B&A: Guest Bath Yay!

So, the office is moved, I spent my entire Saturday at the office busting my butt and then sleeping all day Sunday recuperating from really, really, REALLY over-doing it...but then I got back to work at home. SO...

Hey, look, it's a room I haven't posted about before!  That's because I haven't been happy with it.  I loved pretty much everything about the room except the shower curtain.  But yesterday I fixed that. :)

First, though, let me show you where the room has been:

 <-- once upon a time, I thought the only way to make my tiny guest bath feel bigger was to paint the entire thing white and add a tiny bit of color here and there.


It was okay, for a while...

and I did really love the results when I painted the cabinetry white (a decision I angsted about mightily).

But the aqua and white was...


...well, it was boring the CRAP out of me

So I decided, to hell with it, it's not like anyone's going to be fooled into thinking this bathroom was enormous, so why not just have FUN with it?  It's a little out-of-the-way room that people see for maybe 5 minutes when they come over, so why not go the opposite direction and go WAY over the top with it, to make it a WOW room and give folks something to look at while they're in there? (Even if it's a "wow" of "wow, what is this woman smoking?!"  LOL)

So I sponged over the entire room in an "olive-drab" sort of green I had sitting around from an old project;  then went over the lower half of the room a second time to darken the bottom half.

 I stenciled over the line between the top and bottom halves of the room in a soft gold...


(which I freaking LOVE, by the way)

(and the art in this shot is from Matt Manley's 2008 Rumi-quotes calendar)  -->


(I also did behind the big mirror, so that one day, when I get a smaller, framed mirror, I won't have to go back and make the paint job and the stenciling match - it's already there).

Oh, I also left about 10" down from the ceiling completely unpainted, on the theory that it might lend a dropped-ceiling look and maybe add a bit of visual height to the room since I couldn't magically create more square footage with color schemes...and it mostly works.  I really like the effect, anyway.


This red glass thing is probably my favorite item in the entire room - it was a Christmas ornament that I got on clearance last year at the hobby store in January for like a dollar.  I hung it on a length of jewelry chain from a pin in the ceiling.  :)

<-- but then there was this crazy magenta-and-orange *!~*CONTRAST OMG~*~  that...really didn't work.  It was neat, but a little too over the top.

These are the same magenta sheers that are in my bedroom, by the way (Ikea's SARITA). :)












I really wanted a sari-looking curtain in there, but hadn't been able to find any (or any suitable material) that was remotely affordable - until yesterday morning, when Kress and I hit the fabric store early to get the rest of his Halloween costume together.  There I found:

This GORGEOUS teal taffeta, on sale for $4 a yard!




Which I promptly hemmed...

...put a rod pocket at one end with some fabric leftover from another project (because I didn't want to waste any of the taffeta on a pocket, I wanted the extra couple of inches for curtain length).

...and then painted a border print with the same stencil I used on the bathroom walls.  I dried the paint with my hair dryer as I went along so that I wouldn't have to wait for the paint to dry, so that the process would go faster.







And WALLA! 

(there's supposed to be a brown glass knob on that cabinet door, oops)

whoa, camera, slow down on the flash there!  *is blind*

Ta-da!  :)


.