Renovating small spaces

Small spaces can have a huge impact, you can fool the eye into believing the space has increased in size or you can embrace the small, cozy feel in the room.

For our half bathroom, we needed to add a small basin and desperately needed to give it a face-lift and add some character.

Our home had been rented out for many, many years before we purchased it and seemed to be white-washed in boring.

 Our half bathroom before any work took place

For this bathroom, as I have said, it needed a small basin so you didn’t need to go to the other bathroom to wash your hands. I didn’t want to damage the existing tiles as they are in great condition and I was going to pick the cheaper option of painting over them.

We installed a cute little, half in/ half out, wall basin to save on the limited space we have.

We have been fortunate that the kitchen was tiled in the exact same tile and we managed to save a lot of them when we gutted the kitchen. So patching the damaged tiles was quick and easy.

Then the fun part started! I picked a stencil pattern from my faithful friend, Pinterest, and asked Palette in PMB to cut the design. Palette are amazing and have a range of stencils of different sizes for sale off the shelf. I needed a specific size to match our floor tile size. Below was my Pinterest inspiration pic..

So to make this happen, I made a quick stop to my trusted friends at NAA, Natal Associated Agencies. They gave me the correct paint for the floor as I was going to be painting over hard ceramic tiles, which are not porus and therefore, most paints will not adhere to the tiles. I landed up bringing home a base coat, dark blue bottom coat, off-white coat for the pattern and clear gloss top coat. That’s a lot of painting, especially when each coat needs a day to dry as the paint is polyurethane based. I need to also point out that I painted the walls as well. For this I just used tile and melamine primer paint and then white bathroom and kitchen paint. This, alone made a massive difference to the bathroom!

  Undercoat done

 Dark blue, base coat finished

 Starting to stencil..

 First one done

Because the paint was so thick and I couldn’t wipe the stencil clean after each time, the stencil took a hammering and didn’t survive more than four tiles. A water based paint would work perfectly on a concrete floor with the stencil.

I had to improvise and make a pattern with masking tape for the edges. I am very happy with the end result. I also put in a floating shelf and updated all the bathroom fittings to bamboo.

The finishing touch was the oregon sash mirror I finally got round to finishing.