It felt great.

I then whipped out some spackle and got to work filling in the holes that were left behind. I sanded the area down, spackled it up, waited until it dried, and then sanded it down again.

Spackling is very easy and I promise you can do it. If you’re a spackling newbie read this article for some tips and tricks.

Once the holes were filled, I unscrewed all of the outlet covers and got to work taping. Taping is by far my least favorite part of the painting process. But, it is the most essential part of the job. Don’t forget to tape the ceiling so you don’t accidentally get any paint up there.

Lucky for me, my mom decided to come help me paint our two bathrooms. With both of us working we were able to get it all done in less than 4 hours. Pretty good if you ask me! Our system is someone edges with a brush, while the other is the designated roller. We flew through both rooms in no time at all, with two coats of our paint color.

Here are the “after” shots. No more beige baby!

The color is Sherwin William’s “Passive” and it is the same color we have in our main room. We had tons of paint leftover, so we decided it was easiest to just continue with that color in the bathrooms. It looks a little blue in these photos, but it is actually a light gray. I’m a big fan…

I’m happy that I finally decided to take on these two rooms. It was worth it to crouch down and paint behind the toilet, because now I can say “Bye bye beige!”

My bathroom is now feeling much less blah, and much more glam…all thanks to a little paint!