Powder Room Reno Pt. 4: Painting Tile Floors!

Y'ALL. I'm just going to cut right to chase here. This worked SO well. So, so, so well. It's holding up great, and I'm thrilled with how it looks. The end. If you want to know more, you can read on about how we did it, but if you're just here to know "yeah, but did it work?" Yes it did, and I'm obsessed!!

When we moved in, we had the same salmon-y colored tile floor throughout the entire kitchen and all the bathrooms in the house. They look yellow-y in the lighting of this room, but believe-you-me. They were the color of cooked salmon... a light, milky pink. No gracias.

The previous seller renovated the kitchen and baths and must have bought it all in bulk. Lovely. When we re-did the kitchen floors to hardwood, I knew I'd eventually want to get to the bathroom, but figured it would come in time. Well, the time has come and gone! We heavily debated replacing them -- even bought some sample tiles to see if we liked them better. We did love the idea of replacing the tile altogether, but the thought of adding another project onto our already long to do list was overwhelming, and it would have pushed us over budget, even with a small space.

I've already shared how we scored our $250.00 slab of granite (it's true!), and went over budget on the wallpaper because (#icantmath) so any budget we had for flooring went out the window. I had read tons of articles on painting tile floors and I figured, "what's the worst that can happen." Painting the countertops didn't work out well for me, but I wasn't ready to give up on paint just yet.

After reading over a dozen posts about painting tile floors, I decided to go with chalk paint and a heavy duty sealer. I'll link all the products we used below.

It's been about 6 weeks since we did this. We use this bathroom every day, vacuum it every week, and wear shoes in it all the time and there's not one little scratch. It's holding up super well and I am SO thrilled!

Here's how we did it:
- Clean everything with a heavy duty de-greaser. I used this product.
It doesn't say to do this, but I wiped everything down again with water, and dried it with a microfiber towel, twice. Just to be sure!

- I used a heavy grit sanding block to rough up the surface of the tile. I spent a solid 20 minutes doing this, and I think it really helped.

- Tape off all the surfaces and edges

  

- Wipe everything down with water and microfiber tile again. No hair or dust particles please!
Because the surface of my tile is glossy and polished, I used an extra adhesive bonding primer. I highly recommend this if your surface is really smooth. Even after sanding, it still felt really glossy to me. I think this primer is a big part of why it's holding up so well!

  

- Let primer fully dry -- then do a second coat. Just to be sure :)

- Then, I used a small foam roller to apply the chalk paint. I found this awesome chalk paint at my local Ace Hardware by Magnolia. You know I love me some Joanna Gaines so I was excited to use it! I bought a few different white options, but settled on the color ShipLap. Let first coat fully dry. I did 3 coats to make sure I got extra smooth coverage.

- Then, I used a chalk paint sealer. I did 3 coats with a regular paint brush (letting each one fully dry in between applications). The first picture is of me beginning to apply the chalk paint so you can see how it differs from the streaky primer. The second photo is after 3 coats.

  

- Remove tape at a 45* angle.... and voila! Painted floors. Before...

And AFTER!

- Once you are finished, I recommend waiting 24+ hours before walking on them. There's a tiny dark streak in the paint in the first tile (right above my right foot) that you can see in this pic... It's actually an indent in the paint from me walking on it too soon. I thought it was dry about 12 hours later, but because I had done so many coats, it wasn't. I realized it right away and stepped off, but that little indent will always bother me. Spenser says I have to leave it as a reminder to be patient with my projects. #lessonlearned

Before: 

    

After: 

Before: 

After: 

Like I said, it's been 6 weeks since we've done this and we walk on it multiple times a day every day. There hasn't been any wear or tear on it at all. I will definitely be back with an update after 6 months & a year to see how it's holding up! I cannot *wait* to tackle the upstairs bathrooms and finally rid myself of the salmon tile once and for all. And guuuuys! This is my last bathroom reno update! We tackled so much in this project... and a ton of firsts for us.

- Painting existing cabinet
- Installing wallpaper for the first time
- Our first big reno fail & replacing the counter top
- And our first time painting tile flooring 

We definitely took a risk taking on some of these DIY's, but thankfully all but one turned out better than I expected (and let's be honest, the new granite is the biggest consolation prize ever. Way better than painted counters, for sure!). We've decided we're going to cool it for a bit on home projects and focus on saving up some moolah and dreaming about some bigger projects we may want to do later this year (like more landscaping and possibly a bigger bathroom remodel upstairs). I'm working on our latest quarterly update (I'm a month behind) to show our progress again, so I'll pop in now and again for stuff like that! Thanks for tagging along. 

