As we sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting for Baby Boy #2 to make his way into the outside world (hopefully on Sunday...just a little family quirk to maintain. But really, ASAP would be good -- this heartburn is a killer!), I finally made myself sit down and complete a super-easy project to jazz up the kids' bathroom. This bathroom also serves as our guest bathroom, so in addition to my hatred of blatantly kitschy themes, I knew it had to be kid-friendly and fun while being cleanly decorated and not make their grandparents squirm with bright cartoon characters staring at them while they pee there too!
This bathroom was plain jane when we moved in -- I actually felt sorry for the previous owners' teenage kids with how tacky and ugly this bathroom was. It was painted to match the rest of the house in cardboard brown and had a rolling/peeling perfume bottle decorative border around the top of the walls. Add in the builder standard towel rods and builder wooden vanity, and it was yawn city.
Though we're far from done in this room, we are making big strides. We painted the room Mild Mint in a satin finish, added a shower curtain rod (though we still want a new shower curtain...and need since there is paint on the brought-from-our-old-apartment one hanging there now), and added some shelves and baskets. We also rearranged the towel rod placements, hanging 2 on the open wall by the open door so that there is a rod for guests' towels and one for our kids' towels. We will also hang the 3rd one (which we removed from the Master bathroom when we put new rods in there) over the toilet for hand-towels so that we can remove the loop next to the sink (which we hate for function and as a fire hazard next to the only outlet in the bathroom).
But I wanted to go ahead and share some of the "art" that I made for the room...which I still haven't hung yet. But I am quite busy gestating a human, so excuse me if things take a little time to get done these days, won't you?
I used some leftover scraps of 1x6 boards after Hubby built Big Brother's twin bed for Christmas. (Which I apparently never blogged about here... but it was based on this tutorial from the super crafty Ana White.)
I was planning to just paint the board with some of our off-the-shelf white trim paint and sand it down to expose some wood and make it look antique, but then I found this handy tutorial on Pinterest and decided to finish up a small bottle of dark grey acrylic paint I had and try her technique! I painted the edges with the dark grey, spread a little Vaseline on, and then topped it with my white semi-gloss paint.
I had considered using another Pinterest tip on making rustic/faded wood signs, but since I don't know how to work Hubby's Adobe Illustrator program and Word wouldn't let me flip words to print in reverse (mirror reflection), I had to get creative in other ways. I created the wording and font styles I wanted and printed them out as outlines. After leveling the words (note: not the paper since I trimmed it up VERY unevenly) on the wood, I taped the pages in place and used an exacto knife to carve the letters gently into the paint/wood as a guide.
When I peeled away the paper, I was left with the carved outline guides.
I used a paint pen to color in the lines and fill in the letters and symbols I had carved.
After everything was dry, I found some medium grit sand paper and mustered up some elbow grease to rough up those boys! Below, the Bubbles sign is not yet sanded, but the Splash Park sign was sanded down quite a bit. Sadly, the sandpaper smeared a lot of the black, fading it into the white more than I expected, but I did go back the next day and clean some of that up between the letters with a clean sheet of sandpaper just to reduce the gray smearing. (I also drew an arrow under the words Splash Park that points to the bath tub from the direction the sign will be hung on the wall, so it isn't as unbalanced as the not-centered wording appears below.)
The Bubbles sign turned out much better without so much black smear-age.
The Bubbles sign will hang just below the lower glass shelf but above the rod we'll add for the hand towels, and the Splash Park sign will hang above the higher bath towel rod next to the shower on the door wall. (And don't remind me: that heinous brass light is next on the chopping block in that room...)
We also hope to frame the mirror with some reclaimed wood to continue the rustic/beachy vibe of light cool colors with found-object decor, and we desperately need to paint the vanities in both bathrooms. But I think we'll take on just these smaller hour-by-hour decor projects for the rest of this summer while we soak up a new baby's tiny face and help Big Brother adjust to our new family life.... at least, we'll start that plan as soon as Baby Brother decides to grace us with his presence on the outside!!
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