The bathroom is a room that gets used a lot. This is the most abused room with constant steam coming from showers and baths. It’s small, water-prone and gets a lot of traffic. So when you think about painting your bathroom, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind.
Painting your bathroom does not have to be a pain in the butt if you prepare properly for the job. Here are some tips on the preparation and painting of your bathroom.
Proper drywall prepping
Work with your contractor to make sure that your bathroom walls are properly prepped for painting. If there are defects visible on the walls and they are not perfectly sanded, paint will not fix them. On the contrary, it will make all the defects more visible. So approach prepping your walls in the bathroom like you would no other room. Because some things might go unnoticed in the dining room or bedroom, here they will on display, every day you use it. And this will drive you crazy until you redo it.
Also, another reason for properly prepping the walls is removing any residual soap scum or bleach-based cleaning agents. If they are not completely scraped off the walls, your new paint might peel off beautifully (even if you manage to make it stick in the first place).
Perfect corners
Just like surface prepping on the walls, corners also require special attention. Make sure you get perfect corners on drywalls, prior to painting. You can correct them at this stage. But if they are not perfect, painting will not fix the problem. And they will be visible as this is the smallest room that gets the most traffic in the house. You can use Paper-faced metal drywall corners as they easily solve the problem of ideally straight corners and give them extra reinforcement.
Remove the toilet tank
Now, no matter how hard you try to reach those places behind the tank, you won’t succeed to do a great job. So our advice is to remove the tank completely during painting. You don’t have to remove the entire toilet; that thing stays in place. Just the water tank behind the toilet. All you need to do is shut off the water supply at the bottom of the tank, flush the toilet to rid of the excess water, and remove the tank with a couple of towels. That’s it! Paint the wall and put it back where it belongs.
Bathroom paint
No, you don’t need to buy that special bathroom paint that some manufacturers specifically make. It includes mold-inhibiting and water resistant agents.
But keep in mind that your bathroom has a lot of water and steam. So it needs to withstand this stress. If you use regular paint, try to pick the eggshell or semi-gloss types. The glossier you get, the safer you will be.
Stick to light colors
Most experts agree that you should stick to the light color palette for the bathroom. Darker colors will make it look and feel smaller. You want to visibly enlarge the space in the bathroom, not make it feel claustrophobic.
You don’t need to stick to the classic white bathroom. But lighter shades of blue or yellow or any light, airy, bright paints in the bathroom will work perfectly!
Paint for windows space
Windows in the bathroom get even more abused than any other windows in the house because of the humidity and other factors. So the safest bet would be to use exterior paint or at least gloss or semi-gloss paint. Because the paint will get wet and with time it might develop mold; and you don’t want this to happen.
