Our little half bath..it's come a long, long way.
It's a tiny little thing so getting pictures isn't the easiest of things but all you need is a small slice of perspective to see how it's changed.
This is a blurry shot taken right after we moved in:
This room was low on the priority list but we did manage to get a few things done like rip the outdated wallpaper down and prime the walls quick. I also painted the countertop to look like marble on a whim (see how here...it stayed looking like the day it was painted until the day it was replaced years later!) Here's an old post with more deets.
Eventually I painted the walls white (Pure White by Sherwin Williams) with the same paint I was painting closets with at one point and it stayed like that for a long, long time even though the stark white walls were hardly better than the primed ones that hung out before them. I found a pretty $8 light fixture* on Amazon Warehouse and couldn't get that up fast enough. It's a small change that packed a little punch. Oh, and we got a new, much taller toilet. It was better but so plain jane.
After Theo was born last March, I had one of those creative itches I just needed to scratch. You know the ones that pop up after you've had a baby or had something else happen in your life that's just kind of taken over and not left room for any sort of anything else. Yep, one of those itches. So, I pulled out a sample paint pot of China White we had (my favorite creamy white) and got to painting lots of little splotches.
I LOVE how it turned out and even though it was a super simple project, it made such a huge change in how the room looks. Boring no more.
Let me tell you how I did it because, even though it seems like I just threw lots of painted dots up on the walls, there was actually some rhyme and reason to how they got thrown up there that I think made a difference in the final look.
The type of paint brush you use probably doesn't matter much but to get the shape of the dots I painted, a flat, one inch brush is what you'll want. I bought a pack of these* a long time ago and they've come in handy for so many projects.
The dots have a sort of abstract almond shape and I got that by holding my brush so that the bristles were vertical and by painting an arched shape pointing left and then pointing right. Not being perfect is how you want to play this. (Sorry it's hard to see the wet paint; it dried a tad darker, but hopefully you can get a visual of how I painted.)
The more I painted, the more "messy" some of the dots got but that just fed into the whole hand-painted, abstract look.
I went around the entire expanse of wall in this little bathroom painting these little dots maybe six to eight inches from each other.
Then I went back and painted a second dot very close to each first dot I had painted like so:
And then I went back and painted a third dot on maybe 75% of my little two-dotters around the room. Last, I filled in empty spots with a dot here and a dot there.
I also added some half dots where the walls met the ceilings and baseboards to get that wallpaper effect.
So now that you know the "how", it's really important to talk about the paint. I used a sample pot of latex paint which, by the way, was plenty of paint for this project. The amount of paint I used was maybe four or five tablespoons. You could do an entire room if you had the desire with just one pot. The reason that I got away with using so little paint is because I watered the paint down. I used maybe one part paint to three or four parts water. This is SO important when you're doing any sort of painting designs/patterns/whatever on walls. Watering down the paint ensures that the paint leaves behind zero texture - the last thing you want is to paint over your hand-painted walls someday only to see the raised design left behind because you just slapped paint up there without watering it down, thereby "flattening" it. Make sense? I don't want to paint these walls green someday and have raised dots everywhere. So, water down the paint, ok? :)
You probably guessed how much this project didn't break the bank. I used paint and a brush I already had but if you had to buy supplies new, it probably wouldn't even break ten bucks. Hooray!
This is a super easy project for anyone to tackle so if you take it on, let me know! Start up a good audio book, turn up your fave tunes, or just sit in the silence that seems so hard to find these days, and put some abstract almonds up on your walls.
Go nuts. ;)
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Psst, while I was not blogging over the past year my email subscriber count continued to climb to almost 800 of you which is awesome but also put me over the subscriber limit to have a free Mailchimp (the service that I use to send out new post emails with) account. So, I'm trying to figure out how to keep getting you your email updates without having to pay too much since I'm not making much cash directly off the blog right now. The best I can say is to check in once in awhile for a new post! Thank you for reading!!
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