A “Not Finished” Bathroom Transforms with 3 Cozy Projects Starting at $22
Stripes and plaids work in almost any room, from kitchens to bedrooms to dining rooms. Here, DIYer Elena Manby shows how to pull off vertical stripes in a bathroom.
“This space was looking not ‘finished’ with just white walls,” Elena says. Three projects (using all leftover DIY materials) helped refresh the bathroom.
First, she painted an accent wall behind the mirrors.
Before Elena painted her stripes, she painted a solid green accent wall in the bathroom; it’s Sherwin-Williams’ Evergreen Fog, and she also painted the walls and ceiling of the water closet in the room that color.
Then, she re-hung her arched bathroom mirrors underneath the black light fixtures; both pieces were part of previous, smaller bathroom upgrades. (Elena also previously swapped a bulky medicine cabinet for a built-in niche in this space.)
A DIY upgrade makes the same vanity look new.
Elena’s DIY decorating and organizing advice, which she shares on Instagram, is as follows: “Do one area at the time,” and “start with a small area.” In other words, tackle one small project at a time, and eventually the whole room will feel new.
Another key project Elena did in her bathroom was stain the vanity. “I used leftover products from previous projects and even kept [the] original handles,” she says on Instagram. She removed all the doors and sanded them and the base, stained the vanity in Minwax’s Dark Walnut, and sealed it with a polyurethane coat.
Lastly, the stripes add drama.
Most recently, Elena has joined in on the vertical stripe trend, and she gave the non-green walls in her primary bathroom a makeover. “I wanted to add wallpaper, but our walls are textured,” she explains. “Painting ‘wallpaper’ instead of real wallpaper saved us a lot of money, and I learned to just go with your vision.”
She used Sherwin-Williams’ Sand Beach for the stripes, and she says it took a while to land on the right color. She did not use painter’s tape and instead used a laser level to create her stripes for a more hand-hewn look. “Calculating spacing and how wide [the] stripes should be” was a DIY “first” for Elena. This portion of the project cost $22. Elena says “the stripes made [her] bathroom look more cozy [and] warm.”
“I am glad I decided to just go with it,” she says.
Inspired? Submit your own project here.