A $20 DIY Transforms This Bathroom’s Dated 2000s Beige Tile
If you don’t love the existing tile in a room but aren’t looking to fully tear it out, there are a few options: You could add peel-and-stick tile over it, you could paint it a new color (although that’s not lease-friendly), or you could cover your existing tile with painter’s tape or poster board and add real ceramic tile right over it.
Or, you could copy homeowner and DIYer Lily Tsutsumida (@lilytsutsumidaart) and add contact paper over some of the tiles. Her bathroom before “felt very dark and had an overwhelming amount of beige tumbled marble tile, which felt dated to the early 2000s,” Lily says. And she and her husband, Evan, didn’t like the plum wall color, either.
“We had no money for a real renovation,” Lily says. “The checker tile makeover was insanely affordable. [We] spent about $20 on contact paper, and the rest was just time.”
The temporary nature of contact paper makes it trend-friendly.
Lily added dark green contact paper over every other bathroom wall tile to create a checkerboard effect and break up all of the beige. “Using contact paper as DIY tile stickers was a first, and I was worried about adhesion with all the moisture,” Lily says. “It’s held up shockingly well.”
She also says the project was fairly beginner-friendly, as long as you don’t mind getting down on a floor behind a toilet to reach truly every tile in a bathroom and using a paper cutter to accommodate any irregularly shaped tiles.
Plus, the checkers are temporary if she wants them to be. “When I tire of the trend, I can easily swap for something else,” she says. “The impermanence allowed me to go bold, and I’m very proud of how nice they look relative to their cost.”
The total bathroom reno cost $300.
Although Lily and Evan only spent $20 to upgrade the tile, they made other improvements to the bathroom, like painting the walls white (Behr’s Nano White), changing up the lighting and faucet, and adding new decor, so the total was about $300.
“I want my bathroom where I get ready every day to feel like me,” Lily says. Her goal was “light, bright, and modern,” and the bathroom “feels totally transformed in style and energy.”
Inspired? Submit your own project here.