de-boring-izing the guest bath

i bought my house 3 years ago, and it seems like i've barely scratched the surface.  it's not a large house, and there are rooms that i haven't touched with paint, hammer and nail, window treatments, etc.  nothing.  it looks the same dang way it did when i got here.

also, after 3 years i have yet to host a party.  which is RIDICULOUS because i live in florida and i have a pool.  i mean seriously, 3 years and i haven't managed to justify hosting some sort of pool party?

well recently there has been talk of a 4th of july crawfish boil going down in my backyard, and before that happened, i decided to finally put some crap in my guest bath besides towels and a shower curtain.

honestly, what i did is not even blogworthy.  i spend a lot of time perusing blogs, and some ladies just seem to have natural creative tendencies.  me?  well i bootleg and steal a lot of ideas from their blogs.  :)

here are some photos.  the guest bath is TINY.  i can't get the entire room in one shot.  this is the only area that isn't a bathtub, toilet, sink, towel holder, or blocked by the door.

 

i HATE that the walls are still white, but for some reason my boyfriend actually cares what color i paint rooms.  is this odd?  i think it is.  it seems that most ladies can just throw paint wherever they like and their husbands couldn't care less.  i made the mistake of mentioning peach once, and his head spun 180 degrees while he vomited pea soup.

also, i have to choose my paint battles.  my dining room desperately needs paint before the guest bath.  there are a couple of horrid cracks in the plaster that mock me every time i walk through there.  we will be negotiating that paint color first.  plus, that's where i want to hang the gallery shelves that i intend to make.  (another blog idea i'm stealing!)

anyway, back to the guest bath...

i've had that conch shell for eleventy billion years, and i've always wanted a cute way to display it because i adore the thing.  my granddad gave it to me when i was little.  i love the whole "put it up to your ear and you can hear the ocean" effect, plus it's just plain pretty.


i've had that beach sign for about 2 years, thank you very much tj maxx clearance rack, and it's been sitting in my dining room, homeless.

the vase is 5 years old.  my boyfriend sent me daisies (my favorite flower) for my birthday and they came in that vase.  it was too cute to throw out, so it's been collecting dust as well.

the frames i just found today at a yard sale.  i hit it late, around 10:30, and these ladies were a little panicky to try and get rid of everything.  i wish they'd had more stuff i wanted, it was mostly clothes and yarn.  they sold me 3 frames for a dollar.  i painted these two with the same "oops" paint i used on my bird feeder project.  by sheer coincidence, that color ties in nicely with the blue/green/brown floral shower curtain i have in the guest bath.  the pictures i put in the frames are two watercolors i bought last weekend at an estate sale for a dollar each.  the recently deceased was an artist.  in hindsight, i wish i'd bought a dozen more of them.

the third frame i found today is a bit larger, and i think i'm going to try my hand at turning that into a chalkboard.  my projects-i-want-to-try list needs to be written down somewhere!

found something cool by accident today...

i was lucky enough to be the first responder on a pretty $15 mirror listed on craigslist yesterday!  i checked the right listing at the right moment for a change.

so i arranged to meet the woman selling the mirror this morning.  she works out of a cute house in a downtown neighborhood, about a 5 minute drive from my house.  i drove down to meet her at 10AM and found a sea of cars and people at the mansion next door and a giant ESTATE SALE sign.

omgomgomgomg.  :)

i bought the mirror and visited with my new craigslist friend, veronica, for a bit.  she was incredibly sweet with the cutest german accent, and she was telling me some of her crazy craigslist stories.  apparently she's moving back to europe, so she's been slowly liquidating a lot of her decor and furniture.  she's having a garage sale this weekend, so i'll probably stop by.

she told me a little bit about the old couple who used to live in the mansion next door.  apparently she was friendly with them, and she said it was very difficult for her to watch people walking in and picking apart their estate.  this made me feel a little guilty about being so excited to go poke around, so i at least managed to keep from salivating all over her driveway as i pondered what i might find.

we said goodbye, and i waited until i was sure she'd gone inside to beeline towards the estate sale.

this had to be the coolest estate sale i've ever been to.  i was a couple hours late, so i missed a lot of great deals on giant outdoor urns and whatnot, but there was still a ton of outrageous pieces to drool over.  unfortunately my house is smallish and on the full side as far as furniture goes (i'm looking for a buffet, but that's about it), so i had to walk away from the gorgeous chairs and claw footed tables i saw.

i found a heavy glass cake cover for $10, and now i'm super excited to try and build a cake stand to go with it using a platter and a candlestick holder.  i saw that idea on someone's blog here that i follow, but for the life of me i can't find the bookmark to properly reference it here - sorry!  i did a quick google search though, so here's a link to the basic idea.  so, so cute.  time to hunt down a platter and candlestick holder i like!

