The Pink Didn't Work

I've been messing around with mistake paint I find at the home stores and painting different items I have around the house or buy at garage sales.  My living room is green, and I see a lot of pink and green together - I thought I give it a try.  It didn't work for me.  I found this nice big mirror for $1 this summer.  The frame was chipped, so it needed to be painted.  I tried a light wash of pick over white primer ad then distressed it.  I thought it was ok and hung it on the wall.  My hubby came home that night - saw the pick - stopped - made a face - and said something to the fact of really not liking it.  I laughed becasue he is super easy going and doesn't make a buig deal of of soemthing unless it really not going to work for him. 

The pink mirror really just doesn't add anything here - or go with anything else for that matter.  Opps.

Some of my first trials with painting and distressing an item.  Can't go wrong on the already chipped $1 garage sale mirror.

After living with the pink for a couple of days, I totally agreed with him.  The pink just wasn't working in our house.  Most of the time, it's better to let me make a mistake and then fix it, rather then tell me not to make the mistake in the first place.  I'm stubborn like that :)   All the pick stuff has been repainted shades of grey with some faux bois thrown in.  I've also decided that I don't like the green walls anymore either.  They're going to be toned down sometime soon too.  AND I'm going to paint he fireplace brick a white color.  Better stop blogging and get working...

Thought maybe I could pull of the pink - not really.

Grey is Good

Man I really like grey!  It's all over our house.  I think I'm quite the trend setter, we were using gray in our condo back in Spring of 2008, now it's everywhere!  I have lots of left over gray paints.  I've mixed them together and painted these couple of garage sale items for our house.  The two window mirrors - were purple - now gray.  It's my hope that these open up the little windowless bathroom a bit.  Look another non-matching toilet seat!  Don't worry, it's been replaced since I took this picture.  No I didn't pick out the gray toilets, tubs, and shower stalls - those are remnants of the 1980's.  It's all coming baaack.  Maybe I should not paint over all of the brass is our house?  Ahh, no, the brass needs to go.


It's very faint, but I finished the top of this coffee table with a faux bois streaking.  You can just barely see it in the photo.  I was palying around with the technique and what to mix with the paint.  I prefer the contract to be more pronounced then this turned out, but it's fine for now.    Check out the rest of our garage sale leftovers in my garage.  We've almost cleaned it all out.  I need to get my car in there :)

Master Bath Re-do

Whne we bought our little house in the burbs, we were thrilled that it had two bathrooms, and two showers - even a master bathroom.  Most of the small bungalows we had looked at in Broadripple didn't have this nice feature.  Our Master Bath came with a couple of issues: the shower floor leaked through to the crawl-space and it was ugly.  Most of the house has this cosmetic UGLY feature - lots of 1980's brass.

Here are before photos of our master bathroom:

This lantern light was silly in the bathroom, not to mention ugly.  Also the cabinet that you can barely see - too narrow to actually hold anything.  Totally pointless.

Nasty leaking shower.  It took us 18 months to hire someone to fix it.  We didn't use our master bath shower until we had live in the house 19 months!  Again - more brass.

You'll note the new supplies for the bath sitting in the tub.  Mismatching toilet seats are not nice.  Menard's is the only place I could find gray toilet seats.  A matching seat makes such a big difference.

When Byron (dog) broke his leg we tried to keep him in the bathroom one day (after he's learned how to break out of his cage.)  He tried to break out of the bathroom too.  We figure that wasn't good for the healing leg - we just let him have full reign of the house again after this

My small attempt to make this bathroom nicer - the shelf - it didn't help.

The AFTER Bathroom

 I can't believe how yuck the old bathroom was and how long we just tried to ignore it.  As I mentioned  earlier, we hired out the fixing of the shower.  We are very happy with their work.  We knew our limits and didn't want to attempt this project ruin the shower further.  The bottom half of the shower was ripped out, and a totally new shower floor was installed.  Honestly, we didn't realize how brown the tiles were that we picked out.  That was a bit of a mistake.  I really thought they were more gray...  It didn't really matter to us -they were fixed.  We also has the workers install the nice inset shelf for our shampoo - totally worth the couple hundred extra. A new door was installed too.  We decided to keep the old faucet and fixtures for now.  The estimate for replacing them was about $600.  I'm sure that included something really fancy?  I really didn't understand why it would be so much.

Look! A matching toilet seat and nice decor on the shelf!

I wasn't certain what color to paint the room until we saw that the new shower floor was more brown than grey - brown walls it is!  We needed to tie in more brown for that floor to work.  Now get this - I went to Lowe's and found this brown paint in the mistake bin!!!  It was the gloss I wanted and the perfect color for $3/Gallon!  How fantastic is that!  I sanded the trim heavily becasue of the damage from the dog and painted all the wood glossy white.  The silly light fixture was replaced with a cheapy 'breast' light for Menards.  The light still isn't a great design piece or anything but it's an improvement for $5. 

I actually use the bath for laundry and towel storage.   Thought it would be funny to share the 'pretty' version and the 'real-life' version.

I'm very happy with our renovated bathroom.  It's relaxing and pretty without being too girly. 

When I had this done, I just had to move on to the rest of the bedroom... 

I'm linking up to Transformation Thursday at Shabby Chic Cottage Blog.  Click on the box below to see other creative transformations.  The blog world is so fun :)