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!  :)


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Wildebeests: Coffee Table

Promised you this yesterday:  the coffee table that I "made" (not really) for my living room:

Around the time I decided not to use my old table anymore (it was enormous, because I'd had an enormous sofa, but I was down-sizing all my furniture a piece at a time), one of my neighbors had a garage sale, but for some reason, nobody bought his old coffee table...

...which was understandable.  I mean, look at it.  BUH.  It was missing the drawer on the front, and the finish was horribly marred and scratched.  There was kiddie graffiti all over it, gum stuck underneath it, and places where the wood had been cut into purposely with a fork some strange sort of child's furni-torture device; and the stain...I believe this particular color is Minwax's "Agent Orange."   I caught up with my neighbor after the garage sale, and he said, "No, please, it's yours if you want it.  Just get it out of my driveway, I hate this thing."

Free furniture to refinish?  Brilliant!  

So the first task was to disassemble the whole thing, and strip down the parts to the bare wood so it could be completely re-stained from the ground up.  I split the top and cut a foot of wood out of the center(and the end aprons) to make the table narrower:  24x42" instead of a nearly-square 36x42".

Here you can see the various stages of refinishing the piece:  the first leg is in the middle of being sanded down - most of it is still the original orange-y "oak" color.  After the bare wood was smoothed and cleaned, I hit it with two coats of Minwax's "Bombay Mahogany", a very deep browny-red (second and third leg in the picture).  Over that went a coat of "Jacobean" (a deep neutral brown, one of my favorite stains), and then about fifty million coats of clear "Polycrylic" to give the piece a deep, deep shine.

On the table's surface, after the Mahogany but before the Jacobean, I stenciled a design that I adapted from a wallpaper motif that I saw online, with plain old 99-cent acrylic craft paints.  The Jacobean coat went over that, and various random rubbings and wipings occurred, to give the painted motif an aged, halfway-worn-off look.  I wanted the piece to look old, worn, faded - but well cared for...

And I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.  It was a pain in the BUTT trying to get the stain to do what I wanted to over the paint - but a fun pain in the butt, if that makes any sense.  The Mahogany on the top of the table came out lighter than on the legs, so the top ended up getting another coat of that before the Jacobean went on.   I went over it with the aforementioned fifty bajillion coats of Polycrylic, and then attached a  bead trim to the edges of the apron, and slider-feet to the legs to keep it from marring the floors.

Tr-drrr!

About a year and a half after I finished this, I was given a pair of wonderful, fuzzy, black kittens, who, it turns out, LOVE BEADS LIKE WHOA.  I have to staple them back on about once a month, lol.  Whatever.  :)  It remains one of my very favorites of the pieces I've refinished and/or built.