A Renovation Race: My DIY Moroccan-Inspired Bathroom Makeover

I’m going to kick things off with a bit of a teaser slash quiz. The picture below shows all of the wallpaper samples that I considered when updating the ground floor bathroom of our house. I’m not going to tell you which one I picked – the answer will be revealed further down with the “after” photos of the reno project – but I invite you to guess which option I chose. And yes, you could refer back to the feature image for this post, but what fun would that be?

Before we get into all the makeover fun, a little stage setting is in order. November 2021: Nathan and I had been in our new home in Oregon for one whole year. I’d been trying to convince my friends and family to come visit and had finally managed to coax a friend of mine from high school into making the trip. So when I found out around Thanksgiving that she and her husband would be visiting in January, I immediately went into panic renovation mode. We had nowhere to put them, as we hadn’t set up either of the two potential guest rooms in the basement, and we were still sleeping in the office/spare room while renovating our master.

The space before

With just a few weeks before our guests were to arrive, I set to making sure that we had somewhere semi-presentable for them to stay. This obviously and most importantly entailed getting the guest room together (future post to come on that), but I was also determined to give the main floor bathroom that they would be using a much needed update. As you can see from the pictures here, we hadn’t touched this space since moving in – leaving even the dusty old valence and faux flower garland window treatment.

Fortunately, I actually had a bit of a head start, as I had already painted the dresser pictured above over the previous summer. I’d determined that between the dresser and the vanity, there was quite a bit of the same wood tone in the space, and since I had some leftover limewash paint from the master bedroom project, I decided to just use that to give the dresser a quick facelift. And knowing that I eventually wanted to redo the entire bathroom with a Moorish influence, I purchased some new Moroccan inspired hardware from a shop on Etsy to replace the old knobs.

Spray paint fiasco

When it came to refinishing the bathroom itself, the first project I tackled was the shower. It’s one of those tiny, aluminum stalls, and with no budget currently to replace it, I wanted to find a way to lose the chrome in favor of something that would go with the updated color scheme. Since the new finishes would be bronze and black, I had the idea that I could try using paint to emulate that look. I did a little research and, lo and behold, came across several blog posts that specifically detailed how to spray paint a metal shower. So I bought a couple cans of Rust-Oleum metallic spray paint in oil rubbed bronze and decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, my results were not quite as successful as these other, likely more seasoned, DIYers.

And this was despite me carefully following all the steps, starting with thoroughly cleaning the shower to remove the grime and soap scum and then diligently taping off the surrounding area and anything on the shower that wasn’t metal. I began with a coat of metal paint primer and let that dry before spraying on the first coat of the bronze paint. And that’s where I began to run into the first problem.

For anyone who’s used spray paint, you know that it can be tricky to achieve the recommended thin, even coats without the paint dripping. And with my heavy hand, you know that there were drips galore. Fortunately, those more or less evened out once the paint dried, but the real issue occurred after that. I had gone through two cans of paint but ran out before I could finish a full second coat, and I had to wait a few days before I was able to pick up another can to finish the job.

For whatever reason – maybe it was moisture or dust that had accumulated in the bathroom in the interim – when I sprayed on the next coat, the paint underneath began bubbling and cracking in some areas. And the more I sprayed over the problem spots in the vain hope that more paint would somehow cover them up, the worse they got. So there are now several large areas of branching, tree root like cracks running along the finish.

The only way to fix them would be to sand off the paint in those areas and repeat the whole process all over again. Perhaps that’s a project that I’ll get around to one day, but for the time being, we’re stuck with the botched result. Still, I find it an improvement to the previous chrome, and it at least now matches all the new hardware.

Prep for success

With the shower complete, it was time to tackle the walls. I started by taking off all of the fixtures and shelves and removing the screws and nails before filling in the holes and cracks. Then it was on to priming the wainscotting and applying a wallpaper liner to the walls in order to create a smoother surface for the wallpaper to adhere to. Once the liner was pasted on and dried – in true overkill fashion – I applied a coat of a wallcovering primer over that to seal and prep the walls for the wallpaper.

