Our hall bathroom is a design nightmare. Normally I would have been content (at least short term) to shut the door and have hubby take it over as his bathroom, but it houses the only bathtub in the joint, and I’m a total bath-a-holic.
Here’s our ‘before’ picture -

Turquoise walls and ceiling, ornate decorative tile, green countertops, black floor, yellowing grout (which for some reason isn’t totally apparent in the above picture), ugly too-bright lighting with a vine motif, gigantic mirror. Yuck.
I thought I’d paint the bathroom green, so I started getting those little paint testers and trying out patches on the walls. Stu got sick of the bathroom becoming a camouflage design, so he painting the whole works a dark-ish moss green. I think I hated this more than the turquoise (it had very yellow undertones).

Part of the problem was that there was so much light in there (8 bright vanity bulbs in a 7′ x 5′ ish room). It was pulling all the color out of anything subtle, so something bold really had to be painted on the walls with those lights.
My first move was to take down the lights -

Right now, we’re using a lamp in there until we can get a new light fixture in.
My second move was to take down that gigantic mirror -

And primer over all that green! -

At this point, it’s in the most ripped down state it will get to and is ready to be built back up.
I’ve decided on Sarah Richarson’s “Surf” (SR-31) color for the walls (she has a line of colors through Para Paints that I found at Lowe’s) -

It’s described as ‘a subdued, barely there neutral with a touch of blue, green and grey – it’s an easily adaptable chameleon colour’. Perfect! Just what I need with all my different shades of green in that bathroom.
If you’re looking for more on the Sarah Richardson colors, you can find them here. I’m slowly painting my whole house in them.
The funny thing about the Surf color is that as I was leaving the house with the paint chip to have the paint mixed at Lowe’s, I held it up in broad daylight, and the chip read as a stark white! I almost had second thoughts, but reminded myself to trust my instincts and also reminded myself of what a huge difference lighting can play with a color.
I’m glad I went with my original gut feeling and had the Surf mixed, because there is definitely enough color in it for our (no daylight) bathroom.
Normally I probably wouldn’t even mention this, but I am just amazed at the difference it made, so I’ll share. Our grout in that shower (with the tiles (and yucky grout) to the ceiling was turning a pinkish yellow and had some darker staining in other places. I thought we were going to have to re-grout it to return it to it’s former white glory, but if we were going to go to the effort to re-grout, we might as well re-tile, since those ornate decorative tiles aren’t in the 5 year plan. Well, re-tiling is not in the budget right now as you can imagine, and I thought I was going to have to live with the grout the way it was for a few years.

I tried scrubbing the grout with all sorts of grout cleaners and bathroom cleaners with no luck. As a last ditch effort, I decided to try a $5 bottle of grout whitener I found at Lowe’s (in with the grout sealers, etc if you’re looking). I didn’t have high hopes, but I applied it yesterday, and OMG! What a difference! Our grout is white again and looks fantastic!
I used the Homax Tile Guard Tile Grout Coating. I’m thinking about using it on our kitchen back splash too, because it’s having the same problem that our bathroom grout was having.
Here’s a glimpse into the new bathroom –

It still needs quite a few finishing touches, but is getting closer to being done.

You can see that the color works a lot better with the tile than the previous wall colors.

The counters are still a mess, and we don’t even have towels in there yet (or a shower curtain and rod), but I wanted to share my progress. I also want to put something in the area to the right of the mirror – thinking a hotel style towel rack, but also thinking maybe a small cupboard. We don’t have a shortage of storage space by any means in this bathroom, because there is a huge closet in the area behind the door (when it’s open). Perhaps I’ll throw a couple of wall shelves up and put some decorative stuff on it.
More pics to come when the bathroom is all finished.