A Powder Room Makeover with DIY Wallpaper and Board & Batten

You know those home renovation projects that take about a BILLION time longer than you planned? And the ones that are a TON harder than you thought they’d be? This powder room makoever in Our DIY House was one of those. It seemed to take me forever, and we experienced a lot of hiccups along the way, but I’m excited to finally share with you today our DIY powder room makeover with wallpaper and board & batten!

Wallpaper: Phoebe Wallpaper in Teal from Amazon

This project began innocently enough. I wanted to make our downstairs powder room feel more “finished”, look more interesting, and feel less like an elevator.

(This room has got to be the WORST one in the world to photograph since it’s so tiny with no natural light. I hope you’ll be able to imagine how it looks in real life!)

This bathroom is only 25 square feet big and our main floor ceilings are 9 feet high, so this makes for a very small but tall room.

Here’s what our powder room looked like before. I had simply painted it the same green/blue that’s in our laundry room and our sitting room (Distant Valley by Valspar) and hung a shelf above the toilet. The vanity is originally from The Home Depot and it has a faux marble top.

The room just felt BLAH. The storage was all wrong.

The first thing we did was install some DIY board & batten wainscoting to the room. I thought this would be a great way to add a horizontal line to the walls to make it feel less tall and skinny.

I also think this type of trim matches the traditional look of our home (and I plan to do it in other spots of our house eventually!).

We used baseboard pieces (4″ wide and 1/2″ thick) so that they’d match the thickness of our current baseboards so that we wouldn’t have to remove the latter.

We put up the horizontal piece as shown above with a nail gun, and then we used the same baseboard pieces to install the vertical strips. My hubby rounded off one of the sides of the baseboard trim so that both sides would match.

Next was installing the wallpaper. I thought this would be a piece of cake since I didn’t find the last little wallpaper installation I did hard at all.

It was horrible.

The wallpaper was beautiful and great quality (here’s where you can buy it if you love the look of it too), but it wasn’t pre-pasted. I had to apply paste onto it, so that was really time consuming and MESSY!

Matching the pattern from panel to panel was really challenging too.

Once the wallpaper was FINALLY done, I was so proud. I even took a selfie in front of it:

My idea was to leave off the top trim that would cap the rest of the wainscoting (it’s a 3/4″ by 1 1/2″ piece of MDF) until the top half of the powder room was wallpapered. This way, I could disguise any unevenness at the bottom of the paper.

However, after we installed the top trim, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea that went all wrong. I thought I’d put painter’s tape on the wallpaper just above the trim before I caulked it…

IT DOES NOT WORK. Don’t do it. Don’t ever put painter’s tape on wallpaper. I ended up with a huge strip of wallpaper torn off just above our board and batten trim! I was heartbroken!

After a few tears (mine), we decided to flip the top trim around so that it was higher and would cover the rip in the wallpaper.

I think it looks just fine, and Hubby did a great job of trimming around the plug over the sink to make it look “built in”. Originally, the trim would have nicely sat below the outlet, but we had to get creative now that we’d flipped it!

After that debacle, it was simply a matter of painting all of the trim. I had to caulk the trim and give the wainscoting a good four coats of white paint (Benjamin Moore’s Simply White), so that took a long time!

I really love the new white & bright walls, though. And the colour and horizontal lines do make this tiny room feel a little more grand!

I also hung open shelves over the toilet, and I’m using wicker baskets to conceal things like toilet paper and hair supplies.

The shelves are from Ikea, and I painted the brackets in Simply White.

This wallpaper is so darling – I just love it! It has a chinoiserie feel to it, and it’s still that green/blue colour that I love.

Our powder room is on the way to our formal sitting room, so I also really like how it has similar colours and a similar feel in style to the sitting room.

         

I also installed a pretty towel ring in polished chrome to match the other hardware in the powder room. I originally had a towel bar across from the sink, but that was a poor choice in retrospect. This is much easier for the kids and our guests to use!

As a finishing touch, I quickly switched out the knobs on our original vanity from a brushed silver to a polished chrome to match the rest of the space. Those little details make a difference!

Our powder room update is complete, and I’m SO GLAD IT IS. It makes me smile, and I think our guests will find it fun too!

What do you think of our powder room update? Would you ever put wallpaper in a powder room?

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