Pretty Potty Storage and Picking Paint

As we were tearing things up in the mirror department this weekend, we took the chance, while we had all the tools out and up there already, to make a change in our less than happy looking above-potty storage situation, and the weird orange-y brown wall paint color.

Cheap cabinets, updated with nicer pulls, are still cheap

Sad cabinet door that never closed right

I had this shelf lazing around in the garage, and decided to put it to work.

 First, I needed to clean it up, and get it ready for paint.

But, I didn't sand because I am lazy.

 I love these little painter's pyramids, because you can paint both sides of something without waiting for it to dry completely.

 

I covered it in 2 coats of primer, then I painted the shelf the same color as the rest of the trim in the house.

Color Continuity or Laziness?

Then, we had to make some paint decisions.  I've painted this bathroom 3 times.  There is NO natural light in there, which makes the lighting weird, and makes colors look VERY different from the swatch in the store.

One piece of advice - if you don't like the color at the first swipe, you are not going to like it any better when it's the whole room.

If you look closely, you can see the lavender that was supposed to be light gray at the edge of the orangey-brown.

We started by grabbing every color we even remotely liked at the Lowe's paint section, and narrowed it down to 3 options.

Then we realized how tomb-like that room would be in the deep brown, and narrowed it down to 2.

Given the weird lighting, and our history of multiple attempts at painting this bathroom, we chose the lightest swatch and got rolling.  This time, I painted the ceiling the same color (because my roller slipped, to be totally honest), and it made the ceiling look a million miles high.  I really don't like the work of painting a ceiling, but it really is worth it.

Thankfully, the 4th time was a charm, and the paint actually came out lovely and soothing.  And it picks up the gray in the floor tiles so well, you can barely see where the Kiddo stepped in paint while he was helping!

Also changed out the old robe hook for a cuter one.

After the paint was all dry, I mounted the shelf, first making the Mr. sit down to ensure head clearance.

 I moved the art into the big empty space above the shelf, and added some cute basket storage.

Crisp, clean, not-broken, and still functional.  Win.

Mirror Mirror

Nothing shouts "builder basic" like the giant, flat, boring bathroom mirror.

These lights are long gone (phew).

Original cabinet color...yikes.

 When I saw these lovelies at HomeGoods ($50 each), I thought they'd be the perfect replacement

First, out with the old.  Mine was just held in with a small metal track at the bottom, and 2 clamps at the top.  I unscrewed the tops, tilted out the mirror (with the Mr.'s help), and unscrewed the bottom track.

Big mirrors like these are actually rather fragile, so make sure you tape it up incase it shatters.

Once it's down, if you painted previously, you'll have something that looks a little like this.

Either pull out or push any existing anchors through the drywall, and patch your holes.

Removing the metal strip revealed a pretty wide gap between the sink backsplash and the wall.

Caulk, to the rescue.

Keeping your finger damp as you smooth out the caulk beam helps keep everything nice and smooth.

Now that the old stuff is out, we can turn our attention back to the new mirrors.

As you saw, one was metallic, the other white.  Home Goods didn't have any matching ones, but I figured I would be paining them a fun color anyway, so I didn't mind.

I did mind that this corner was a little wobbly and loose.

So, I unscrewed the backing, and saw this lovely sight - mirror glass held in with clamps, stabilized in a few spots with what looked like hot glue.  The wobbly bit was where some glue had gotten chipped off.

I took the mirrors out of both, which had the added bonus of making painting a little easier.

And sprayed them with 2 really light coats of plastic primer.

3 coats of paint later, they were ready to get re-assembled.  I used a foam brush on most of the frames, but needed a bristle brush to get in the little faux nailhead detail spots.

When I re-installed the mirrors into their frames, I ran a bead of silicone around the backs to add a little stability.

Once that was dry (and after the room had been painted and had time to dry), I found my center lines from the lights and the sink faucets, and marked where the hangers should go.

Of course, the placement of this outlet made it impossible to center the mirrors.  So they're both moved in toward the center by an inch.

Finally, here they are in their fully finished glory.  I think that's a big step in the right direction.

Of course, one project makes a million more...check here for the next parts of the saga - replacing the pokey-outey medicine cabinet, picking new paint, and prettying up the potty area ... and stay tuned for next weekend's fun - replacing the sink faucets (Wheeee!).

I love Lamp

Well, I loved a vase.

Home Goods, 20 bucks.  I like that it looks like vertebrae.

Then my mom took it away for the weekend and it came back a lamp.  I mentioned something about posting a tutorial here, and my dad muttered something about "trade secrets," so you'll have to wait until I convince her to open an etsy lamp shop (ie., secretly make one for her) (hi, mom!) to get your hands on one.

