Stripe Tease

Sometime last week I got it into my head that I needed to snazz up our small bathroom. It could have been the full moon, or the fact that Mr. W uses that bathroom daily, so it looks like a locker room most of the time, or it might have been the influence of one of my latest reads—Styled by Emily Henderson. Whatever it was, I got a wild hair that I couldn't shake.

I had to do something to improve the aesthetics in there.

Every time I walked down the hallway, all I saw was a toilet and a big white wall and I just couldn't take it any longer. So I started messing around in Photoshop to see how I might be able to break up the space.

First, I tried a wire magazine rack (Mr. W does seem to do an awful lot of reading in there...)

Next, I tacked in a vintage Guinness picture to match the one we have hanging over the toilet.

Then, I tried on an accent wall treatment. 

Searching for inspiration, I Googled "black and white bathrooms" and found a large number of them with striped walls, so I decided to give that a try.

A lighter variation seemed better—and was clearly the winner among the Photoshop mocks.

A quick search through our paint closet and I found a shade I thought could work perfectly in the room. While Mr. W went to Santa Barbara for a golf lesson, I set to work taping up the wall to create my stripes. I measured out my stripe widths and then used Mr. W's laser level as a guide to set up my tape lines.

I cannot tell you how many times I drop the f-bomb when I'm doing projects like this. Let's just say, I'm very glad we don't have children in our house. They'd be getting detention a lot at school if they existed.

If you're not a crazy DIY blog reader like me, you may not know that the trick to getting crisp paint lines for these kinds of projects is to paint over your tape with the base paint color first. So after I got all my stripes laid out, I went over each area I planned to paint grey with the existing white color of the bathroom.

Once that was dry, I went to work rolling on the grey and tried to busy myself with lunch-eating and cat-petting in between coats. Of course, I forgot to take progress pictures, but when it was all done, I nearly died of joy overload. I think it turned out so cute!

The entire time I was working on the bathroom, Mr. W was outside building the vanity for our master bath. He only came inside bleeding one time. Which I suppose is pretty good when you're operating a table saw... Very excited to get this guy in place and finish that bathroom too!

Once the master is done, we may finally finish the laundry list of stuff we have to still do in the small bathroom (read: demo and re-tile the shower, build a concrete countertop for the vanity, install the new sink and faucet, make a new frame for the mirror, caulk the floor trim, and repaint the door casing). Until then, I will distract myself by enjoying it's charming and adorable stripes.