The Budget Casa

Sometimes, fixing up a room can be as simple as painting some walls. Painting a basement bathroom a bright color is a good way to turn dreary into refreshing. And the best part? You can DIY in a day.
We have a bathroom that we never let guests see. It's our basement bathroom. When we moved it in was painted black and the cement floors were painted pink. It is disgusting. Recently, we finished remodeling the other upstairs bathroom and decided it was time to give the basement bathroom a new look. It was time to paint. Because the walls were black, we knew we needed a brighter color to perk things up. So we painted it a light green called Lime Wash and got the paint from Mendard's ($19.95 with a mail-in rebate) and a $8 quart of primer. We've never used any other paint besides Behr, so we were kind of nervous to see how it would work. But Menard's was having a sale and we wanted to get a deal. So we went to work.



Painting over black walls is not easy. It took us two coats of primer. Fortunately, we listened to podcasts of "This American Life" while we painted.


It only took us one coat of green paint. The coverage of the paint from Mendard's was great! We added picture frames we found at Target for $2.50 each and put in pictures of fish that we cut out from some designer paper we bought at a craft store for $3 a sheet. One sheet of this great fish paper was all we needed to give the bathroom a fun look.

Next week, see how we add a $7 backsplash and make the cabinets look new, without painting them. And of course, we still have to deal with the pink cement floor...
Do you have ideas on what we should do with our basement bathroom? Leave them in the comments! We'll take some of the best ideas and use them.