From there, I moved back to the wainscotting, painting on three coats of Benjamin Moore’s Bold Blue – a humdrum name but a deep navy-indigo hue that feels very Morocco to me. As I waited for things to dry throughout this process, I also slapped some fresh white paint on the ceiling, door, frame, and the window trim.

An education in wallpaper hanging

With all the prep work done, it was time to apply the wallpaper – the most delicate and frustrating part of the entire undertaking. Before I could even begin making measurements and cutting and pasting, I had to remove the selvedge – a strip of unpatterned paper on either side of the wallpaper used to protect it and help with alignment when hanging – using a yardstick and utility knife to cut along the line. Then it was on to measuring sections of wall and cutting corresponding strips of wallpaper, allowing for enough overage so that I could trim the paper where it met either the ceiling at the top or the wood trim at the bottom. After brushing on the wallpaper gloop and “booking” for five to ten minutes – letting the paste moisten the paper so that it would expand properly – it was finally time to hang.

While the entire wallpapering process was tedious, this step was a nightmare. I had carefully made my measurements and cut strips with what I thought was enough excess for me to match the pattern from one strip to the next, but when glue came to wall, I found that my meticulous calculations were off. In order to get the pattern to match up, I often ended up having to cut a brand new strip or use two or three sections where one would have done the job if I’d measured correctly. Ultimately, this led to me using more wallpaper than I should have and left me with not-quite-enough paper to complete all four of the walls.

The fourth wall

In considering what to do with the bare wall, I ruled out ordering more wallpaper, as I didn’t want to spend another $400 plus for another two-roll order (as required by the manufacturer) when I only needed to cover a small space. While I haven’t landed on a definitive solution yet, I’m leaning towards tiling the wall with off-white octagonal or hexagonal tiles to play off the octagon pattern of the wallpaper. But as with the shower paint touch up, that’s a project for down the road.

In the more immediate term, we still need to get the new faucet installed – a matte black centerset style – which has been sitting in the basement, as we didn’t have time to flex our amateur plumber skills before our company arrived (we decided that a mismatched but fully functional sink would go over better than a missing or malfunctioning one). Other to-dos in the works include installing the two wrought iron towel bars that I’m still waiting to receive after ordering in November without realizing that they are made to order with a lead time of 16-22 weeks. You’d think they’d be more upfront about that information on the website…

The toilet paper roll holder also has yet to arrive, which I was annoyed about until I recently went back through my emails and realized that despite saving a bunch of options to Pinterest, I apparently never actually decided on and ordered one. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’ve been doing too much online shopping when I can no longer keep track of my purchases. But I count as a win the new iron hand towel holder arriving in time for our company’s use.

There are a few other little updates that I’d like to eventually make, like regrouting the tile floor and replacing the exhaust fan. Despite the missing fixtures and unfinished projects, everything ultimately came together pretty well, in my biased opinion (as long as you don’t look too closely at the handiwork). To really give you a sense of the full transformation, here’s a side-by-side before and after shot of the space:

Self-imposed deadlines

All-in-all, I’m quite proud of the work I was able to complete in just a few short weeks. Getting the guestroom in order took up most of my time, so I really only had about a week to tackle the bathroom. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I was putting the finishing touches on things right up until we went to pick up my friends at the airport. Paint fumes might have lingered throughout their stay, and there wasn’t anywhere to hang towels or a toilet paper roll, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone but me.

But that’s just the way of things. You put all this pressure on yourself and work hard to make things as perfect as you can, and at the end of the day, you’re really the only one who cares – and certainly the only one who notices the imperfections. Your friends are just happy that they have a reasonably clean, free place to stay, even if it is overrun with haughty, allergy-breeding cats.

Yet without that external pressure put on me by having impending company, it’s unlikely that I would have made any of the progress that I did. Which is why the shower paint fix, wall tiling, and regrouting projects may happen weeks or months from now, or perhaps not at all. Maybe I’ll get around to it when someone else tells me they’re coming for a visit. That will be just the motivation I need – playing on my vanity in wanting to maintain a well-kept home and on my deep-seated need to people please. But if that’s the way work’s gotta get done around here, then people, please, reserve your spot today.