3 Ways to Decorate with Vintage License Plates in the Bathroom

Vintage license plates make an awesome source of fun retro art for the bathroom. Before you start any of these ideas for decorating a retro bathroom with vintage license plates you will want to follow the instructions for preparing your new reproduction license plates or vintage licenses plates for the moist environment of the bathroom.

Prep Work:

To get started you want to coat the metal in a few layers of clear paint. I recommend a Rustoleum spray paint in clear. Shiny or mate will work. Apply two to three coats allowing each one to dry before adding the next.

Vintage License Plate Décor #1: Theme Wall

For a cool retro looking in a larger bathroom take one whole wall and make it an accent wall full of license plates. To do this simply starts in the middle. Use simple screws and the holes already in the license plate to screw them into the wall.

Attach another one right next to it with no space in between them. Continue until the whole wall is covered! This adds tons of retro color.

Vintage License Plate Décor #2: Cabinet Handles

To get started you want to use small reproduction license plates. These need to be metal. Roll the plate into a cylinder. You can use a simple metal pipe to do this.

Lay the license plate face down on the table. Lay your metal pipe on top on the left edge. Tart rolling. Wear gloves to protect to hands.

Once rolled into a cylinder then drill holes through the back that match up wiht your existing cabinet door holes.

Another option is to use epoxy glue to glue these retro bathroom hardware into place, but you need to make sure this dries for 48 hours before pulling on them. Use something like Gorilla glue. It works well on most surfaces.

Vintage License Plate Décor #3: Easy Frame

You can also simply screw the retro car tags into a frame shape surrounding a mirror that has no frame. I like to simply screw straight into the wall again.

If you want to make your mirror a little smaller than create this vintage bathroom mirror by glue in the reproduction car tags onto the mirror with that same glue as before. It works well on metal and glass, which is perfect for this vintage looking bathroom frame.

You can use reproduction near tags so you do not ruin collector's items with the glue.