Still no idea where it will live, or the shade that will top it...stay tuned while we find the perfect spot for this little love.

Master Bedroom Before and After

If you ever doubted the power of a gallon of paint, feast your eyes on our master bedroom so far...

We started with our boring off-white box...

Ikea bed, $10 decorator tables as side tables, naked windows, and too-small art...

Ikea dresser, too-big mirror, shiny brass doorknobs...

and one more cluttered Ikea dresser.

This is what the room looks like today - same furniture, different look.

Same Ikea bed, but I have now become a white bedding convert.  Better scale of art over the bed (moved from its original spot in our entry).  Big time (but still cheap) upgrades on the side tables and lamps, too.  The old steamer trunk moved from the hall back to the end of our bed.  It's hard to tell, but the valances have a stripe that somehow matches the paint EXACTLY and were a lucky clearance find at Belk (and that I found after we painted).

After a few room re-shufflings, the dressers switched places, but they're still working fine, so we're keeping them.  De-cluttered, though, and art rearranged to fit better.

Something still bugs me about this wall, but I'm not making any moves until I figure out what it is, exactly.

We also moved a bookshelf that had been in the living room before we re-arranged in there for the eleventieth time...  I'd forgotten how nice it is to have a bookcase in my room.

Besides the paint, there are a bunch of little details that make the room happy:

I turned a particleboard dresser from college into a way more functional side table for the Mr. By this time, the top was covered with water puckers, so I gave it a freshen up by taking off the top and replacing it with a stained plywood top, and added cute pulls.

I'm terrible at shelf staging, and I'm sure all this stuff will get rearranged a million more times.

Long ago (10 years or so), I fell in LOVE with this print, and cut it out of Blueprint magazine (anyone else still mourning that loss?) and put it in my inspiration binder (way before Pinterest, guys).  The only problem was, before I could come up with the money to buy it, the website stopped selling it.  I cried real tears.  

This Christmas, my sister-in-law scoured the internet and found a website that will happily print out of circulation art.  I opened it and cried real tears.  Now it's the first thing I see when I roll out of bed every morning.

My sister-in-law also gave us this trunk as a wedding present, and it hold all our precious stuff (yes, she is the best present-giver in the history of ever).  Every kid who has ever seen it has called it a treasure chest, and in a way, it really is.

Of course, it still has a way to go before it's "perfect."  Our Ikea furniture has held up great, except the bed is really squeaky if you lean against the headboard, and the dressers and bookshelf are kind of boring.  And as with every other inch of grubby carpet, we'd love to replace it with easy to clean hardwoods one day.

I will take no flack for bedroom ceiling fans - I would LOVE a fancy chandelier, but we live in the South, and the bedrooms are on the third floor - I don't want to be personally responsible for our own ozone hole making the rooms sleep-able in August.  Also, last year our AC imploded entirely, and we were SO THANKFUL for the fans.  That said, I'd like a prettier one than "the cheapest one Lowe's had in 2007" model we have now.


So a little paint and a few small, personal additions have made our bedroom a cozy, restful place.  Anyone else feeling the power of small changes?

Bedside Bookshelf

The Kiddo reads books until he falls asleep, which is great (bedtime independence, hooray), but it means there are piles of books right by his pillow, which is less great.

Usually, there are even more books taking over the bed...

Luckily, I had a bunch of spare trim we used in the closet on another project, and 1x1 wood in the garage, so I quickly cobbled together a cute solution.

Even though I got a very lovely compound miter saw for my birthday, the garage workbench hasn't been set up yet, so neither has it...  I had to bust out the crummy old miter box for some simple straight cuts, and it worked just fine with my favorite pull saw.

Because the garage is a mess while we reorganize to accommodate and build the workbench, I had to get creative about miter box placement.  Don't try this at home.

A kind of dumb place to set the miter box, but it worked out OK in the end.

After I made my cuts, I clamped and glued the two pieces together.

After the glue dried for a few minutes, I put in some nails, and inset them with a nail set.

I filled the holes with some putty I had laying around, and sanded with a medium-grit sanding block that was literally just the first one I grabbed off the shelf.

I painted the whole thing (2 coats) with the same trim paint that we've used everywhere else in the house, using my new favorite, no-brush-marks-ever, foam brush.

I let it dry, then hauled it up and placed the shelf and leveled.

The whole thing, even fully loaded, is really light, so I used some small brackets that didn't work in another project, but were just right here.  Yes, that's right, friends, I am a hardware hoarder.

I used the same screw-in anchors I used for the baseball bat holder for the screws that attach the brackets to the wall, just in case the Kiddo gets any designs on pulling the shelf out along with a book.  Again, probably overkill, but better safe than patching drywall, I always say.

and TA-DA, a tidy bedtime book shelf.