This Bathroom Makeover Fakes the Look of Expensive Wallpaper with a $50 Hack

ABOUT THIS BEFORE & AFTER

HOME TYPE: House

PROJECT TYPE: Bathroom

STYLE: Colorful

SKILL LEVEL: DIY

RENTAL FRIENDLY: No

Eventually, Kathleen Martin (@createacolorfullife) and her husband are planning to gut and replace the shower in this once-“scary,” bathroom, as Kathleen calls it on Instagram, but in the meantime they gave it what she calls a “Band-Aid reno” that looks pretty darn beautiful.

“I always say, you don’t have to live in a home you hate because you can’t afford the full renovation,” Kathleen adds on Instagram. “There are lots of budget-friendly updates you can do in a bathroom.” She points to peel-and-stick tile, vanity upgrades, lighting upgrades, accessories, new shower curtains, and paint as examples, all of which made a difference in her budget bathroom makeover.

The beige walls got a major makeover — including a stencil job that looks like wallpaper.

Kathleen and her husband tore out the old sheetrock and installed new, and then they painted the wall behind the vanity. Kathleen used this $50 “deco palm”-patterned stencil (flipped upside down) and royal blue paint Sherwin-Williams’ Blue Plate for the DIY project.

Her best stenciling advice? Use as little paint as possible to prevent a blotchy outcome. “The paint should be so little that you [have] to put pressure onto the roller to get paint out,” she says on Instagram.  In other words, you should be working with an almost-dry roller, she adds.

“This was my first experience stenciling, and wow did it humble me,” Kathleen recalls. “I ended up painting over the entire wall and redoing it.” The second time around, she learned to roll her soaking-wet roller onto a piece of cardboard (anything absorbent and flat works, preferably reusable) to offload paint onto it before the wall.

First came fixture swaps.

But before the paint upgrade came new bathroom fixtures. Kathleen and her husband installed a $275 marble-top vanity from Wayfair, a circular-front medicine cabinet they found on Facebook Marketplace, a new sconce, a new toilet, a new faucet, and new hardware.

You’ll notice in the “after” that Kathleen and her husband hired a plumber to “change the creepy toilet position too,” she says.

The floors got a peel-and-stick makeover.

Lastly, the floors got a peel-and-stick makeover. Kathleen and her husband ripped up the tile, put in a new subfloor, and installed a stick-on tile from Wallpops that creates the perfect amount of pattern play with the walls.

And speaking of flooring, Kathleen says her stenciling endeavor gave her the courage to try stenciling her kitchen floors. You can check out Kathleen’s kitchen project here.

Inspired? Submit your own project here.

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