Throne Room

Pinterest, I heart.  But, one thing I can’t understand is what the point of having followers or in a bloggers case, growing the number of your followers is.  I mean, I pin things that inspire me from across the web without even thinking about other people.  So, someone enlighten me on the whole followers thing, will ya?  I guess I sort of get how you would want to follow people who seem to have the same style/vision as you so that you can catch all their ideas but the push to grow your followers?  Clueless.  I pin things I plan on using as inspiration for future projects and recently, I started creating pin boards for each room in my house.  My good friend Lauren makes boards for the rooms in her house and it’s just a brilliant idea.  It’s one place you can put all the inspiration or ideas you have for that room so that they’re in one spot; not in the midst of the inspiration for every other room in the house in a jumbo board you call “All Things Nesty”.  Yes, that is/was my virtual house idea dumping ground and it’s a little overwhelming to go in and sift through to find something you pinned a few months ago that you now want to make happen in the kitchen.

Anyway, I feel like I always start off my posts with a lengthy brain dump and it might be a problem…

What I’m really here to share today are my plans for the kids’ bathroom.

Here’s a before picture taken from the house listing right before we purchased it:

Shortly after we moved in, we painted the walls a minty-green and the doors and trim with a basic, semi-gloss, off-the-shelf white from Lowe’s.  And then a year after that, I slapped a quick coat of white paint onto the cabinets. 

Here’s pretty much what it looks like currently, but usually with a spotty mirror and colorful hair elastics and tiny toothbrushes tossed around:

But, backtracking to the whole pinterest board per room thing, I’ve found it incredibly helpful because usually, I find myself so all over the place when designing a room in my head.  And, since I’m on a teeny-tiny budget, I’m even more all over the place because I can’t just go out and buy whatever I think will look good.  I have to find it for a price we can afford, fix it up, refashion something, or trash the idea and come up with something else and that makes for a lot of changes from start to finish.  Most of the time, I don’t really even have a list of what I’m looking for for a specific room.  It’s usually that I just spot something in a thrift store and think “Hey!  That’d look great in the kids’ bathroom/kitchen/master bedroom” and then I put it in there but I have no idea what to pair it with nor do I think that far ahead because, yep, there’s that budget again.  I just spent all my home decor budget on this one thing so, in a few months, I’ll maybe look for something else for that room.  But with a pin board, I can pin my ideas and know what I’m going to be hunting for.  Make sense? 

