Hi! I decided it was time to turn my attention to our tiny, neglected downstairs bathroom. The invisible yet defining feature is a trap door under the floor in there that goes to the (terrifying) crawl space under the house. The reason the floor is an unattached piece of linoleum is that we have to fold it back to get to the trap door. I am sure there is a better/more attractive solution to the problem, but we are still in the work-with-what-we’ve-got phase here. The painfully visible feature is the hulking black toilet of doom. Alas, it stays for now…I am basically just pretending it doesn’t exist. This is where we started.

I think my favorite thing about it is that the previous owners painted it Benjamin Moore’s Quiet Moments, which is possibly the most hilarious bathroom color name ever. Except maybe BM’s Stolen Moments. Luckily, it is a totally inoffensive light greenish, grayish blue. I would love to put some really fabulous wallpaper in there, like Brazilliance, Clarence House’s Congo or Osborne & Little’s Summer Palace. However, those are all serious investments and we plan to redo the kitchen at some point which might mean moving the bathroom wall, so Quiet Moments it is for now. The first thing to go in there was my Animal Print Shop Giraffe, which I love so much. The sink is beyond small and there is hardly room for a bar of soap, so I added a simple glass shelf (this one from Home Depot), as well as the round mirror and a rug.

The latest round of updates started with the sisal mirror and a few other small projects, including painting the linoleum white. I also spray painted the pipes under the sink and while not as good as actually being all nickel pipe, it’s way better. I was just not feeling the white floor though. That’s where this post’s project comes in.

Diamond Painted Linoleum Floor

Materials:

• Graph paper and a pencil
• Paint – I used white, BM Quiet Moments, BM Mellow Yellow and Rustoleum Bright Coat Metallic Finish in Silver
• Painter’s tape
• Ruler
• Math Skillz – or time and patience. I am not blessed with the first or last, but I muddled through
• 1″ artists brush
• 2.5″ angled paintbrush

The one good thing about the weird linoleum/trap-door situation is that I could pull the whole thing out and lay it out on the beer die table table extender in the backyard, which opened up a world of options. I decided to paint a pattern on the floor. I originally thought a scalloped pattern of some kind, but I wanted to start that afternoon and so a pattern using painters tape would be easiest. I looked around for inspiration and remembered Mandi’s wall pattern on Vintage Revivals from a few days earlier. I adapted it slightly and sketched it out on graph paper.

Once I knew what I wanted, I figured out how to translate the pattern on the graph paper to tape on the linoleum. It. Was. Hard. And not made easier by the clouds of pot smoke wafting across our back yard thanks to our neighbors. I started by making large diamonds and then dividing them into smaller ones, using Mandi’s pattern as a reference. The important part is remembering to measure the distances from the correct side of the piece of tape. The diamond points on the sides needed to be 14″ apart, so I had to remember to include the 1″ piece of tape in the measurement. Here it is mid-taping for reference. The small diamonds will be silver, the two-piece think lines are where the yellow will go, and the diamond after that will be blue. The rest will be white.

Once all of the taping was done, I painted white over the edge of the tape in the spaces I was going to paint blue or silver with the idea that any paint that seeps will be white onto white, not the color onto white. It’s a little easier to tell what is going on once that step is complete. It started raining so I had to do the next bits inside.

Once that was dry, I painted one coat of blue and took it back outside. I used spray paint for the silver, so in addition to taping I made a quick stencil which helped a bit with overspray.

While that dried I did one more coat of the blue and then pulled off the tape where the yellow would go. I ended up freehanding the yellow. By the time I had done a coat of white and two coats of blue, there was enough of an edge that it made the cutting in much easier.

As I expected, when I pulled off the tape, the white was looking pretty dingy – there was a lot of erasing, leaning, handprints and some silver overspray. I went back over the white with one more coat and let it dry, and brought it back into the bathroom. Here she is!

And a quick before and after

Things are looking up in there!

XO, Julia