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Around the House: Guest Bath Progress

By Dawn Sailors In Guest Bath, Projects

Since we’ve been out of town so much in the past several weeks, we hadn’t been able to find the time to make any progress on our guest bathroom. Perhaps you remember how it looked when we last left off, but if not, you can click here to read all about it or here for the post on deciding it was time for a reno. Here’s the last photo:

I’d gotten the vanity painted and new hardware really spruced it up, but the bathroom was still rocking a lot of torn up wallpaper and nasty carpet.

Well, unfortunately this isn’t a final reveal, so the nasty carpet is still here (that has to be one of the last things to go so we don’t ruin the new floors with any other projects going on in there), but the wallpaper is no more and we have a shiny new coat of paint to show off!

It took me and my dad several hours on both Friday and Saturday to see real progress, but we finally got there.

First though, the process. We started Friday with removing the storage cabinet, which we saved to be re purposed in our master bathroom at some point. It was too big and bulky for this bathroom, but we desperately need storage in our bathroom, so it should help a lot in there.

After that, we tackled the remaining wallpaper and Brett helped with those high places that we short people couldn’t quite reach. Did I mention this room has vaulted ceilings? Nice for light. Sucky for painting. We got everything torn down except for the highest and farthest back corner above the tub. There’s a fun little ledge there (where the vents run maybe?) More on that later though.

Once all the paper was removed, we filled in holes all over the place and sanded everything smooth. Then we wiped down all the walls with a water/Lysol mix to get rid of any dust from sanding and any leftover glue from the wallpaper.

Finally it was time for paint. I picked a light gray called Gravity by Valspar. It has a cool tint that almost makes it look blue, but it is still very neutral and bright. I debated a fun bold color, but with such high walls, it would be A LOT of color. Plus this way if I ever change the color scheme (I’ve been known to change my mind on occasion.), we won’t have to repaint the entire room.

Back to painting- this was a three stage process. To make a long story short, (first) I cut in the edges while my dad rolled for as high as we both could reach.

Then (second) we got out the ladder and did the same thing one ‘level’ up.

This still was not even close to as high as the ceiling, so we finished up by (third) getting out an extension pole to paint up top.

We used an edger (like this one) to paint around the ceiling, and then added the pole to the roller to get the rest of the high walls coated. And the final result? Looks like this:

I know what you’re thinking. What about that other high corner I mentioned earlier? Well, I guess there will really be four stages to this paint job, because this will involve me climbing up to stand on that tiny ledge to finish it off. (I’m the only one who can fit. Unless Vera learns to wield a paintbrush sometime this week.) I can hardly wait to see how dirty it is up there. Currently it looks like this:

Not ideal obviously. But gives you an idea of why that area is so hard to reach. That’s ok, though, because we definitely still need to get the paint back out for some touch ups/second coat. Once that is finished, we can finally start the fun stuff. Like hanging a new shower curtain, painting the counter tops, installing a new faucet and light fixture, getting the floor installed, and decorating the heck out of this bathroom! Yippee!

Even though we didn’t quite get the painting wrapped up, it’s looking so much better already and will look even better very soon. Happy Monday friends! I hope you had a great weekend.