TIFU by dying my entire bathroom purple

Obligatory, this happened last year, and my family still holds it against me. (TW: mentions of panic attack)

My family and I have lived in our house for about 17 years, and every single year my parents have talked about fixing up the bathroom. It is a really old heritage-listed house, in a city with lots of other heritage-listed houses, and preserving the history of the city is very important to the citizens and the city council. Because of this, home renovations take a very long time to get approved, which is why we put off fixing the bathroom for a long time.

It was unbelievably ugly, with a yellowing bath and shower, wallpaper on the walls that had been poorly painted over and was now cracking, and worst of all, one patterned tile in the centre of the room that not only differed from all the rest in colour, but was a different size too. It sucked.

At the start of 2020, my parents decided to finally do something about it. They got a million quotes, found a fancy claw-foot tub, and got to work. I was overseas, but my parents and my sister scraped off the wallpaper, removed the shower and bath and sink, and smashed up the horrible tile (good riddance, but forever living in my nightmares). Unfortunately this was the worst possible time for this, because then Covid happened (just after I got home, thankfully), and we were stuck with no bathroom, and no tilers or plumbers to reassemble it because of lockdown. We were stuck having showers outside next to the pool, which wasn't too bad as it was the end of summer, but using a camping toilet in the backyard with full view from the kitchen? Not ideal.

Lockdown didn't end up lasting that long in my country, so after a few weeks, construction in the bathroom began, and a month or so later it was painted, tiled, and fit with a fancy new bath, sink, toilet, laundry cupboard, and even a fancy cat sandbox (it's like a little house! No smell, and no awkward eye contact with your cat while you're both shitting lol). A very important note to make here is that the walls were painted white, parts of the wall were tiled white, the floor tiles were black and white, the sink was white, the bath was white, the toilet was white, the cupboards were white, and the cat house was, you guessed it, white.

Although we ended up with a super nice bathroom, my household was still very traumatised with the public toilet situation, and showering in the rain towards the middle of autumn, and emptying that horrible camp toilet twice a week. Because of this, we were much more excited by our new fancy bathroom than a normal human should be, and constantly talked about how nice it was to have not only a functioning bathroom, but a lux one too. Add to that the 17 years of build-up to the renovations, and the frustration of dealing with the city council - this bathroom was a really big deal to my family.

It was probably about two months into our new bathroom when I decided that I was bored of my red hair, and I wanted to go purple. I am someone who feels the compulsive need to have unnaturally coloured hair, and frequently bleach and dye it whenever I'm bored.

I begged my sister to help me, but being a 14 year old, she had better things to do like scrolling through Tik Tok. I cut my losses and made my way to the bathroom to DIY, because what could possibly go wrong?

I put on the gloves and got to work.

The first mistake happened when a drop of purple landed on the cabinet under the sink. I quickly wiped it up, but in doing so I got a smudge of dark purple elsewhere on the cabinet. Not panicking yet, I just decided to finish my hair and then I would work on it. Once my head was satisfactorily lathered, I took off the gloves, and left them in the (white) sink (mistake two).

Mistake three, I did not tie back my hair. I got a tissue and tried to wipe the cabinet, but it seemed to have stained. This was when I started to freak out internally, just a little. Because of this, I started scrubbing quite vigorously, which caused my hair to swipe the cabinet, and therefore spread more dye. Fantastic. I tucked my hair behind my ears and picked up the gloves to find the sink stained purple. I rushed to throw the gloves in the kitchen bin, and did not think even a little bit about how touching them meant I had purple dye on my fingers now.

I decided now was the time to recruit some actual cleaning chemicals. I went to open the (white) laundry cupboard with my horrible purple fingers, and got dye on the doors. My panic level was steadily rising. I snatched up the first cleaning products I could see, and began spraying and scrubbing to no avail. Everywhere I scrubbed, the colour lifted a little, but not enough that I was confident my mum wouldn't crucify me.

Now my hair was becoming a real issue, practically painting every surface I neared, so I decided that I would wash it out, and then I could focus all my energy on cleaning the cabinets. What mistake number am I up to now?

