Good morning and happy Monday!!! I think?? I don’t know about you, but I could barely keep my eye open this morning after my alarm went off ::sigh:: Guess it was just that awesome of a birthday weekend 🙂

P.S. Speaking of, I just HAVE to show you part of John’s birthday gift to me…It’s relevant to the blog, so I think that counts as gush-worthy here:

It’s my own little DIY tool belt bag!!! Complete with the following:

• Mini sharpie to mark measurements and make notes
• The thing that looks like a black, fine-tip pen is actually a teenie tiny Phillips and flat head screwdriver
• Normal-sized Phillips head screwdriver (handle painted blue for easy identification)
• Razors and box cutter
• Needle nose pliers
• Normal-sized pliers
• Mini tape measure
• and a normal-sized flat head screwdriver (handle painted red)
• (The neat scissors up at the top of the picture are actually from my dad – They are “Chinese Scissors” and are really heavy-duty! I thought they were just about made to go in my new handy-dandy tool belt)

Did I mention that I have a FANTASTIC boyfriend (and dad too)!??

But on to the meat and cheese of this post…

Typically I set aside Mondays for “Inspiration Posts” – A run down of the people and images that influence our style. But today, I’m going to have to make an exception because we have quite a project to reveal: the bathroom redo! I just can’t wait to have a hot shower through our new water softener set up.

As you may know, we have a half bathroom on the main floor of the house that was in need of some love and some updating. Before, it had plain tan walls and country accents that just weren’t doing it for our style.

So it was “out with the old and in with the new” as they say!

First, the original mirror got kicked to the curb taken down and put in the basement, to be replaced by our newly thrifted one.

We wanted to try to get the rest of the room flipped and completed by Saturday night since we were having some people over for a double birthday party (I share my birthday and age with one of my best friends!). So we hit the ground running Friday night by getting one coat up on the wall of the light grey satin-finish paint we had picked up last week.

It was already MUCH airier and modern!!! It’s amazing what paint can do…

We put on a second coat Saturday morning and took care of some trim issues from when the half bath used to serve as Rocky’s dog crate of sorts (he’s an excitable dog…)

Before:

And now after:

Thank goodness the last owners left behind some trim paint! Admittedly, we tried one can only to have the color turn out a bit “off” (it read more “cream” than “crisp white”)…But John did a second search and came up the with right can – Crisis averted!

Once the second coat of the grey on the walls had dried, it was time to put the room back together!

While I was doing wall-painting-duty the night before, John had taken care of some spray painting – We DID decide to paint the thrifted mirror a bright white afterall (along with the square shelves that are in the original “before” pictures of the bathroom).

Here they are dried and ready to be put back up on the wall!

We also needed some art, accessories and new silver fixtures (toilet paper holder and towel ring – Since we got rid of the country-fied, swirly ones).

The art ended up coming from Target – We randomly found the perfect set of three in our color scheme for $10 a piece! I think we can consider this our first “Big Box Store SCORE!” 🙂

And the accessories were pulled from throughout the house – A couple of owls, a hand carved box John had and a candle. We also gave the thrifted clock I bought a few weeks back a facelift – I know I said that I wasn’t going to touch it, but I couldn’t help it…I actually repainted it TWICE!

Here it is in its original green color:

And then its second life – dark grey:

And now (hopefully) its final life in yellow:

Here are a couple of details once everything made it back into the finished room:

And the final reveal of the room as a whole!!!

It feels slightly hotel-like to us, which makes us feel all swanky…We also are all about continuing the bathroom project trend and will probably kick off the master bathroom redo in just a couple of weeks!!!

Stay tuned!

My very first issue of “Do It Yourself” magazine arrived in my mailbox last night 🙂 It was like my birthday (which is this Sunday) came early!!!

And to top off the excitement, this issue is all about painting pretty much anything in your home to give it new life – My latest go-to fix! I’m reading the magazine pretty much cover-to-cover so that I don’t miss a thing – I think I’m on page 41 (of 112) right now and already have at least 5 new projects I want to tackle:

• doodle a design on a painted lamp base with a white Sharpie oil marker
• make hand-painted coasters using plain white tiles and porcelain paint
• pick up some colorful photo boxes from Michael’s and use them for fun/colorful closet and table-top storage
• spray paint a wicker tray (or ANYTHING wicker for that matter – baskets, chairs, etc.) in a pop-y color like teal or orange
• paint a custom design on one of my drum lampshades

It’s going to be a busy next couple of weekends – And I’m not even all the way through the issue yet!!!!

I am all about grabbing a sample/quart/gallon of paint to spruce up things in our house. From walls and kitchen cabinets, to furniture and lamps, we’ve got paint plans for just about every nook and cranny. In fact, we are about to break open a quart of light grey paint tomorrow (or tonight if we’re feeling gutsy) to redo the half bathroom before guests arrive for my birthday party tomorrow night. Stay tuned for that reveal next week!

But all of this paint had us spending a lot of time driving back and forth to Lowe’s – Thankfully the nearest one is about a quarter of a mile down the road, so it’s not much of a hassle. But wouldn’t it be GREAT if we had all of those gorgeous paint chips at our disposal so that we only had to make ONE trip to pick up paint (as opposed to one to get the paint chips, bring them home, decide and then go back out to get it mixed)? Sure would be nice if we had one of those paint chip booklets they make…

I even Googled it to see if it’s possible to purchase an Olympic paint chip book, but found nothing…Although I did find a “how to” on getting a paint chip book from your local hardware store here – Sounds like an “at the right place at the right time” happenstance though. As we all know, I’m too impatient for that.

But thankfully I had a light bulb moment – Why not make our own! You know we are all about the cheap and DIY over at our house…So we made the trek over to Lowe’s one last time ever for paint chips. This time we didn’t come away with only a few though – More like 200.

That’s right, we literally parked ourselves in front of the Olympic paint chip display and, each taking a section, grabbed every paint chip they had. I’m not one for breaking rules, and something about this seemed a little thief-like…But luckily there weren’t many people in the paint center that evening to make me feel too awkward, so we were able to fill my purse to the max with a stack (about two inches thick) of paint chips!

I’ll admit, my heart was racing as I tried to casually walk out of the store with a purse packed with the paint chips – But I know they wouldn’t have cared. They’re FREE SAMPLES for gosh sakes!!! At least that’s what I kept trying to reassure myself with. I felt like a bona fide bandit (like Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole in “How to a Steal a Million”) after we made it to the truck.

Here’s our bounty once we laid everything out at home:

All of those colors are so pretty…I decided to organize them into two different sections – Dark Rainbow and Light Rainbow. The stack together was so thick, that we actually had to make two separate chip books.

The rest of the project was as simple as using masking tape to hold the stacks well-packed together and grabbing a drill to put a hole through the one of the upper corners. Like this: (although I would recommend using a piece of wood to drill on instead of a folded towel – There’s definitely a small divot in the counter top now…)

Here they are all ready for their chain connector!

Luckily we didn’t have to go searching for a chain to use to thread the paint chips onto – We had recently removed a fan from the kitchen and took the pull chains off, which worked like a charm!

Oh, did I not tell you that we switched out the other kitchen light fixture?? Here’s the new one we bought:

Before…

And now after!

But back to the paint chip books…

All we had left to do was thread the little silver ball chains to the stack of paint chips, and we’re all done!

So excited to have all of those lovely colors handy now! And can’t beat a free DIY project that will aide in many future DIY projects around the house 🙂

Have a great weekend!!!

(Photo credit for paint chip book: here; for “How to Steal a Million” promo image: here)