Let me paint you a picture. You stumble into your bog-standard, builder-grade bathroom each morning, shower under dire magnolia-coloured tiles while listening to the kazoo version of Your Five Year Old Having Meltdowns At Their Peak Singing Power Before Heading Out The Door To Face Another Day Of Commuter Hell. Sound depressing?
Well it was for me. Whenever we moved into this house the bathroom was done in every shade of beige/light brown/yellows/tan. It honestly looked like somebody wanted the room to be as bland and beige as humanly possible because they were too scared to pick tiles/wall colours/shower curtains.
I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it.
I didn’t really feel anything when I went into that bathroom.
There were worse rooms in the house but hey-ho. It was fine. Plus everything in there actually worked – shower had good water pressure; mirror wasn’t cracked; toilet flushed.
However, it was bloody boring. After renovating our kitchen and building Amara’s nursery from scratch (pretty much! ), our bathroom stood out like a sore thumb. We spent ALL of our renovation budget on the kitchen and Alice’s room so the chances of doing a bathroom revamp were slim to none.
But I kept seeing blogs, vlogs and Instagram posts of people transforming their bathrooms – slap bang in the middle of builder’s grunt zone -by painting one wall navy blue; adding funky tiles; or swishing that magnolia shade for something a little more grown up. I knew I couldn’t do the whole room – no money plus a toddler who sees DIY projects as ninja-wippling their way through as many cupboards/bags/bins of screws/belts/toys/etc. means I’m limited with what I can achieve -but could I manage one wall? One day my mum pops over for a cuppa and catches me giving our bathroom walls ‘the eye’.
She breezes past me, strides into the bathroom and goes: ‘If you don’t like it, just paint it.’ Simple as that. Mum advice isn’t exactly useful is it? She didn’t take into consideration I was pregnant (deadinitely not helpful then) and had zero desire to figure out what paint colours to even start with.
But you know what? She was right. I was overthinking the s*** out of everything!
So, I started small. First wall? The one behind the toilet.
It’s the first thing you see when you walk in BUT at least if I messed it up, it wasn’t the first thing guests would look at when they walked through the door. Plus after scrolling through WAY too many Pinterest bathroom inspo pics during lockdown, I knew I wanted subway tiles. But I didn’t want to tile the whole wall -my friend Claire painted her downstairs toilet COMPLETELY navy blue and whilst it looked ace; it always felt like a cave to me when I walked in.
So instead I tiling from about waist height up to the ceiling, creating a coloured ‘band’ around our bathroom that makes the space feel bigger and more luxurious. Er….the tiling process wasn’t great. To be honest Liam was working lates that week so he wasn’t there to witness my toddler-esque language when tile-adhesive got everywhere (and I’ll let you into a secret – I’ve STILL got a sneaky layer underneath some tiles that I just can’t shift).
Learning experience numero dos? Being heavily pregnant doesn’t help when you’re trying to tile above shoulder height. BUT holy crap did it transform the room!
Our bright white toilet suite instantly looked like we did it on purpose rather than it being there because we couldn’t be arsed picking colours/wasting more money/tile shopping. Our shiny chrome taps suddenly looked high-end; our drying rail didn’t look like we’d randomly thrown it against the wall (we had – still do); and even my sorry excuse for a spider plant tucked under the window looks like I actually put some thought into where I put it rather than just chucking it on the windowsill. Seeing how much of a difference just that one small wall made got me thinking about other ways you could jazz up your bathroom without spending a small fortune OR completely renovating the entire room.
Painting your wall is obvious really; grab a pot of paint and create a feature wall in a weekend! We painted the wall behind the sink in our downstairs toilet this beautiful dusty pink colour and it instantly took it from trying REALLY hard to be stylish to elegant family bathroom. Wallpaper’s also having a moment at the minute – especially removable, stick-on kind.
I stuck this floral wall panel in our downstairs bathroom and it instantly went from dull toilet to wow-factor restroom. But if you’ve got kids. If you’ve got husband’s who think decorating = oily trowels and roller pics everywhere for weeks on end.
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If you’re just life-ing, you need to consider practicality with any renovations. Guys. That lush grasscloth wallpaper I was going on about up there?
Not practical when it’s going to get steamy in there when you’re running toddlers baths every evening AND your toddlers decides to splash water EVERYWHERE. That reclaimed wood effect? Yeah, that looks amazing on Instagram but not so much when you’ve got to make sure it’s sealed properly so the sh!t your toddler decides to flush down the toilet doesn’t soak into your ‘feature wall’.
Trust me, I had the wood effect sorted at one point. Until I imagined cleaning toothpaste splodges and, ahem, Play-Doh explosions (what? It happens!) out of the grooves of my beautiful wood tiles and swiftly changed my tune.
Surfaces that are easy to wipe down and clean are a godsend when you’ve got kids. Sure, they might not look like the pinterest boards you’ve pinned BUT when your downstairs toilet looks like a toddler ninja threw up everywhere #because they totally will at some point – you’ll be thanking yourself. Scale is important too.
Our bathroom is tiny. Like most spend half the night in there tiny. So I only did the tiles about two thirds of the way up the wall.
Any higher and it would’ve felt like someone slapped a huge box around my toilet. My sister-in-law went full hog on hers though. She actually did floor-to-ceiling timber behind her stand-alone bath.
It looks AMAZING but she’s got a huge bathroom so it works. Ours isn’t massive enough to do that I don’t think. Trust me, I didn’t think about the lighting either.
Ordered my tiles; came home and didn’t realise our bathroom lighting was completely different to the showroom. Ended up googling ‘how tile colours look under different light bulbs’ and spent about an hour in B&Q comparing my tile samples to the bulbs. They lucked pretty similar to the lighting we have at home but I needed to double (and triple) cheque!
You don’t want to spend all afternoon painting/wallpapering/tile-laying just to realise your ‘feature wall’ looks completely different at night time when you have handful of kids running round screaming whilst you’re trying to take a bath to de-stress from parenting toddler/pregnant hormones. Speaking of bulbs, the colour temperature made SUCH a difference to how the tiles looked. Some bulbs made them this deep, lush green and others made them look grey.
I love how they change colour though depending on what time of day it is and if the bathroom lights are on. It makes your bathroom feel alive! Total cost?
Under £200 for everything and taking a weekend to put up (honestly – I took like four trips to the tile shop ‘cos I’m crap at working out how many tiles I actually needed).
Feel amazing knowing I could’ve gone into Derby Millais, picked up a fancy handbag for the same price and still have transformed our dull bathroom into a room we actually LIKE spending time in. It’s the first thing people comment on when they come round now.
Before – nobody said a peep about our toilet. But since adding that little bit of colour everyone notices it. Even Milly thinks it’s cool – she runs into the bathroom and calls it “Mummy’s pretty wall”.
Enough said. What it’s taught me? If your baby decides they want to spend more time in there with us overnight/constant baths feeding/etc.
I’ve got something pretty to look at rather than dull, beige walls. Plus you really don’t need to rip your whole room apart to make it feel like a ‘new’ room. One feature wall can change the dynamic.
Just make sure it’s toddler-friendly.
