My Bathroom Wall Decision (Plus How I’m Saving Money On 35 Paint Colors)

So in the end, I flipped a coin. I literally let a quarter decide the design of the bathroom walls for me. Heads, wallpaper with trim. Tails, stripes. And tails won. So I’m gearing up for a lot of taping and painting, and I’m aiming for something that looks like this…

Interestingly, these two design have the exact same colors. I used my photo editing software and copied the colors directly from the square wallpaper and dropped those colors into the stripes. But for some reason, when those exact colors are arranged into stripes, some people perceived them as being different colors.

Anyway, that’s just an aside, but I thought it was very interesting.

I decided that the only way this would work is if I buy a few colors and mix the rest of them myself. I’ve had plenty of experience with mixing my own paint. If you’ll remember, that’s exactly what I did when I painted this cabinet in my studio.

I did NOT buy 72 paint samples for that cabinet. I bought the main colors, and then I did a whole lot of mixing, testing, re-mixing, and testing again to get the rest of the colors.

And now I need to do that again for the walls in the bathroom. So I took one repeat of the wallpaper and started grouping the colors together in color families. I ended up with 10 different groupings. And then for each group, I chose the single color that I’d actually need to purchase to use as the jumping off point for mixing the rest.

I know that picture is kind of hard to see since I couldn’t get the wallpaper curls at the top and bottom, so here’s a better view of how I grouped the colors.

And then here are the colors that I decided to purchase.

So how does this work, exactly? I’ll give an example. For the colors in the purple category (and there were a surprisingly large number of colors in this group), I’ll start off with the first one, obviously. The second color looks like the first plus white. The third color is the second color plus even more white. The fourth color is the first color plus blue and maybe even a touch of black. The fifth color is the fourth color plus white. The sixth color is the fifth color plus white and black. And on and on.

I know you’re probably looking at those colors towards the end and thinking, “There’s no way those are even in the same family.” They’re a little different, for sure. But that second-to-last color will be the first color plus white plus a little pink, which is one of the colors I purchased. But all of the colors above will have some of that original purple in it, and then they’ll be mixed with a combination of white, black, and other colors to get to the final color.

The purples will be the most difficult. Some of them will be very easy, like these two. Obviously, the second one is just the first one mixed with white and possibly a tiny touch of black. Or maybe no black at all. I’ll have to see as I go.

I also grouped these together. I realized when I put this grouping together on my computer that some of these colors look different on screen than they do in person. On screen, that last one doesn’t look like it belongs in this group at all, but in person, it does have some purple in it. But obviously, it also has green in it as well. All of these colors, in person, have purple in them.

This one is pretty straightfoward…

This one is pretty straightforward as well.

This grouping will be pretty easy, but you can see that by the third color, I’ll need to introduce a bit of orange, which I have from the grouping above.

The second color in this grouping will require a tiny bit of yellow, which I will have from a previous grouping.

This is another color that doesn’t really read correctly on screen (at least not on my screen). From the screen color, it looks like it belongs in a previous grouping. But in person, it’s much clearer, so I couldn’t get that color from the previous coral grouping. But it will be used as an undertone for a couple of colors in other groupings.

These two are also pretty straightforward.

And then this is the final one, which also may look on screen as if it belongs in the previous grouping. But in person, this color is too clear (i.e., not grayed down) to come from the previous color, so it had to stand alone. But I’ll also be using it as an undertone in a couple of colors in previous groupings.