The Townhouse: Using Paint to Update Bathrooms on a Budget
The Townhouse has two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms — and I wanted to redo all of them. So I started with the half bathroom. However, I really didn’t want to put too much money into it because the practical side of said, “You’re looking for a new house, and it doesn’t make sense to spend money on tile and countertops.”
Darn that practical side of me.
But I still wanted to do something with that bathroom. To me, it’s a pretty important part of the house because it’s the bathroom guests see. Not to mention, it’s the only remaining room on the main floor that I haven’t done anything with, which means it still has the peach walls that I hated.
It’s a tiny space, as most half bathrooms are, and has one light source, a fan light in the center of the ceiling. It tends to be dark in there so the brown countertop and oak cabinets did not help.
With budget in mind, I searched around for cheap vanities that I could possibly replace our vanity downstairs. However, it became clear that I had champagne tastes on a beer budget. So then I began a search of Pinterest to look for ideas of what I could do. In that process, I came across a ton of tutorials to use paint to update just about everything: countertops, floors, you name it. And I already know how to paint a cabinet.
I went through multiple thoughts on what to do color-wise. I wanted to be experimental with the space but then decided it needed to match the rest of the house, especially since we’re considering selling this year.
So here’s what I decided to do:
Paint the countertops to look like marble and then epoxy it.
Use a peel-and-stick vinyl tile on the floors (I chickened out on stenciling and painting the floors).
Paint the walls white to brighten things up.
Paint the cabinets a soft gray.
Bring in some wood tones with floating shelving and framing the mirror.
Painting Walls, Countertops, and Cabinets
The first thing we painted was the walls. I was so happy to see the last of the peach go, and it instantly brightened up the space.
Painting the countertops made me extremely nervous. I’m not artistic. I had no clue what I was doing. Not to mention, I get pretty impatient sometimes.
Thankfully, there were millions of tutorials. I used these two tutorials:
I also watched Gianni’s Countertop Paint tutorial video as well since they do have a marble version. I considered doing that but found that it was much cheaper to just do it with materials I purchased separately. All I needed was some gray craft paint, white paint (of which I just used the kitchen cabinet paint I already had), some thin paint brushes and a soft 2” paint brush, a sea sponge, and a spray bottle.
The first step was to paint the countertop white. I primed it with an oil-based primer and then did three coats of white paint. After that, it was time to start doing the veining.
The process got off to a rough start, and I was happy that you could literally just wipe away your mistakes. If I messed up a line, I would just spray it with water and wipe it away. In the end, I also realized that some of the messy ones turned out the best.
After I finished with paint, it dried overnight and then we used epoxy to create the shiny look, as well as protect it. I made Matt do most of the work because I found myself really concerned about messing it up.
It ended up being a really fun project, and I felt so proud of these end results. In fact, I loved them so much, I decided to do it with the rest of the bathrooms in the house.
We also swapped out the old faucet with this champagne gold one that I found, which give it a nice luxury look.
Then we did a soft gray color on the cabinets and added champagne gold hardware to match the new faucet.
Using Peel-and-Stick Vinyl Flooring
Once that was done, we had to do the floors. Now, at this point, I had just finished fibroid removal surgery, which meant no moving around, definitely no bending. That meant that Matt ended up doing the floors all on his own — and it didn’t help that I wanted him to do it in a herringbone pattern. One, he’d never done floors before. Two, we had to cut these square marble look-alike tiles into smaller strips. Three, it was a pain.
But it turned out so well!
It’s such an inexpensive way to add the look of tile, and it really pulls the whole room together. We did add grout to it, even though it isn’t necessary, just to add to the look.
Adding Wood Elements
I also had a shelf from Target that used to be above my coffee bar that happened to be pine wood. So we bought another shelf, sanded, and stained them to make these gorgeous wood shelves. I wanted to make sure the space didn’t feel too white and sterile with the white walls, countertops, and floors.
For the mirror, we just used some 2x4s that we cut, stained, and glued onto the mirror to frame it in. It was such an easy thing to do and upgraded the bathroom that much more.
So here we are, the final product, and I absolutely love it. It didn’t break the bank or come close to it, and the bathroom looks amazing. The space is completely transformed, not a peach wall in sight.
So we ended up loving the look so much that we did it with our two other bathrooms as well.
With the guest bathroom, we painted the countertops and cabinets then replaced the faucet, hardware, and light fixture. We loved the peel-and-stick vinyl in the half bathroom so much that we also did it here, just not in a herringbone pattern. I didn’t want to do that to Matt again. We also added a new mirror as the one we had in this bathroom fell off the wall.
Here is the before, during and after:
We also updated our master bathroom at the townhouse. This time we didn’t paint the cabinets because I ended up loving how they looked after a bit of sanding. We did paint the bathroom to make it lighter since it was a smaller space and the dark gray just felt too dark. Again, we did a lot of the same things as the other bathrooms: painted the countertops, changed out faucet, hardware, and light fixture, and framed the mirror. Plus we changed the floors with the same peel-and-stick vinyl floors.
These are pretty terrible before, during and after because as you can imagine, we were exhausted by the third bathroom. But it looked great, I swear it!
