You are allowed to redecorate

around a bathmat

I have a friend in Colorado who has really nice decorating taste. She prefers muted colors, natural fibers and materials, and has collected a lovely set of furniture, housewares, and artistic touches over the years to round out her aesthetic. When I visited recently, I fell in love with her bamboo bathmats. And I had to have one. 

My aesthetic is anything but muted and natural. In a previous office I painted one wall turquoise, one wall yellow, one wall orange and one wall…gray.¹ I have a blood red half-bath in my house decorated with a Star Wars theme in black and white. I like to call it the murder bathroom. My bedroom is National Geographic yellow.² One of the rooms I did not paint upon moving in, however, was the upstairs bathroom. This room, depressingly drab and coated in the same run-down greenish beige renter’s tint as the rest of the place before I took to the brush, sported industrial-style shelving and towel hooks, and a rusty baseboard heater. When I bought the townhouse in December 2021, I had to finish painting all the furnished rooms first. I spent a full week painting before the movers came and I haven’t wanted to mess with a paintbrush again. Until now.

On July 4 I spent the day driving from store to store looking for a bamboo bathmat. Nowhere in Missoula, apparently, can these be found. So I ordered one. Then I turned to paint colors: What goes with bamboo? It turns out, spring green goes with bamboo! And so does white, of course. And yellow. Lowe’s hooked me up with a gallon of this green and I ordered a couple of bamboo shelves and towel hooks on a bamboo bracket. I bought snowy white towels and I already have towels in yellow, of course.

 

The coup de grace came when I realized, this could be a Crested Butte-colored bathroom! What did I see so much of there on all the hillsides in addition to yellow wildflowers and aspens? Lupine. A large mountain wildflower print, the foreground filled with lupine,³ decorated the guest bedroom so I moved it into the bathroom. The shower curtain: lupine.⁴ Yes, even the rocker plate got the treatment.⁵

I am thrilled with this new bathroom. Sure, I’ll have to whitewash my whole townhouse when I attempt to sell it sometime down the road, but for now I get to live in a place I love, with a bamboo bathmat as a centerpiece.

1. Don’t ask why the one gray wall. I could not tell you.

2. I was a National Geographic teacher advisor for a while, so I felt that the paint color, which was actually called Geographic Yellow, was a natural choice.

3. My darling daughter reminds me this is fireweed, not lupine.

4. My darling daughter tells me this is also not lupine.

5. I didn’t ask her.