The AO House: Bathroom Peek

If at first you don't succeed...

This was our bathroom several weekends ago. Note the eleventy billion paint samples on the wall and resting on the back of the toilet and the edge of the sink.

After falling in love with this inspiration bathroom, I was determined that a blush pink paint color would look beautiful in our bathroom coupled with my ikat stripe curtain fabric (dangling on the left of the shot). I did my due diligence and searched far and wide for the perfect shade. I did NOT want to make the mistake of painting the whole room the wrong color.

Many of the shades were a bit too pink (and didn't look as nice as I thought they would) and some were too dark. Our bathroom has very little natural light, and the recessed lighting is not very helpful to the paint colors (which look marvelous in the store). After much deliberation, I decided on Powder Puff from Martha's new line at the Home Depot:

I was looking forward to trying this new paint line - the sample shades are all very attractive. The gallon was pretty pricey (I want to say something like $35), but the paint quality was lovely. A thinner paint that is easier to paint with, but has great coverage and true color. And it didn't stink up my small space. All great points.

The only bad point was that it was the totally wrong color. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Seems I can never get a break with paint. Even with samples, I manage to pick something that doesn't work.

Once I was done painting the whole bathroom, the color was just screaming "PEACH" on the walls (even thought it's more of a very pretty light beige in person - I think it only looked peach because of my lighting/bathroom space). Don't get me wrong - peach can be great in the correct context - but it just made the bathroom look dated.

So I threw in the towel that weekend. I was pretty frustrated, and decided that my shower curtain fabric was not helping me in the color choice department so I abandoned my plans.

I sat on it for a week, and decided to make life easy by picking-up a ready-made curtain that I liked at Target. It became my new inspiration point, and we finished the major work on the bathroom this weekend. Finally!

I still have some final changes to complete, but here's a sneak peek:

I will definitely do a full post on the final bathroom. As you can see, it's quite the departure from my original inspiration, but I like this version so much more! I'm glad I called it quits when I knew it wasn't right - hard to walk away from a plan you want to work, but in the end, this bathroom came together really quickly once I was happy with my picks.