It’s often the most overlooked room of the house. Not even big enough to warrant its own basin, mirror or any extraneous faffing. The separate bathroom and loo combo leaves a lot of people with a space that’s not big enough to swing a small hamster, never mind a cat.

This is our first floor layout… since we had the loft converted and sacked off the second smallest room in the house for our dream staircase.

You can see on the floorplan, our bathroom and WC are two separate spaces. And despite most people’s preference to knock these spaces into one to make a larger family bathroom, we didn’t want to do that with the house only having one loo when we moved in.

And actually, I still prefer the layout like this. I like not having the loo in the bathroom. Especially with a five year old in the house whose aim isn’t always 100% accurate. Sure, our bathroom isn’t large, but for a family of three it’s more than adequate. More so now we have the second bathroom in the loft.

I’ve been wanting to do something with our lil WC for ages. It was just dull and the f’ugly radiator took up way too much room in such a tiny space.

So my plan was to paint the last crap rad in the house black (standard) and then mask up a large rectangle behind it and paint that black too so the rad disappeared into the design feature. That was the plan anyway.

Because “life”.

Upon removing said masking tape it left me with two completely disastrous edges where the original coat of white paint peeled away from the plaster along with the tape. You see, these things happen to us so-called professionals too. And the reason this happened, is the plasterwork underneath wasn’t properly mist-coated or sealed before being painted. And I have no-one else to blame for that apart from me. What I will say is, I last painted this room over 5 years ago, and I remember my mist-coat** being a complete disaster, so much so I just kept painting and painting stuff on in the vain hope that more gloop would stick the other gloop on. It kind of worked. But it’s finally come back to bite me well and truly on the arse.

**I’ve since learned the error of my ways and absolutely swear by this stuff for mist-coating. No faffing, no watering down paint, no mixing, just open it and roll it on. It’s a MUST for anyone about to tackle any freshly plastered walls. 

So I waited for a few days and had a rethink about what to do next…

Earlier this month, on what was the hottest day of the year, I decided i’d strip the paint off, seeing as it wasn’t actually on anyway. Strip it by hand. And what started out as very therapeutic, ended up being stupidly stressful, hot, sweaty, dusty and a completely unenjoyable afternoon.

And I was left with this bloomin’ mess, a headache and a red face. More thinking ensued, along with some mild to moderate cursing.

Think, Karen, think! What are you going to do now? Two weeks ago, you had a perfectly respectable WC… and now you’ve got a black radiator, a wall that resembles a Dalmatian and a husband who’s starting to doubt your complete genius. 

Ah-ha! Hang on a minute, I have 3 drops of wallpaper i’ve been saving in a drawer for 18 months. I’ll hang them. I’ve never wallpapered before and have none of the tools I’d actually need, but how hard can it be? 

Welllll….it turns out, I didn’t make a complete mess of it. In fact, I think (with a bit of help from the hubby as I think he finally took some pity on me) we did a pretty decent job of hanging our three drops of wallpaper.

The WC now dressed in Woodsman wallpapers

I wrote about Identity Papers at the beginning of 2017, jump back here to see more of Linda’s fantastic designs. This awesome design has been sat in a drawer, waiting for the right wall for over 18 months. And i’ve finally found it. Obviously meant to be no?

Check out my join. Almost perfect because there is literally no pattern to match in this design. You can’t really go wrong. My kind of design.

So now the wall looked less like a disaster zone and more in keeping with the rest of the house, it was time to deal with the radiator. I didn’t want that old, battered one back on, what that i’d now painted it black n’all. Time to source a new rad, rad for my new rad room!

Before the new rad. And…

Ta-da! I give you the Reina Slimline Radiator, very kindly gifted from UK Bathroom Store. 

Phoenix Thermostatic Valve from UK Bathroom Store

We have column radiators throughout the rest of the house, we’ve been slowly getting shot of the old ones over the past five years, but we couldn’t fit a column one in here, even two column ones were too deep. When I saw this simple flat panel design at UK Bathroom Store, I knew it was the one.

It’s ridiculously slim, the smooth white flat finish tops off our WC update perfectly. Obviously, with it being 28 degrees outside I can’t comment on the heat output yet….  i’m not putting the heating on for you lot.

So there you have it. That’s my funny story about our WC. I’m well chuffed with how it’s turned out… considering it looked like this about 3 weeks ago:

So, what do you think? Fancy updating your own tiny room at home?

** I was very kindly gifted the Reina Radiator and Thermostatic valve from UK Bathroom Store. Linda from Identity Papers had also sent the wallpaper to me to 18 months ago for me to experiment with. Thank you to both for saving our WC!

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