Painted Shower Tile

Do you have a boring brown shower that you can't afford to upgrade right now? What if I told you for under $100 you could turn it into the bright white shower of your dreams?

We have an older boring brown shower and I was thinking I would just live with it until we could afford to replace the tile - but who knows when that will happen, and I really wanted to enjoy it now! So I looked into several options and decided on this Rustoleum tile kit. You can read about how I used this on my tub tile as well here and created a faux zillege.

Here is what my shower looked like before I started my bathroom project:

I decided to paint the shower frame to a nice matte black.

This was my starting point!

Let me break down all the steps I took:

1. Clean your shower tile realllly realllly well. The instructions say to use comet - I used a different cleaner but honestly you really want to get any sort of build up off of your tiles before starting. There's a few areas on my shower tile where the paint didn't stick, and I had to sand those areas down and paint it again. So clean it really well!

2. The next thing I did was sand everything down. You want to sand your tile with a 600 grit sandpaper just to roughen up the surface a little bit better and help the paint adhere. The areas where I didn't have the paint adhere were the areas I didn't sand super well around my shower doors.

3. Tape everything off - everything you don't want paint on should have tape on it.

4. Get your paint ready - I used this tile kit. All you do is mix part A and B together. This stuff smells really bad so you need a respirator. Even with my respirator on, I had moments where my eyes burned. This was with a window open, and my fan on too. I will say our house smelled like this paint for a week after doing the painting. So if you have an aversion to chemical smells like this I'd look else where.

I followed the instructions on the can and did two coats the first day - waited a day and then did 2 more coats. You'll probably need at least 3 coats if you're covering a darker tile. I ended up doing 4. The last 3 coats went pretty fast and were just going over some areas that needed it.

This is my shower after 2 coats:

And here is my shower after 4 coats of paint!

Here's my shower completely done! (well I'm still going to replace the shower head) But seriously what a difference the paint made.

This project was so easy, very inexpensive, and made a world of a difference in my shower. Stay tuned for the final pics of my bathroom once I finish the floors!