1st floor powder room progress

Our Virginia house is a house of wallpaper, none of which goes together. And, when a wall is painted, it’s beige. Yellow beige. Cringe time.

I’m a girl who loves color. Growing up, I insisted on painting my bedroom a bright sunflower yellow. I loved it. I was surprised my parents actually agreed though they may have thought I would change my mind. I didn’t.

In our first house in PA, I learned to use color in a coordinated way. Though I did paint my office a bright yellow. Otherwise, I kept the riot of colors outside in the flower beds.

Here in our Virginia house, I plan to have lots of fun with color, especially since it will be a number of years before I’ll have flower beds full of color. My first true color project is our first floor powder room. I’m basing the design on this bathroom.

The wallpaper pattern in here was a mud wall with exposed bricks. As patterns go, it wasn’t the worst, but difficult to look at in a small bathroom. Once we discovered the wallpaper steamer, it was fairly easy, though a bit messy to remove the wallpaper.

Fortunately the fixtures, mirror, sink, and toilet work well enough to be used again for now. Eventually I may replace the black fixtures though I think I may like them better once everything is done.

I decided to use the dark purple I used in my youngest son’s bedroom. Since we were painting walls that previously had wallpaper on them we did 2 coats of oil based primer to lock in any remaining glue residue.

The wallpaper is made by Orainege. It’s peel and stick. When I picked out the wallpaper, I didn’t realize we would only get 2 pieces out of each roll. We ended up getting 8 rolls.

Unfortunately the wallpaper is somewhat transparent. When we painted the purple, we wanted to make sure we went under the top moulding. That ended up being too far up. My husband fixed the issue and now he’s slowly working his way around the room with the wallpaper. He’s finding it extremely frustrating to put up without tearing.

Once the wallpaper is installed, we will tackle the moulding. I think my husband is looking forward to that.