Powder Room Facelift

Yesterday during two nap times, I made over the downstairs powder room. Thank you nap time! I have been wanting to do this forever.

I had previously painted the walls and trim white. When we took possession of the house, the powder room was tan. Kind of a dark, blah tan (like the rest of the house). I could tell by looking behind the toilet while we were tiling that it had also been yellow and blue in past lives.

Anyway. I painted it white and had always planned on painting wide horizontal stripes and replacing the meh mirror.

I bought the mirror a while ago during one of my more successful Home Goods trips (huge and $19.99!) It was white, but a little banged up, and not in a good way. I painted it a tannish gray color and planned to paint the cabinets in there to match, but after getting the gray stripes up on the walls yesterday (using Frog Tape, the love of my painting life), I decided the mirror needed a glossy black finish instead. I'll do the cabinets glossy black as well, and bring in a few pops of color. I think it will have more of a Hollywood Regency look to it once I'm done. I also painted the ceiling, which I've never done. This one needed it, and I think that will be part of my painting routine from now on. Recently I've been forcing myself to paint the trim white every time I paint a room. I just keep adding more and more work for myself!

I'm also going the Hollywood Regency route with our bedroom, which is coming along, slowly but surely. So far I have painted the walls and bought some of our bedding. Mark also bought an amazing wing back chair at a garage sale that I'm going to re-cover and put in there. But more on that later. Here's our tiny powder room. Very hard to photograph:

I'm so in love with this mirror, black. It was made to be black...don't you think?

Right now as art, I have some Thomas Paul Aviary fabric framed.

View looking into the room. I like how the gray stripe acts as a kind of backsplash. I'll be painting those cabinets black shortly. Going to use the Glidden door and trim paint that supposedly leaves no brush strokes...anyone tried it?

Little house update.

Since my house is somewhat clean, I thought I would take a few blurry, poorly-lit photos to document our progress in the adventures in decorating (and a few of the baby, too).

We've done a little more in the kitchen - added hardware to the cabinets, installed a butcher block top on our island, and made new curtains. We also painted our kitchen chairs black and stripped the tabletop back to wood. We still want to replace the rest of the counter tops and are debating on what to do with the table. I'm not quite happy with it yet:

In the family room, we brought in a bookshelf and made some new throw pillows. You can see that I'm bringing a little red, which I like. I like that the family room is the most colorful room on the main level. I think it makes it more casual. Please note the cardboard deer head. I also have plans to paint the cabinet white to coalesce better with the shelf:

And in the living room, we bought a piano and a side table for the entry way. We also hung a large mirror and some black and white family photos. I wish I could photograph this whole room at once, because I'm liking it a lot more lately.

I like this little vignette. Isn't the elephant tea pot cute?

Then of course we got this little guy, who gets more cute and fun everyday, even today, when he got up and said, "get ready suckers, because I'm about to cry for four hours!!!"