This Bathroom Makeover Shows How to Make Dated Blue Tile Look Stylish
ABOUT THIS BEFORE & AFTER
HOME TYPE: Apartment
PROJECT TYPE: Bathroom
STYLE: Colorful, Vintage
RENTAL FRIENDLY: Yes
Bathroom makeovers with colorful vintage fixtures and sometimes-centuries-old tiles intact abound. In other words, there is plenty of inspiration out there for dealing with an old apartment or house’s pastel tub or tiles — and making it look stylish, to boot. (See: This green 1909 bathroom, this pastel pink bathroom, and this $265 bathroom makeover.)
In renter and DIYer Imani Keal’s (@imaniathome) 100-year-old apartment, the tile color was very, very blue. When her landlord wouldn’t let her get rid of the tile, Imani decided to pair the blue with pink in an approximately $2,500 renter-friendly makeover (a little over $1,000 of which went to peel-and-stick wallpaper).
The pink peel-and-stick wallpaper pairs nicely with the blue.
At first Imani considered going with a monochromatic color scheme, and she ordered several blue wallpaper samples. But one of her goals in the redo was to tone down the blue, so she ended up choosing a wallpaper that’s a pretty strikingly different color: the rose shade of “Drunken Chevron” wallpaper from her own line with Otto studios. (She added even more pinkish red with her vanity and trim paint choice, HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams’ Borscht.)
For the wallpaper, Imani ordered 11 rolls but only ended up using 10. Still, she advises ordering extra “to ensure a pristine color match and in case you make a mistake,” she writes on her blog.
She cleaned the walls thoroughly then wallpapered every wall surface, including a niche where artwork now hangs. This required “moving around all the bumps, texture, doorframes,” she describes on Instagram.
She adds on her social media that you can’t cut corners if you’re wallpapering a room that sees a lot of moisture like a bathroom. She removed the rental bathroom’s old caulk with a utility knife and redid it along the edge of the wallpaper “to ensure that the seams wouldn’t lift up due to moisture,” she says.
New metals made a big difference in the bathroom.
Another change that took the bathroom from dated to designer was replacing the old chrome hardware with gilded details: a new gold mirror, a new wall sconce, brass light switch plates, and a brushed gold faucet from Lowe’s.
Of course, the vintage bathroom wouldn’t be complete without a few vintage-inspired details, like the four-tier vintage shelf and another brown shelf in the corner that Imani inherited from her grandmother.
Inspired? Submit your own project here.
Further Reading
I Tried the 90/90 Rule and My Closet Is Now Fully Decluttered
Everything You’ve Ever Wanted To Know About Article’s DTC Furniture
We Asked 8 Pro Travelers What They Never Pack in Their Carry-On, and Here’s What They Said
