The Blue Bathroom

Everyone kept telling me I was crazy, wanting to paint the bathroom on our main floor a dark “charcoal blue”. I believed hard enough in what interior design skills I could muster out of all my HGTV-watching experience, and after a day or two of taping, hours and hours of rolling and sponging the horrific textured walls, calling upon the spirit of Joanna Gaines a few times, praying to Bob Ross, and cursing the nature of paintbrushes, it surprisingly turned out pretty darn good!

Granted, these photos were taken at night, so it does look pretty dark. But during the day, it looks gorgeous. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and it really highlights the wood floors.

THIS. This magical tool is what I believe is called an edger. It’s like a little flat sponge with a handle and little “hairs” on the flat part of the sponge. It saved our lives, our arms, and our sanity.
As it turns out, paintbrushes + textured walls = nightmare disaster. It just smears the paint around and leaves huge smudges and smears, and unless you have a week to do 15 coats of paint (and enough paint to do so), we weren’t going to be getting anywhere. Even though we’d taped the edges, we still didn’t want to get very close to the blinding white trim with such a dark color on a paint roller. What we found is that if you take this little guy, and just dab it around on the edges and corners, it will imitate the texture of a paint roller! It has little wheels on the edges to keep it from getting too close to the trim—which of course, is only helpful when your trim isn’t all kinds of wonky and is 1 inch thick in some places and 1 millimeter thick in others. The sponge can hold a whole lot of paint too, which makes it great to use when touching up spots that one may have accidentally hit with the foot of the stepladder.

It worked best in situations like this, because there is also an edge on the little sponge that does not have wheels and can get right up flush with another wall, which is great for really getting in those corners and getting rid of any white space left over.

This bathroom definitely taught us quite a bit pertaining to the virtues of proper taping. Because there happens to not be a single straight edge in this whole house, and every line that could exist is in some state of eternal wave, the trim in this bathroom drove us mad. The doorframe, starting about halfway down, begins to get closer and closer to the wall until the bottom 1/4 or so is completely flush with the wall. One section of the ceiling starts doing a sort of wavy thing, encroaching a bit on the wall’s elevation. Not to even mention how the light above the mirror is actually holding on to just the paint and pulling it away from the drywall somehow...
Aside from all of this, the blue bathroom is one of my new favorite rooms in our house when considering design.

*All praise the spirit of Joanna Gaines*