Painting Project

After surviving the Christchurch earthquake, flying through a typhoon and hanging out in Hawaii while Kilauea erupted my handsome adventurer has returned safely home!

But there's no rest for the weary, and home less than 48 hours he was already hard at work on one of our long looked-forward-to projects: painting the bathroom!

This is the first apartment we've ever had where we're allowed to paint. It's also the first one with jarringly disjointed bathroom colors/fixtures. The tiled floor in a combination of strange and inexplicably colors that somewhat-but-not-really resemble blue, green or teal. It immediately jumps out and screams "Hello! I'll be your floor today", rather like the hideous monstrosity of a carpet they used to have at the Radisson when I worked there in high school. The fixtures and counter were variations on an almond/cream kind of color, the medicine cabinet, coving tile and trim were all white, and the battered walls a neutral color somewhere between primer and real white. Very strange.

We decided to go with a Victorian blue and chocolate brown color scheme for accessories, because it instantly toned down the floor and added some much needed depth to the space. After much sorting and testing of paint samples, we decided to go with a color called Vanilla Wafer, which is a lovely butter-cream shade.


As you can see, this is Arthas's first experience with painting a room and he was rather dubious about the whole endeavor.


Here's a shot during the first coat - the inside square is the old color. The new one is so much warmer and more welcoming! We also chose a very thick paint, which helped conceal the less than wonderful drywall patches and smoothed out the walls' appearance. (I say "we" euphemistically - Eric gets total credit for that!)


Here's the finished product! I'm thrilled with how well the new color ties together the counter, shower curtain and other fixtures! You can't tell in these pictures, but we didn't paint the ceiling, so the molding along the top and the ceiling itself stand out slightly, making them look higher and simultaneously giving the room a warmer, brighter feel. We're very happy with how it turned out, and looking forward to similar successes in our other rooms in the weeks to come.