Bathroom makeover-ish

We moved into our house in July of 2012, and there are still about a million little projects we'd like to do to make it a little more "ours." I'm sure at least 75% of them will never actually get done, but we're plodding along slowly. I swore that the hideous 90's wallpaper in the master bath and the bathroom next to Lucas's room would be the first two things to go, but it's been 15 months, and... those two bathrooms are still a few decades behind the times. And this post isn't even about them. Because apparently removing wallpaper is very annoying. And we haven't yet gotten up the energy to find that out for ourselves.

Anyway... we have a half bathroom on our first floor, and it's the bathroom our guests usually use. It's painted a chocolate-y brown (the same color that our library used to be painted.) I wouldn't have picked the color myself (I'm all about bright colors), but it's not a bad color. Dan has already repainted the upstairs bathroom in a light blue (it had been sponge-painted a mustard yellow color), and we had planned to do the half bath in the same color, but it seemed like a lot of work... for Dan, not for me. So I decided to just embrace the brown, but it needed something, because for the past 15 months, it has looked like this:

So, basically... we had added nothing to the bathroom but hand soap and lotion (and the garbage I didn't empty out of the can for the picture.) In 15 months. Charming, right? Every time I went to a garage sale, I kept an eye out for a picture or something to hang in the bathroom, but as I mentioned in this post, most of my artistic "eye" is just me knowing which things I don't want to hang in my house. Then I got the bright idea of buying a bunch of matching picture frames and hanging up pictures of our friends on those blank brown walls, but I couldn't decide on a color (and picture frames are abnormally expensive.) Enter Target clearance.

I went to Target a few weeks ago, and their back-to-school dorm room stuff was all on clearance. I found packs of four 4x6 teal frames on clearance for $4.18, so I bought seven packs of them and one pack of three 5x7 frames. In their garden and outdoor clearance, they had a metal lantern in the exact same color as the frames for $4.58 (I think), so I bought that, too.

After that, I decided I needed some friendship quotes to put with the pictures. While I was searching, I found this Etsy shop that had printable quotes from the musical "Wicked." Dan surprised me with tickets to the show in September, so I've kind of been on a "Wicked" kick. The Etsy seller had a cute design with the quote "Because I knew you, I have been changed for good," so I asked her to change the colors of it to match my bathroom and frames. I also asked her to design two other quotes to match it. (You can buy them here, here, and here. Then we can have twin bathrooms. But don't use pictures of my friends. That's just weird.)

Mine don't have the watermarks on them... obviously.

I traced the frames onto paper and then played around with arranging them so that I wouldn't have to hammer forty million holes in the wall before I found an arrangement I liked.

Think Panera will pay me for advertising its bags? No, I guess not.

And then I hung the pictures! Hanging pictures is kind of annoying, especially when you don't feel like using a ruler or a level... But I was pretty happy with the results!

It was really hard to photograph these frames because they kept reflecting off of the walls.

And now our bathroom doesn't look like it's part of an empty house! Tra la!

And that's all I have to say about that.

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