Caught In The Undertone: Painting A Bathroom Mint

It took us a couple of weeks, but we recently took our bathroom from this:

To this:

Boom!  And might I remind you that it used to look like this:

Double boom!  Any excuse to whip out that picture.  Man…our bathroom was a whole lotta ugly!  And cramped.  Opening it up and removing all the strange nooks made a world of difference.  And now with a lighter, more airy hue canvasing the walls, it looks even bigger than when it was painted yellow!

Although, making the room look bigger really wasn’t our goal when we decided to change the wall color from Valspar’s Hint of Honey to Benjamin Moore’s Mantis Green.  No, it was because of an undertone conflict.  When we first painted the bathroom, we hadn’t really come up with a whole house color scheme.  The bathroom was the first room we tackled (can you blame us?!).  The original plan was white trim throughout the whole house, which later turned into white trim on the first floor and dark stained trim upstairs.  The yellow worked swimmingly well with the white trim but once we finished staining up the hallway trim a month or so ago, we knew the yellow had to go.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the bright yellow color, but it was competing for the attention of our gorgeous, rich colored trim in the hallway and was picking up too much of the yellow undertones in the wood.  To complement the wood’s yellow undertones, rather than making them even more yellow, we went across the color wheel to the blues/greens and opted to re-paint the room Mantis Green by Benjamin Moore in a Semi Gloss (with an added mildew resistance mix-in since it was for a bathroom).

Two coats of paint and a few hours later, our bathroom was looking minty fresh so clean.

Don’t mind the bathroom vanity hanging out in it’s new home.  We haven’t yet hitched it up so it’s pulled out a little bit, sitting in front of the plumbing, and is sans drawers and sink.  But now that the space is all freshly painted, hitching up the vanity is high on our priority list.  And it can’t happen soon enough since brushing our teeth in the tub, praying to the porcelain throne fiberglass tub style, is starting to feel way too normal.

When I finished painting, I only added back a few things into the space so it still feels super empty.  Like this bare bones toilet nook.  Can’t you see some fun art hanging above the toilet paper?  Or a rustic shelf installed above the toilet?

And I even refrained from putting the towel hooks back up on the wall underneath the open shelf (which still…after three years of use…haven’t been painted…just primed…oh the shame)!

We’re taking our time putting our bathroom back together again and carefully choosing pieces to put back into it.  Maybe it’s because working on the bathroom this time around, we don’t have the 30-day time frame.  We first renovated the only bathroom in our home in the 30 days we owned the home and still rented our old apartment.  Let’s just say we made many a rushed decisions in the process!

But so far, we are LOVING the new minty fresh bathroom color.  And…bonus…the color totally photographs better than the yellow did!  Blogger priorities.  Oh…and did you meet our new shower curtain?!

We’ve had it for awhile.  It was a wedding gift off our Pottery Barn registry that we received last summer.  We finally hung it a few months ago and LOVE it!  The shower curtain was another reason we chose to re-paint the bathroom.  The shower curtain didn’t go so well with the yellow as it competed with the deep brown, ticking stripes of the curtain.  There was just too much boldness and brown-ness going on in the space and we needed more of a neutral backdrop.  But I do still want some yellow pops of color here and there in the room.  I’m actually thinking about a yellow light fixture to replace the boob light.  Nothing gets me more hot and bothered like mint and yellow.

Pssst…So how about you guys?  Are you having any color conundrums lately?  Or absolute amazing color combos that you cannot stop thinking about?