New Apartment Decorating PART 5: My Boho Bathroom Decor!
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My new apartment decorating saga continues! And today it's all about bathroom decor.
Here's the challenge with my new bathroom: it’s boring. It has this bland, builder-grade look to it and it's basically a brown and beige lump of a room. It's not the most visually inspiring bathroom, let's just say that.
So using my magical interior styling powers, I’m going to do my best to make my apartment bathroom look more interesting, and frankly cooler looking than it actually is by going for an earthy boho bathroom look!
Would you rather watch than read? Here’s the video! ↓
Bathroom Styling Tip #1: The Quest for the Right Shower Curtain
Let's talk about the shower curtain saga, because oh, what a saga it has been… 🙃
If you're anything like me, picking a shower curtain turns into a month-long ordeal of scrolling through endless options. What can I say, I’m particular about such things.
After scrolling through literally hundreds of shower curtains online, I ultimately I landed on a supposedly very pretty curtain from West Elm. I really liked how this shower curtain looked on West Elm's website. It had kind of a cool, groovy vibe to it, which is in line with the overall look I’m going for in my apartment.
So I ordered it. And after waiting a month for it to arrive (I hadn’t realized it was on backorder…) I unpackaged this supposedly beautiful West Elm shower curtain, hung it up, and…
It looked like denim. This shower curtain’s fabric looked like denim. I waited over a month for a faux denim shower curtain. 😂
So I suppose my tip here is to always be prepared for disappointment when ordering online. It’s definitely worth ordering decor online because it opens up so many more options that you wouldn’t find in person (shower curtains especially for some reason!) but always be aware of return policies and have a backup plan if something doesn’t work out.
Luckily, I had kept track of all shower curtains I was considering buying and put them in a Canva doc, so it was relatively easy to pick another one.
And this is the one I chose:
My quest for a new shower curtain may not have been an easy one, but it was worth the effort. Because the right shower curtain sets the tone for your entire bathroom, so I recommend you choose one that exemplifies your style while expecting the unexpected when ordering online.
Not that anyone would ever expect a shower curtain to look like denim... 🙃
Bathroom Styling Tip #2: Decorating Limited Counter Space
One of the challenges with my bathroom is there is very little room for countertop styling. So I had to find a way to fit the practical things (a hand soap dispenser and a small washcloth rack) with the pretty things.
Luckily, I’m no stranger to tiny countertop styling and I have a bit of a go-to formula for it. When decorating limited counter space in your bathroom, all you really need to consider adding is the following:
A pretty hand soap dispenser (not the kind you buy as-is in the grocery store, like a bottle of Dial. I’m talking about an aesthetically pleasing, pretty soap dispenser, which you can find at budget-friendly places like Target or World Market.)
A group of 3 decorative objects forming a triangle together. I typically like these things to be:
A vase of faux florals
A candle, bottle of room spray, or reed diffuser
A small decorative object, like a little bowl, a faux succulent, a crystal… this can really be any small pretty thing!
Whatever you end up choosing, you don’t need that many things on your countertop to make a visual impact, which is good news for those of us who don’t have very much space on our counters anyway!
Bathroom Styling Tip #3: Don’t Rush When It Comes to Buying New Decor
One thing I wasn’t really feeling after I finished this first phase of my bathroom stying was my set of three boho wall art pieces. Honestly, I felt pretty underwhelmed by them.
They just aren’t making the impact on the bathroom that I had wanted. They’re too small, feel cheaper than I expected them to feel, and they really are quite generic looking.
My mistake was rushing too quickly and settling on these pieces. To be honest, a lot of why I rushed was for the sake of the video; I wanted to create a strong before-and-after to wrap the video up nicely. But in my defense, I really did like how they looked online, especially the colors. Fortunately, they were inexpensive, but it really just feels wasteful.
So be very thoughtful when purchasing new decor and don’t rush! I’m usually pretty careful and particular about what I buy, but this one was a misstep.
Bathroom Styling Tip #4: Battle the Blah with Boho
As I said earlier, one of the challenges with my bathroom is it’s definitely a bland, cookie cutter, builder-grade bathroom. It’s not the most creatively inspiring space, that’s for sure.
The boringness of my bathroom is one of the reasons why I chose to go the boho styling route. The spirit of boho is inherently creative, cool, and free -spirited; everything my bathroom isn’t. So to combat the blandness, boho came in to save the day and infuse my bathroom with the life it was sorely missing.
Of course, you don’t have to do a boho look to cure a boring space. Any style could work! But for me, boho felt like the right choice and kind of an act of defiance against the blandness.
So whenever the space you’re working with is inherently boring and cookie-cutter, consider using boho to make things more interesting!
Bathroom Styling Tip #5: Style in Phases
One thing that helped my mindset through styling my bathroom was framing it as phase one of the decorating process, not the be-all-end-all.
I, like so many of us, struggle with a borderline pathological need to be perfect in everything I do. So it’s easy to put a ton of pressure on myself to make my space flawless as quickly as possible with little to no mistakes. Which really is so hypocritical of me, because I’m constantly preaching not to be like that when you’re decorating! Sometimes the advice you give is actually the advice you need more than anyone.
So by consciously thinking “this is just phase one, this is just phase one…” while decorating my bathroom, it relieved a lot of that self-induced pressure. My bathroom looks pretty now, but there’s plenty of room to improve upon it over time.
Take your decor process in phases. This really is a journey with all kinds of pit stops and plot twists; sometimes of the denim variety, haha. And all of that is okay. New iterations will happen as you organically find things you love!
