Vintage Bathroom Redecoration

Back at Easter time we decided to bite the bullet and redecorate our bathroom. The bathroom suite itself was fine but the paint had gotten a bit cracked and flaky and the tile grouting was grubby. Plus I’d never really been happy with the pale turquoise colour we’d painted it when it was first done about 20 years ago.

We were lucky enough to pickup this vintage 50s bathroom suite when we first bought our house 22 years ago. It was advertised in ‘Loot’ in the days before the internet. Hands up those of you who remember Loot? It was being ripped out of a 1950s bungalow over in Northolt West London and we were also lucky enough to be able to buy the English Rose kitchen that was also being removed. 

When we moved into our house the bathroom and the toilet were separate but we knew we had to have the entire suite in one room so knocked out the dividing wall. We also had to move the wall that the shower and bath back onto since bizarrely we have no right angled corners in the house at all. The side walls are all parallel and the cross walls are all parallel but they don’t intersect at right angles. Consequently all our corners are either less than or greater than 90 degrees. Not great when it comes to fitting rectangular baths and square shower trays. Floor tiling is also great fun, not.

This was all done when we first moved in many years ago. We also found some really nice mosaic tiles in 3 tones of blue that matched the bathroom suite really well so we used sections of them in the shower enclosure.

We also have a chimney breast to contend with and in retrospect wish we had removed it but we didn’t and it does make a handy shelf area next to the bath where we had to block it in.

All the taps and fittings came with the suite, even the towel rail which we had to cut down to fit in the gap between the bath and the shower. The mirror above the sink is one of the only things that we kept from when we moved in – it just needed a replacement glass shelf cutting.

This time as you can see we painted it a lovely pale yellow and I love it. I think it goes really well with the blue.

I picked up a Lloyd Loom laundry bin from an antiques fair which was originally pink. Al sprayed it blue for me (as seen on an Instagram post) I wasn’t sure we’d find a colour to match but luckily we managed to find some ‘Painters Touch multi-purpose paint’ in Slate blue in B&Q that matched pretty well and so far it seems to be very resilient and hasn’t chipped.

The mats are from Costco – another lucky find colourwise and for the first time in my life I bought matching towels. I’ve never bought towels to match a room. I was so pleased to find ones that matched pretty well.