Anyway, the bathroom is painted! I started by taking the mirror, towel ring, toilet paper bar, and electrical plates off the wall. I left the light up because the room doesn't have windows or anything, and it's pretty hard to paint in the dark!
The towel ring and toilet paper bar clicked on and off of these nice little plastic pieces. So easy!
All empty!
Because I did this while Jeff was out of town, he wasn't there to make me do our normal meticulous taping/plastic sheeting/precautionary stuff. I went with just one sheet of plastic on the floor under the paint can, one on the sink, and one on the shiny new porcelain throne. I decided to do all the edges by hand rather than tape them off (our walls are super-textured, so I figured the tape wouldn't work too well anyway).
By the way... I tried to do that fancy foil-on-the-paint-tray thing that's going around Pinterest, but it didn't really work. I had to use two pieces of foil to cover it, and even though I overlapped them for a few inches, the paint seeped underneath. Plus, the foil started to rip after I rolled the roller up and down a bunch. Overall, not a good idea. Better to pay $1 for a real tray liner.
At this point the room was kind of creeping me out... it just looked like an abandoned ghost bathroom or something. Maybe it was all the fall/Halloween decorating that I did earlier that day. I don't know. It just looked weird. So I quickly got to painting!
Let me tell you... painting a teeny bathroom with a high ceiling is really tough. Picture me sitting on the floor, one leg on either side of the toilet, ripping off the plastic sheeting because it's IN THE WAY, practically hugging the good old potty (let's see how many synonyms for "toilet" can make it into this post...) and leaning over trying to paint along the baseboard behind it (remember I decided to cut in by hand rather than tape them off...). Thank goodness I cleaned the bathroom before starting this whole thing.
Now picture me sitting forward on the toilet, leaning over with my head upside down so I can face the back wall, trying to paint behind around all the little pipe connections and such before my vision starts to blur due to all the blood rushing to my head...
Now picture me standing on the back of the toilet (surely that thing isn't meant to hold the weight of a person, but it looked pretty sturdy, and it was really my only option), trying desperately to reach the ceiling corner without pressing my chest against the just-painted wall in front of me, wishing that I could have made the ladder fit into that tiny room.
Now picture me losing my balance and grasping at the ceiling to prevent a fall that would most certainly cause me to knock myself out by hitting the sink or tile floor, knock over the paint bucket on my way down, and end up left on the floor for days until Jeff gets back from his business trip and finds me unconscious and starving on the floor in a puddle of La Fonda Wild West Olive, which would by then have seeped into the brand new living room carpet and permanently stained the floor.
Those are fingerprints of survival! I'm waiting on the nice man that works for our builder to bring me some ceiling paint so I can fix it.
As far as I'm concerned, a couple La Fonda fingerprints on the ceiling is about the best scenario I could have hoped for.
I discovered during this painting ordeal that the construction guys were less-than-precise with the beige paint against the ceiling. There were places where the beige went pretty far up onto the ceiling, which I tried to cover with the green, but then it just looked like I had gotten too much green on the ceiling, and the beige was still showing through.
I figure there are three possible solutions to this... 1) just ignore it (entirely not going to work for perfectionist me), 2) try to paint over it all with the white ceiling paint and get a crisper line (definitely an option, but no fun), and 3) CROWN MOLDING! (I've pretty much convinced Jeff this is what we're doing. I'm asking for a nail gun and an air compressor for Christmas). The bathroom will be good practice for when we decide to do it in other bigger rooms, right?
To top it all off, I can't even get good "after" photos of the room because the lighting is so weird! These are the best I could do:
This is a pretty accurate color representation (at least it is on my computer screen... haha).
It's WAY not this shiny and bright in real life. I don't know what was going on here.
The bottom half of the mirror looks pretty accurate in this one... doesn't it go nicely with the dark wood of the mirror?
I love how the baseboards pop now!
Gotta get some pretty things on those walls!
And now for some before-and-afters (this is the first time I've actually made these... so fun!):
