Bathroom - before

Bathroom
There's a colour Crown paints used to make called Soft Duck Egg Blue and I would love to have that in the bathroom. But note the "used to" - it doesn't seem to be in their range anymore, in Ireland anyway. Their UK website does still have it listed but only delivers to the UK - maybe I'll see if I can arrange a trip to some cousins there next year :-) . Or perhaps I'll try to get some made up somewhere. Otherwise I'll just go with white here, too. Either way, I'll need to put up new Raufaser first, what is there is starting to come off in places and just generally looks terrible. You can usually paint it between three and five times before the weight of the paint starts to pull it away from the walls apparently.

My bathroom is pretty basic. It's long and narrow and so there is no space for any cupboards or storage really. It just has a plain white suite, which I can be thankful for I suppose. Hey, it could have been avocado plastic, I suppose. The toilet seat and lid are a horrible grey to match the terrible grey PVC tiles. The previous tenant seems to have been even worse at DIY than I am. I loathe those PVC tiles and would love to rip them out and get proper ones fitted but since (a) they seem to be stuck down with super glue and (b) I am only renting after all, I will probably just get an offcut of some basic, one-colour lino and put that down.

'Scuse the coat, it's my winter one which needs to come into use again so I washed it and this is the easiest place to hang it to dry. I should possibly also mention that I dislike the shower rail immensely here, too but I'm not likely to bother replacing it as long as it doesn't fall off the wall itself.

The cabinet/mirror is one left behind by the previous tenant (the place was not well cleaned out, I suspect she got nothing of her deposit back and probably ended up having to even pay more on top of that) - it's pretty ugly but functional so until funds allow, I'll keep using it.

Ikea LILLÅNGEN

Actually, there are a couple of fairly cheap and simple options available in Ikea so I'll probably get one soon enough. Then it'll just be a matter of trying to see if my friend of a friend handyman is available to come and put it up. There are very strict conditions in my lease about fitting anything onto the tiles so I'd rather get someone who knows what they're doing to take care of it. This one, for example, is quite nice and available either in white (always a good choice) or this dark brown.

This is just the other side. As you can see, there really isn't any space to put anything and because there is a slight 'step' in the wall higher up, I can't even just hang a cupboard up there. Still, I use very basic toiletries and since I don't use shampoo or a lot of the other stuff most people seem to find necessary I don't really need much storage space anyway. You can see the patch where the Raufaser was starting to peel off the wall so I ended up just pulling some of it off in order to try a tester of colour without having the yellow underneath affect the outcome too badly. Also, ripping the paper off walls is kind of therapeutic (until you'be been doing it for weeks on end!)

So that's the bathroom. The smallest room and the one that needs the most work. If money was no object, I'd just get the whole place tiled in white from top to bottom. Hate, hate, hate having the wallpaper in the bathroom. It just seems somehow unhygienic to me. At least when I put new stuff up and paint, I can make sure to use a paint that doesn't start running if it's touched with water!