Ooh yeah, work that cistern, dangle that loo roll.

It's been a little while (a month, almost...) since I last posted. That time has gone terrifyingly fast, in a blur of sanding, painting, repainting, sawing, nailing, wallpapering (post on that coming soon, I'm still getting over the stress), Ikea-ing... oh, and I had a birthday, too.

The house has come on a long way since we 'finished' the kitchen ('finished' in inverted commas because there's still at least twelve thousand more bits and pieces I want to do in there, but it's definitely done FOR NOW...); we've made serious headway on four out of five of the downstairs rooms (not counting the hallway, which is a beast unto itself), and we're onto our bedroom upstairs. If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen some of this progress in my stories, but there's nothing like a long and meandering post full of stunningly mediocre photography to really showcase the transformation that we made to...

THE BATHROOM. Widely acknowledged by no-one to be the sexiest room in the house.

Also, in our house, the potentially most-finished room...?

Here's what it looked like before:

The ladder, obviously, was not part of the original decor.

Yes, that is wallpaper. In a bathroom. A bathroom with a bath, and a shower. A bathroom that, by it's very nature, is a damp and steamy environment - arguably, the worst room you could choose to wallpaper.

And yet:




This. Not only is this ill-advised wallpaper, but - and apologies if slightly sheeny fleur-de-lis type wallpaper is your jam, because I'm going to get mean about it - it isn't even nice ill-advised wallpaper. Maybe this could look... fine in a bedroom or a dressing room or a funeral parlour or something, but in a bathroom it was just giving off really strong vibes of the ladies' at a gastropub-slash-wannabe-chic-restaurant which was shooting for glamorous feminine luxe but landed in granny-meets-Hollyoaks-set-design. You know the kind of place I mean.

As it was already starting to come up at various corners (though not as badly as in the first picture - I took that post my first victorious tear into it), I spent the best part of an afternoon peeling and scraping this off the wall behind the sink (thank everything they only did one wall). It was particularly tricky because the regular exposure to steam had made the glue sort of... melt and then dry, over and over again, which apparently made it verrrry disinclined to separate itself from the plaster for good.



Lucky me.

It probably didn't help that I was accidentally using the steam cleaner my Mum had brought up from home instead of the wallpaper steamer, which are apparently different things designed to do similar, but different, jobs.

Not an instrument for removing wallpaper. In retrospect, kind of obvious.

That was the first Very Useful Lesson that this particular room taught me.

The second came after we'd put the paint on... but first, a little moment on what my 'vision' was for the room once it was ready for its revamp.

Source

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- All originally from my 'bathroom.' board on Pinterest, obvs.

It's maybe hard to tell from the pictures - the second one probably gives you the best idea - but the bathroom is quite large, and square, with very square fittings; the bath and sink are rectangular, and the shower - which is f*cking glorious, by the way - is a big boxy walk-in (and one of the major selling points). Painted all-white as it was (and despite the wallpaper's best efforts to give it a soft edge), it felt kind of clinical. There's also the fact that the bath is fitted in the centre of the far wall, with the loo, shower and sink all on their own walls, so everything felt a bit like it was floating weirdly in this big, blank space - and not in a good T-Swift kind of way. And finally, because the house was originally built sans indoor plumbing back in the good ole' 1900s, it is on the ground floor, at the back of the kitchen. Actually, if you'll indulge me in a tiny mini history lecture, I'm pretty sure that there was once a pantry at the back of the kitchen, and probably a privy attached to the back of the original building which have been merged into what is now the bathroom.

So, off to Pinterest I went, to worship at the alter of other people's interiors. And after drooling over the images above - and a few more like them - I came back with green.

The bathroom looks out over the garden (sort of - as you can see above, the glass is warped to protect our privacy, but you can tell there's grass outside) and I love love love bathrooms full of plants, so I figured green would work pretty well to bring the outside in and set off the leaves of whatever I put in there. A deep, luxurious green would also give it that classier edge I like in the top two inspo pictures (if anyone knows where I can find that print please let me know) - I'd like to feel like I'm a party-girl heiress having a night off from hedonism in some jazz-era Manhattan hotel while I'm having a bath, thank you very much. Plus, having a darker colour around the bottom of the room (I wasn't brave enough to go floor-to-ceiling dark in the bathroom - I'm saving that for somewhere else...) would pull all of the floating fixtures together, grounding them in greenery.

Also, I was heatedly opposed to going for blue. Not to be too Miranda Priestly here but... blues? For the bathroom?



And thus, we ended up with this:



Valspar's Neptune's Castle, which goes on and photographs as a kind of deep turquoise but is actually a lot more jade/emerald IRL.



After a couple of coats it's a deep, sort of velvety green and I love it.

In order to get a clean line where the colours met, we picked an arbitrary place to go up to (just above the tiles over the sink), and drew a straight line around the room using a spirit level:



Then, I taped along that line and painted up to it.

And, a couple of days later when I peeled it off, we learnt our second Very Useful Lesson, which I'm going to virtually shout to make sure everyone in the back catches it too, and doesn't make our stupid mistake: masking tape and painter's tape are NOT THE SAME THING.

I thought I'd taken pictures of this, but apparently the results (a completely un-defined line and, oh yeah, PAINT COMING OFF THE WALL IN MASSIVE CHUNKS) are just burned into my memory forever, rather than my SD card or Camera Roll.

The only pictorial evidence I have is this:



Yes, another picture of my toilet. That band you see along the top, the greenish one about the width of, say, a piece of masking tape?

Yeah. That was the bit we taped off to prevent paint getting onto the cistern. Luckily, it scrubbed off with a bit of elbow grease and my new best friend, the magic industrial wipes, which get EVERYTHING off, but the lesson was well and truly learnt. Also, bits of our wall were missing.

My solution?




Just chuck some more paint on, mate. Using actual painters tape this time (it's worth paying the difference, believe me) we created a border with some of the black masonry paint leftover from the kitchen (the upper half of the room is also leftover kitchen paint, because #thrifty). To be honest I had been half-toying with this idea already to tie in the black tiling around the bath/sink/shower, so let's just say that the masking tape thing was just a sign from a particular aesthetically inclined fate that it was the way to go after all.



Ta-da! I'm actually pretty glad we went through that to end up with the border, because I think it really adds something extra - especially when it's accesorised up with...



BAM! A mirror and some hooks from (where else?) Ikea, and Alex's dragon tree



We're so close to being done in this room now - all that's left is to get a storage unit (I have my eye on this one, when it's back in stock, or something similar) and add some pictures/plants etc. when we finally move in. Oh, and sand and re-finish the door, because despite not being bothered about wallpapering a humid room someone was apparently worried enough about warping the wood that they used shed varnish to protect it. What? Why? These are questions we will never know the answers to... and the questions I will leave you to ponder.