also, one or both of the previous owners were apparently artists because there was a mountain of beautiful watercolors to choose from.  i plucked out a couple of small beachy paintings to frame and put in my bathroom.  i'm going to try michael's for a couple of simple black frames to put them in.

and then, in the back corner of a shed, behind a dusty box of old LP's, i found this little gem with a $5 sticker on it:

I LOVE IT.  i was carrying it through the house as i kept browsing, and half a dozen people made comments about it.  it is obnoxiously filthy.  i'm sure it was sitting in that shed for a long time, so i'm going to have to put some serious elbow grease into cleaning it up.  i think it would look super cute on a buffet table, but since i haven't found one yet, it might have to take up temporary residence on my dining room fireplace mantle.

also, and i really, really, REALLY wish i had thought to take a picture of it, but i was too busy scraping my jaw off the floor along with everyone else walking through, these folks were serious liza minnelli lovers.  borderline mental even.  they had an ENTIRE UPSTAIRS ROOM dedicated to the woman.  i'm talking all four walls, covered with framed pictures of her.  it was super creeptastic.

i'm sad because after i got the craigslist mirror home i realized it wasn't big enough for the space i had in mind.  i think it's going over the guest room dresser instead.  but hey, if i hadn't bought the mirror, i wouldn't have found the awesome estate sale!

painting with a twist

on friday evening, i attended a class at our local painting with a twist.  despite my curiosity, i was really wary of doing this for a long time, but after two unacquainted friends both raved to me about how cool it was, i finally broke down and signed up.  i felt sure that i would fall flat on my face having never painted anything but walls.

the idea is that you walk in the door, with or without any artistic ability/background (i am most definitely in the "without" camp on that one), sit down at a blank canvas with paint, brushes, and water cup, follow the directions given by the instructor, and walk out with your painting 3 hours later.

sounds ridiculous, right?  i certainly thought so.  i'm an engineer, and we don't do art, which is why i struggle so much to find other creative outlets.  as evidenced by the handful of blog posts i've made thus far, i really am all over the place as far as projects go.

the "twist" part of painting with a twist means that students are welcome to bring in any food and drink - yes, this includes booze - they'd like to partake of during the class.  i elected to bring in a fruit salad, cheese, crackers, and a bottle of merlot.

they usually have 1 to 2 classes per day, and each class walks students through how to paint a different painting.  the class i chose to sign up for was chanel.  i did not realize it at the time, since as i said i am totally ignorant when it comes to all things art, but my friend later told me i chose a semi-difficult painting to cut my teeth on due to all the blending.  oops.

so on friday night i walked into class with my bottle of wine, fruit, and cheese and set up camp.  turns out this was a very small class of only 5 students.  perfect.  lots of individual attention, which i fully expect i will need.  3 veterans who have taken previous classes, 2 rookies.

i'm not sure what i expected, but it was amazing.  the instructor was fantastic.  she reassured us all from the get go that acrylic paint is wonderful because you can mess up as much as you want and it can always be fixed, so don't stress yourself out by trying to be perfect.  i did my best to follow that advice, and after two glasses of merlot it wasn't all that difficult to do!

here is my blank canvas.  i took this picture as evidence that i really started with nothing.

we spent the first hour of class following step by step directions on how to sketch the base of the painting.  this was broken down for us into a series of lines and shapes from one corner of the canvas to the other.  i had no idea so much of the class would be dedicated to sketching.  i suspect this part would be really difficult for any person(s) with O.C.D.  next, we started outlining miss chanel's silhouette in black paint.  here is a picture of my sketch with the first bit of painted outline.

the next step was to slap blue and white paint all over the background, which was super fun.  then we kind of hopped around a bit.  we did some work on the scarf, which is actually white layered with blue and black and then layered with white again.  finishing the scarf was my favorite part, as i really loved how mine turned out.

the face and the hat both scared the heck out of me.  we really did freehand all those circles and lines in the hat.  i was horrible at doing the shadowing on the face.  i did a lot of floundering before i got something that looked alright.  there was a lot of mixing paint with water and adding more paint and blending and craziness.  i was using too much paint and everything came out really dark, but the instructor showed me how to fix it up, and it turned out looking like a face, so hooray!

i started to fall behind a bit when i was struggling with the shadowing, and i got so wrapped up in what i was doing that i didn't get to take any more "in progress" pictures.

here is my finished masterpiece.  the last step was to sign in the corner.

i'm pretty darn satisfied with it.  i would have sworn my friends were taking crazy pills, but it really was a lot of fun, and you really do not need any artistic talent whatsoever

i'm happy to have another creative outlet at my disposal.