Thursday, September 15, 2011

Unplanned Bathroom Remodel!

Usually when someone does an unplanned bathroom remodel, it's because something in there exploded or flooded.  Thankfully for us, this is not the case.  I am doing an unplanned bathroom remodel basically because I'm easily distracted by things on the internet, and I saw a blog about painting your laminate countertops, and my countertop in that bathroom was U-G-L-Y.  Yesterday I ventured into the bathroom and the first step to repainting the countertops, in my mind, is to begin pulling down the what-were-you-thinking-when-you-hung-that wallpaper border.  I know, it makes a lot of sense.

So begins the unplanned remodel.  Because it's grown from even there.  Here is a before shot of our hallway bathroom, as used in our real estate listing:
See that blue countertop?  Ugh.  Original to the house....1979, baby.  Oh, and here's a close up of the unfortunate border:
(Sorry for the terrible color balance...) I make it a habit to pretty much loathe wallpaper.  It's just so 1985.  The only reason there is a border to begin with is because there was a border when we bought the house (it was even uglier FROGS!) and a very detailed faux texture finish on the wall, which stopped at the bottom of the border.  So if I had just taken down the border and painted the wall to the ceiling, there would have been an invisible border because there's no texturing up there.  For some reason, I decided to do a patriotic bathroom (I'm still not sure why) and that brings us to today.

Now I'm still faced with the no-texture-to-the-ceiling dilemma, but I think I've found a great way to solve that without having to choose another traditional wallpaper border that I'm just going to be sick of in four months.  But that's not for this post.

I found a couple of options for painting the countertop, spray or brush...and given my current love of spray painting everything I can find, I chose that option.  I am using Rustoleum Stone Textured Finish paint in Stone Mineral Brown.  So after taping down plastic and newspaper everywhere, I applied a primer in a sort of reddish brown (because it was either that, gray or white...) before I began painting the stone.  It took about 5 coats of the stone paint to cover the red primer completely, which was roughly one and a half cans.  

See the texture of the stone? It's not smooth, it's a rough finish.  But I think that makes it look more realistic.
Last night I applied my first two coats of polycrylic waterproof sealer, and today throughout the day I will apply more and probably finish with 4-6 coats of sealer.  I will say that I sort of preferred the look of the stone finish while it was matte, and the sealer is a semi-gloss so it is now shinier.  I didn't even pay attention to whether or not they had the sealer in matte.  But it's too late now so I can definitely live with that.  

So this is where we are right now.  I taped around the frame on the mirror because I will also be painting it, either dark brown or black.  The wallpaper is almost gone, and now I need to go get busy to get started on the new border solution.  More to come!

1 comment:

Angy said...

Excellent! Not to make more projects for you but our neighbor down the street when we lived in Cove also painted her bathroom floor which was linoleum. Looked GREAT!