Alright! Time for that long briefly awaited post on the downstairs bathroom. The downstairs bathroom is the one that gets used most often (mainly when people are over to hang out). When we bought our house (way back in 2007) the bathroom was painted a light blue color, with white beadboard on the bottom half and white and black linoleum floors and a white ceiling that appeared to have been "wallpapered" with a fake tin/embosssed paper. The bathroom also has the typical builder's grade oak vanity and a pretty fabulous mirror (can't believe the previous owners left it, I sure won't!). 

Immediately after we moved in we painted the bathroom a chocolately brown color. It kind of reminded me of hot chocolate and what can I say, brown was THE color back in 2007. Or at least in my mind it was.

Here's a picture of the bathroom painted brown (sorta - I forgot to get a picture before I started cutting in):

The brown worked pretty well for us at the time, but after more than 4.5 years of looking at it I was kind of tired of it. My friends and family who know me will agree that my keeping something the same for nearly 5 years is close to a record. Since we were already planning to redo the upstairs bath (more to come when it's complete), I figured I might as well update the downstairs bath. Luckily DH agreed and we both agreed that gray would be a good choice of color for both bathrooms.

Three samples of paint that we chose between:

I realize in these pictures you can't see much of a difference in the three colors, but trust me, once there was enough difference to make me happy we tried samples. For instance the bottom color, in both pictures, was actually DH's favorite on the paint chip. Once it was up on the walls we felt it was too dark. Both of our bathrooms are pretty small and neither have any windows, so there is a huge lack of natural light. We decided to go with the middle color - Behr Ultra Silver Sateen. Part of my reason for liking it is because it came across as the truest gray (not purple gray like the bottom color; not greeney gray, which the top color tended towards).

Bathroom after one coat of gray (you can see some of the ceiling texture in these as well):

As you can see, just one coat of the light gray paint made a huge difference. And so, that's the start of the downstairs bathroom update. Next I'll show you the final results, including the faux tin ceiling I painted (with some reluctance from DH).