Living in a rental, there is only so much redecorating I’m able to do. And while I love figuring out ways to improve my space without making any permanent changes, sometimes a girl just needs a little demolition in her life. Lucky for me, I have a boyfriend who was not only open to letting me redecorate some of his house, he even helped (like, a lot).

We started with the upstairs guest bathroom because 1) it really needed it (we’re talking wallpaper from 1987) and 2) it’s a room that doesn’t get used very often, so if we messed it up too badly, we could just close the door and forget it exists for a while. Luckily, it didn’t come to that. Here are a few before pics:

It was really difficult to get good before pictures, because the whole room was various beige and white tones, and there is no natural light anywhere near it. The pics make it look a bit pink, but it was really more yellowy.

Note the puffy white shower curtain.

The tub section is too long for a standard shower rod, and it seems this curved rod was the builder’s solution. Unfortunately, it sagged quite a bit.

The wallpaper. It’s kind of dirty off white, pink and blue. YIKES.

The first step was to remove the old wallpaper. Neither of us had ever done this before, but seeing as how I had seen it done dozens of times on HGTV, I figured it would be easy. Looking back, this is quite possibly the dumbest thought I’ve ever had in my life. It was a NIGHTMARE. We ended up tearing down large sections of the first layer of drywall along with the wallpaper. When it was done, it looked like this:

NOT GOOD. Not good at all. The first attempt to fix it involved putty and primer, but that didn’t work at all. After some online research (apparently we’re not the only morons to ever have done this), I decided that we would need to slip coat the entire bathroom before priming again. This involved applying two thin coats of joint compound in small sections, and took several hours over the course of two days. Judging by the half crazy look in my eyes, I think this is somewhere around hour 6 of day 2:

Honestly, if this didn’t work, I’m not sure what we would have done next. But by the time we finished it up and primed it, the walls looked like new and were ready for paint.

The paint discussion went on for several weeks, but we finally decided to keep it really neutral and do tan walls with cream trim. We finished it off by spray painting the bronze light fixture and the outlet and light switch plates with Oil Rubbed Bronze paint. The bedroom that this bathroom is off of is painted burgundy, so the accessories that used to be in my bathroom matched perfectly (and that also meant I got to get new stuff… more on that later). Finally, we built a frame to go around the mirror to cover the manky black spot, and painted it dark brown. Okay, enough talking. Here are the after shots!!