Skipping back to the kids’ bathroom (I know, catch me if you can), here’s what my pin board’s carrying so far:
wall color  //  It’s Lyndhurst Celadon Green by Valspar (Lowe’s) and we painted these walls way back when we first moved in and I still love them so I’m not changing them.  But, if I was in the mood for a change, I think I’d maybe paint the walls a crisp white and the vanity this pretty minty-green.
rug  //  I’m leaning towards a black and white rug but I can’t decide which of these to DIY.  I bought a woven runner last year from Dirt Cheap (originally from Target) that can easily be tossed in the washing machine and the plan is to paint it like I did our flat-weave kitchen rug.  One side has blue and green stripes but the other side is a blank slate; perfect for paint.  My two inspiration rugs are this one and this one from West Elm.  I think if I go the West Elm route, I’d just make a stencil to mimick that design and stencil it in black onto the white rug.
knobs  //  Anthropologie is my go-to place for knob inspiration.  Not all of the knobs they sell would be easily DIY-able but I feel like these clover knobs might.  I could use the same knobs I used to create these Anthropologie knock-offs in our laundry room.  If the real things weren’t $10 a piece, I might even just buy them but dropping $50 on knobs alone seems a little ludicrous to me.
art  //  I love anything Teil Duncan paints.  The colors are just gorgeous and the abstract but not-abstract is the coolest.  But, last year I scored a big, beautiful, colorful framed watercolor at our church’s yard sale that kinda resembles her style and so I’ll be hanging it in the kids’ bathroom asap.  It’ll add the color I so want in there and pop out from the other gender-neutral accents.  The octopus print is from colorZen etsy shop and prices start at $38 depending on the size you want.  I wish I had $38 to drop on a print but since I don’t, I’ll use it as inspiration to paint my own version to hang over the twalette.
lighting  //  Right now there’s a builder-grade, four-light fixture over the mirror in this bathroom.  It’s great except for the fact that it seems to have too much wattage for some reason and bulbs that are supposed to last years only last months in it before blowing.  So, for the past year, we’ve only stocked two of the four light sockets with bulbs so we’re not having to constantly spend money on and change out bulbs.  As you can imagine, that looks silly.  So, replace it with a two-lighter we shall.  This one is only $50 in Sazerac Stitches etsy shop, which I think is an incredible price, but I’m personally not a fan of edison bulbs (they give off a light that’s too orange, in my opinion) and diy-ing one sounds kinda fun so, the plan is to make one and put clear glass globes on each end with regular light bulbs instead of the edison bulbs.  I’m thinking of using industrial piping and either leaving it as is or just going gold with spray paint.  We shall see…
towels  //  I love these tea towels and they’d be so fun to make!  However, what I really in hand towels in the kids’ bathroom are anything with some mustard yellow in them.  I’ve been crushing on mint and mustard as a pair and so I’ll make that happen by hanging some mustard yellow-infused towels up against the walls…come to think of it, we actually have some yellow and greige striped tea towels in the kitchen that rarely get used because they’re smaller than the big ones we normally use…hmmmm, be right back………….
storage  //  I’m on the hunt for a clean-lined magazine rack like this one to set next to the throne and fill with rolls of toilet paper and pull-ups.  No thrift store or resale site anywhere is safe from my hunt.
shower curtain  //  I’m not set on stripes but I kinda love them (shocker there!) and when I saw this shower curtain from H&M, my mind immediately thought of the fabric I used to cover Sebastian’s ceiling fan shade and how it would only cost me about $15 to make a long shower curtain out of it (psst, I guess the fabric is sold out online but I recently just saw it in store).  The H&M curtain is only $20 but I need an extra-long one and so simply sewing my own would be my best bet, I think.
hooks  //   So here’s the deal with these, I’ve had a $25 Pottery Barn gift card that I was gifted FOUR years ago and that I just haven’t been able to use.  I’ve scavenged theirs and West Elm’s clearance sections a thousand times during those four years but just haven’t been able to pull the trigger on buying anything because there is zero at both places that only costs $25 and that I could find useful.  I almost bought a king-sized duvet cover last year at West Elm that I had plans to turn into curtains for the three windows in our master bedroom but then I didn’t because I couldn’t spend the extra $50 on top of the gift card to buy it.  Ho hum.  Well, last week I finally went onto Pottery Barn’s website with a mission to buy something when I got greeted with a coupon code equal to an extra 20% off all clearance.  So what did I buy?  These brass letters…even though I did have to spend an extra $20 on top of the gift card to get them.  They’re going to hold the kids’ bath towels.  Upon deciding to buy them, I was just going to go with what was shown and grab the L O V and E, but good grief, the V was sold out.  So then I literally sat at my computer for a half hour trying to figure out what word I could spell with the letters that were left and finally decided on…well, you’ll find out later this week.  ;) 

So with all those pretty things, here’s the kicker.  Per the usual, we don’t have a ton of money to toss towards a kids’ bathroom overhaul.  If we purchased all of the things listed above, we’d come in at around $480 (not including the money spent on the hooks).  Nope, not gonna happen while we have other things to pay for like food and shelter.  I need to get all this done for under $50 which means that everything you see will be either thrifted or diy-ed.  Not surprising though, is it?  That’s just how I roll.

On top of all the decorative accents I want to incorporate, we need to rip up the laminate floor and lay tile.  We have tile in our attic that we got for a steal at Dirt Cheap a couple of years ago that will eventually be laid on the floor in this bathroom (somebody buy me some time!!) but that won’t happen until after we rip out that awkward partition + posts in the middle of the room because we’ll have to tile over that spot.  We’re also planning on building/pouring some concrete countertops for both this bathroom and the master bath down the road and framing out that big ‘ole mirror (I pinned this tutorial from Young House Love for that).  We also need to replace the aging/leaky sink and faucet so, we’ll add another $100 onto the budget for all of those updates bringing us in at around $150 for the entire mini-reno.   If we were staying here forever, we’d swap out the cream, square tile tub/shower surround with some white subway tiles but since the tiles are in great shape and we probably wouldn’t get that investment back, with the cream we’ll stay. 

So many plans and ideas and so little time to fulfill them all.  But, I’m okay with that.  If we did everything at once, we’d be bored at the end…and yes, neglect would be the road down which our kids would be walking so obviously, when you have kids, it’s realistic to expect projects to take days/months/years.  Until the day when we can sit back and say there’s absolutely nothing left to do to this house (ahem, that’ll never happen), I’ll just be over here pinning…