The Best Gray Paint Color: Rockport Gray

Yup, our formerly beige-on-beige master bathroom is officially rocking Rockport Gray. And we love it as much as we did when we saw it in this kitchen. Here she blows without the shower curtain hung back up yet (we snapped some pics with it up as well, which we’ll get to in a second):

But let’s back up. Before applying two coats of paint to our bathroom (we shared our little mood board for the room yesterday) first we had to remove that unused-shelf-and-towel-bar (read why we didn’t use them here)…

…to make way for some art on the only wall that isn’t tiled nearly all the way to the ceiling. So we did (using an allen wrench kit like this).

And then we hit some metal anchors that were ripping the drywall apart when we removed them (the bathroom is part of an addition from the seventies, so the walls are drywall instead of plaster, which would have crumbled even more probably).

So after learning our lesson with one, we decided to do this instead:

Yup, I banged them into the wall a bit with a hammer and just spackled right over them for a nice seamless look. Here’s what it looked like before I sanded it smooth (pardon the super blown out picture, I forgot to white balance).

See how it’s sort of rough in the middle of this picture? After using a sanding block it was good to go (that’s my tip, since a sanding block stays nice and flat like the wall, instead of being floppy like a loose piece of sandpaper). The spackle we used was Dap Crackshot (with the blue lid), but we hear stores sell low-VOC spackle now so we’re itching to try that out soon.

Once the walls were spackled and sanded it was time for paint (note: priming after spackling isn’t a bad idea but we’ve skipped that step on a few occasions without any issue, so perhaps paint formulas are getting good enough to cover well on their own these days?). Anyway, on went Rockport Gray by Benjamin Moore (we first saw it in person in Portland when we House Crashed this casa and totally fell in love). We only needed a quart of semi-gloss, and we bought Natura paint (since that’s BM’s no-VOC line). The room needed two coats since it’s semi-gloss paint in there (which is so slick that painting over it almost always results in a terrible looking first coat…

… but then the second coat looks great.

So here’s the room all painted with the shower curtain back up. Of course I didn’t get to make the cream trim bright white before painting the walls, but I’ll do that soon enough (I’ve painted walls and then trim a bunch of times so it’s not too bad of an order for a painting fool like me):

Here’s a flashback “before shot” just to show the contrast and crispness that the less monochromatic color brings to the room.

The gray in the tiles is so pretty next to the darker toned wall color. And the funny thing is that the gray in our little tree accent tiles looks nice with the new paint on the walls. We can picture the room looking even more like us with soft frosted gray glass subway tile as the accent someday, but it’s nice that the trees work better with the new wall color in the meantime.

This freshly painted wall is just begging for some art (scroll up see the “before” perspective from this POV). And the room actually feels more open, even though the wall color is darker because there aren’t shelves and bars that feel like they’re all up in your area when you walk to the john.

You can see how the slice of white in the curtain looks with the tan and gray tones. Can’t wait to make the trim in the room a true glossy white color along with the toilet and some other accents to tie that color in more consistently.

So now our bathroom to-do list looks a little something like this:

• paint the cream trim white <– it looks white in the pics, but the bright white light switch next to the cream door trim makes it painfully obvious in person
• paint the walls so they have some contrast
• craigslist the toilet and replace it with a classic white one
• replace the boob light
• hang some bathroom-friendly art
• do something to add privacy to the window
• replace the border tile around the room (maybe in phase 2?)
• replace the floor tile down the road (just to break things up since there’s so much of it)

The good news for anyone putting off painting a small bathroom is that it doesn’t actually take that long. Each coat probably took us less than an hour (I cut in and then John rolls, and then we repeat that process for coat two). John’s mom once painted her entire bathroom with a paint brush. I remember thinking how amazing that was (and still think about how amazing that is, actually). Must’ve taken forever, but it was only one thing to wash at the end of it all. Haha.