When I first painted the boys' bathroom, I used the left over paint from an accent wall that I had done in my kitchen...a lighter brown color that was trending at the time. It was one of those, "Hey I have some extra paint so I'm gonna stay up late one night and paint the bathroom" kind of things. I do things like that and thank heavens I have a patient husband who puts up with it! Once the paint was on the walls of my bathroom, I knew it was a mistake. It made the room look dark and small. I hated going in there. I knew it was only going to be a matter of time before I repainted it. The brown paint lasted about 18 months until I finally found an excuse a few months ago to get rid of it.
It all started when the night light burned out in my older boys' room. Carson (my oldest) woke up terrified of the dark, and did what any resourceful little boy would do: went into the bathroom, grabbed the Scentsy plug-in warmer (which was turned on and full of hot wax) and took it to his room and plugged it in. I had no idea what he'd done until the next morning when Jonas (my second oldest) came running out of the bathroom yelling, "Mom! Carson got blood all over the bathroom!" Terrified, I ran in to see red wax all over (and was very thankful that it wasn't really blood!). The wax came off of everything easily, except for the paint. It just kept peeling up no matter what I did. Even running a blow dryer on the wax to re-melt it didn't work.
I didn't have any brown paint left over to touch it up. I know that a little bit of peeling paint probably wouldn't bug some of you, but I couldn't let it rest. And to be honest, it was time for the brown paint to go. So, because I am a "ready, shoot, aim" kind of person (as my husband so kindly tells me) I went down stairs, grabbed some aqua paint samples (that I had left over from doing the nursery), and painted streaks all over the bathroom.
Then I went to Home Depot (with all four kids in tow) and broke one of my own
painting rules: I grabbed a paint sample card and went with it. I didn't like
any of the shades of aqua I had tried and just wanted to get the painting done
(because, you know, it had already been three days and I have the
patience of a two year old when it comes to projects like this). I got lucky and picked a color that I love, love, love
(Almost Aqua by Glidden)! These pictures do NOT do it justice. It is gorgeous.
As you can tell, new paint meant a new shower curtain and a new shelf for the
towels. And new towels. At the time, my husband was home from work for a week because he'd had a hernia repair. I convinced him to make me a board that I could hang the bath towels on so I could get rid of the builder's grade towel bar that had come with the house. Once he had the board made, I decided that I wanted a shelf put on top of it...and then trim on the bottom to balance it out. So my patient husband humored me and kept adding to the original piece of wood until he created this masterpiece.
It was made mostly out of wood we already had. We were able to paint it with
left over trim paint our builder had left in our basement. It ended up being a
pretty cheap alternative to the towel bar that was there before.
A few years ago, I read in a parenting magazine about assigning each child a
certain color of bath towel. That way you would always know who had left a
towel out and who was in charge of putting it away. I'd been wanting to do this
ever since, so we assigned each of the boys their own color. It's been great to have this system because now the boys aren't giving me the, "But it's his towel, he should have to pick it up" excuse.
I'll be back in a few days with a tutorial on how to frame out a bathroom mirror.
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