Powder Room Reno Pt. 3: Installing Removable Wallpaper

I know I'm dragging out these powder room posts, but there really is so much to cover! In this post, I'll be going in depth about the wallpaper we chose for our bathroom, how we installed it, and my honest opinions on the product and process! It's juicy. Er, as juicy as wallpaper can be.

When I walked in the door after 10 days away in Nova Scotia, the first thing I saw when I walked in the back door was my wallpapered bathroom. In that moment, I honestly wanted to kiss my house right on the mouth. Being away for 10 days really made me appreciate how far we have come with this home, AND with this particular project. I'm just so excited with how it turned out and can't wait to walk you through it.

I have been seeing all over the internet that wallpaper is reaaaally having a comeback. It's no longer just for Grandma's house. It's chic, it's punchy, and it can add so much visual interest to an otherwise boring room.

I knew I wanted to do a wallpaper pattern on this powder room ever since we moved here. Something about the angled wall under the stairs just screamed "accent wall" to me and I knew it had to be more than paint. I was super, super inspired by this beautiful laundry room wall by Jenna Sue Design.

I absolutely loved the soft pattern of the wallpaper and the visual interest it added to a typically uninteresting room. I figured if she could do it in laundry, why couldn't I do it in my powder room?  We have an air vent in this bathroom that helps cool our entire first floor, so we are typically leaving the bathroom door wide open. Since it's going to be open most of the time, I might as well make it beautiful, right?

Since we've never installed wallpaper before, I was nervous to commit to full on glue. I have a theory now that glue wallpaper is actually EASIER to work with than the removable kind, but I'll get to that in a bit. I started hunting for a pattern similar to the Jenna Sue room and found one I really liked on WallsNeedLove.com. Our pattern is called Ida, if you're wanting to shop it!

When it came to measuring the wall to order the wallpaper rolls, I genuinely thought I did it right. I measured the height, the width, added 15% for overage in case we needed to make weird cuts (we did). And yet, somehow, we still ran short. I am notoriously bad at math, but I do think something was a little funky with how much this covered. It was a repeating pattern, and because of our angles we had to line them up in weird ways. Maybe I didn't account for that? Either way, I was several square feet short. My best advice here is to order more than you think you need, measure 3x, and don't ask me to do math, ever.

Thankfully, WallsNeedLove had awesome customer service and my extra panel arrived in 2 days! I was able to cut parts of the print to fit in the spaces we needed and fill in our gaps. You can hardly tell there are even seams unless you look really closely.

I will say, installing removable wallpaper can be a little tricky. There were some moments we got really, really frustrated because it kept sticking to itself, or the wall, or us, and it made the process take a lot longer than I think it should have. You know when you're trying to wrap something in Saran Wrap and it sticks to itself as you're stretching it out and then you have to throw the whole thing away? This kept happening to us. It was just always sticking to itself or to the wall and we kept having to stop and fix it. It slowed us down for sure and caused us to have to pause and re-set, re-position, and constantly smooth out air bubbles.

 

If we were to add wallpaper again, I am pretty confident in saying I would choose regular glue wall paper. I had a great experience using the Walls Need Love product, but I think you have a bit more flexibility with installation since it doesn't stick to itself and can be adjusted once it's laid on the wall. Lining up the pattern was also frustrating, and required a reaaaally steady hand since our pattern had so many lines. We would spent several minutes making sure one area was perfectly in line, only to step back and realize it was off in another. It just required a lot of stopping, re-starting, removing, re-applying, and so on until we got it exactly right. At one point we asked ourselves if it was worth continuing and should we just scrap the whole project, but thankfully we didn't give up! Now that it's finished, you really can't see the seams and I'm glad we spent the time making sure it looked perfect.

My best before of this angle was from before I started blogging and was just documenting on Instagram, so apologies for the caption. But wow, what a change!

This bathroom is legitimately my favorite room in our house. It feels like the most "me" project I've ever undertaken and I am so glad I decided to do the wallpaper, even if it was a P.I.T.A.!  Now that I see how great it can look, you better believe I'll be doing it again in another project! 10/10 would wallpaper again!