CHANGING ROOMS: OUR QUICK BUT IMPACTFUL BATHROOM TRANSFORMATION

In collaboration with Dulux

Who watched the recent series of ‘Changing Rooms’ on Channel 4?! Wasn’t it brilliant, such a great trip down memory lane but I also loved the addition of Jordan and Russell (from 2LG studio) as a style team update (if you missed it, you can catch up on ALL 4 here). As the show’s sponsor, and to celebrate the show returning to our screens, Dulux challenged us to change a room in our home using the ‘Dulux Simply Refresh’ range.

Our bathroom, even though we love it, was in need of some love (isn’t that the way when decorating? Once you’ve finished one room, another needs redoing!). It was the first room we decorated when we moved in and we painted it dark which I loved, but after 4 years we have finally accepted it is a little too dark for this room – the only window faces a side alley and gets very little daylight. We had also used some paint testers which had rubbed the existing paint off the wall so it needed something lighter to help lift the small room and bounce more light around.

We knew we wanted to keep the door pink, so I was looking for a colour to complement it and had been thinking of a light green for a while (I love pink and green together!). It was between ‘Tranquil Dawn’ and ‘Willow Tree’ as a softer green (but if you’re after a more olive colour, then check out ‘Overtly Olive’) and I finally narrowed it down to ‘Tranquil Dawn’.

I knew I wanted to try painting a ceiling in a colour (which we’d never done before) and I’d also been seeing a lot of striped wallpaper lately and wondered if it were possible to achieve the look with paint, creating a much bolder statement. We decided to pair the green with ‘White Cotton’ and do wide cabana-esque stripes on the walls.

The key to painting stripes is in the prep, the actual painting took hardly any time at all! It’s a good idea to measure the space and work out the size of the stripes before painting (we used the size of the tiles underneath for guidance) and then the ‘hack’ is not to paint both colours in stripes – make sure you use one colour as the base (we used the white), then paint the stripes in the other colour (in our case, green).

We used masking tape and a spirit level, but didn’t use our wall or ceiling line as a measure as our walls are particularly wonky (!). There are a few decisions you have to make, such as the direction of the stripes and whether you go under the window ledge (we did and it looks great!) but apart from that, we found it much easier than we thought – mainly because the paint was soo easy to work with. We only used one 2.5L paint tin of each colour and there’s still some left for other projects!

Working around a baby, this job took us two afternoons (honestly – it’s the masking tape that takes the time!) and it has made such a huge impact to this space.

Would you be up for changing a room with paint soon?

This post was a paid partnership with Dulux. All words, Art Direction and photography our own.