I stripped off and hopped in the shower - and by shower I mean the fancy claw-foot tub, which had a showerhead and a (white) shower curtain over it so you could stand in it to shower. The fancy claw-foot tub that my parents adored and spent thousands on. The fancy claw-foot tub that literally cost more than the rest of the bathroom renovations combined. The fancy claw-foot tub that was white. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

As I was in a state of mild shock, I did not just stick my head under the showerhead like a rational person. I stood in the shower and scrubbed my head like you would with shampoo. Like an idiot. As probably should have been expected, the purple splashed absolutely everywhere. The bath filled with violet water, the tiles and freshly painted walls were splashed as I shook my hair, the poor shower curtain was soaked. The more I saw the damage, the more I panicked; the more I panicked, the more I frantically looked around, shaking more destructive liquid around the room; thus began a violent cycle.

This was where my full-blown panic attack began. I yelled out for help, and my sister came in, to find me stark naked, purple dye running down my body, kneeling in the bath, shower splashing on my head, and purple splattered over literally every surface in the bathroom. There was even dye inside the toilet bowl. She stood in the doorway (door, white, also stained) in absolute shock for a minute or so. I was hyperventilating, scrubbing at the purple stain on the white bath to no avail.

My sister eventually snapped out of it, realised that when mum got home from work, I would be out on the streets (if not decapitated or dismembered), and quickly got to scrubbing the walls and floor around the bath. We scrubbed and scrubbed, and I rambled on about how mum was going to kill me, and she tried to reassure me albeit not very convincingly. At the height of my panic attack, I genuinely thought that I was going to die because of this. Mum would get home, see it, and I would just drop dead. That made rational sense in my mind. So I'm scrubbing, I'm purple, and I'm mentally planning my own funeral.

After about 15 minutes of getting nowhere, my dad walks into the kitchen to get a drink, and hears the commotion. It must be noted that my dad is very quiet, rarely gets angry, and rarely even speaks unprompted. Some of my closest friends, who I have known almost my whole life, have barely ever heard him speak. He's just not an emotional or reactive person. But when he walked into the newly purple bathroom he just stopped, stared, and said "what the FUCK?"

I of course started hyperventilating more, and spewing out random words about how I was going to clean it or pay for it with each shallow breath, and my sister tried her best to help out, but my dad's expression of shock horror was not changing. He eventually just walked over to the cupboard, gave me a bottle of cleaner, and noped the fuck out of there. I squirted some of it into the bath, and to my absolute relief, the purple lifted.

Thus began the next three hours of me and my sister scrubbing absolutely every surface of the bathroom. I took down the shower curtains and threw them into the washing machine with a mountain of bleach power and prayed for a miracle. My sister and I had to clean the inside of the bath, the outside of the bath, three out of four walls, the windowsill, the floor, the sink, the cabinet, the cupboard doors, the inside of the cupboards, the bathroom door (both sides), the sandbox, and the entire toilet.

When we finally finished (thank god for my sister, honestly) I filled up the bath so I could wash the rest of the dye out of my hair. It was around now that I was coming down from the adrenaline high of my panic attack, and began to realise that this whole time I was fully naked, and also covered in purple. So when my mum finally came home, she found me in the bath, frantically scrubbing at my purple skin (I had work the next day - think corporate office job), chuckling nervously as she surveyed the bathroom with that detective gaze that mums have.

There only seemed to be a few spots, aside from my entire body, that we had missed, and I got to them as soon as I got out of the bath. My mum admitted that she probably would have snapped my neck if she saw the mess we described, so it's a good thing she was at work.

From that point on, I've had to dye my hair in the shower outside, which is not fun at all in winter, but is still far better than a panic attack and a five hour cleaning marathon.

And the worst part of it all - the purple hair didn't even look that good. It was so dark it was almost my natural hair colour, and faded an awful khaki colour. Additionally, my fingernails were stained like a rare disease for months.

How do these YouTube tutorials make DIY hair dying look so easy?

TL:DR I splashed hair dye all over my newly renovated (white) bathroom, sending myself into a naked, purple, panic attack