golden hand: May 2016

the BEFORE

So I imagine you thought we had given up on this blogging venture. Nope, still here. As it turns out, life happens and you have to take time to do other things sometimes. I have enjoyed many date nights with my boys, long weeks at the office and fabulous pregnancy naps. But, we're back, and with our return is my promised post of our boy's bathroom makeover.

The above "before" picture is literally stolen from MLS and features everything I loathed about this bathroom from GO. One piece shower, wretched below builder-grade, non-descript colored paint that stains if you breathe wrong near it, poor tiling job and hidden linen closet behind the door (Truth: when we moved in, I honestly thought there wasn't one. Since I never went in and shut the door behind me, I didn't discover it until I went to hang the towel bars. Yep, smart girl.) While the granite is nice, everything was installed very shoddily, including paint on the mirror edges and the stunning brass light fixture that very obviously does not match the chrome fixtures everywhere else.

All of that said, I am not Nicole Curtis. So, my aspirations leaned more toward touch ups and kid-friendliness. My inspiration came from these adorable printables that I found on Etsy.

I fell in love with the color scheme, and built the rest around it! Now, my husband will tell you, aqua is NOT a boy color. I, however completely disagree. It's cool and calming, and when coupled with a nice blue and green, certainly masculine in my book. And, what mom doesn't like filling the rooms their children occupy with reminders of their manners? Here's how my turned out with kid-reachable, monogrammed towel hooks below:

Ok, so theme in mind, I had to start pulling out all of the things that had accumulated in this bathroom previously. And since the "hidden" linen closet happens to be the only linen closet in our house, this was quite a lot of crap, evidenced in the picture below:

Bet you wouldn't guess Ms. OCD lives in this house. Yeah, out of sight, out of mind. So, between thisc nightmare closet and under the sink, procrastination (and prego naps) got the best of me for a couple of weeks. Once I finally got my act together and moved all of the unneeded items to either the trash or laundry room shelving and reorganized the medicines on a high shelf there, I was able to start the major undertaking of painting. I quickly realized this was not going to be a one-woman job and employed not only my husband, but big brother Colin in taping, painting and replacing the light fixture and hardware.

Once we were back to a clean palate, I could add in all of the goodies that would make this the perfect space for my boys to function. I had to start at my go-to store and the one we can all get lost in for hours...Target (bathroom boycott nonsense notwithstanding). While I wasn't too crazy about the color choices in towels, I did manage to find a great shower curtain, some storage bins for under the sink and in the closet and cute little curtain rings. All of these items kept with the color scheme, with the exception of the curtain rings, but I liked the design and decided to do a mini-diy and make them what I really wanted. A little bit of paint and mod podge and voila, no more gaudy orange and pink!

To pull the colors together more, I grabbed some manly aqua bath mats from Home Depot, along with new nickel towel bar, toilet paper holder and towel hooks. My walls were looking bright and clean, but lacking some serious color, so I went searching for a few more printables to coordinate. Never underestimate a search on Pinterest. I went with these three for my boys:

sweet brother art, good clean fun, and the potty chart

Simple, clean, cute and coordinating. Missing items for these include, a name for baby boy #2, which we are having a rather difficult time deciding on (as you probably noticed above in the post, the lack of a monogram in the same vein), as well as the training involved in utilizing the potty chart. I'm frankly terrified of starting the process and keep delaying the inevitable. But, when we're both brave enough, it's there! :)

Martha Stewart provided the perfect colors for towels (of course) through Macy's.

So, this brought me down to organizing. Y'all this is my favorite. I need my mommying to be efficient so I have to set myself up for success, even when it comes to bath time. And, while I found some great storage at Target, there were countertop items that needed homes. As luck would have it, the new and extravagant outdoor shopping area that they just built less than two miles from my office, happens to include a little place called The Container Store. Um, guys, go here (I'm talking to you, Amanda!). You will not regret it, whether you have OCD like I do, or you just plan to organize anything, anywhere in your house. I could have moved in. I'll say this, my lunch break was not very much within it's one hour limit that day, but I did get out of there only spending $45, which I counted as a victory! Below are the items I grabbed to keep this bathroom in check (all of which happen to be plastic in order to avoid broken glass around the kiddos).

Cute little foaming soap bottle, to keep the sink mess-free, bamboo containers for q-tips and flossers on the countertop, plastic trash can for easy cleaning, mesh laundry bag for convenient laundry disposal and coordinating, reversible bin which I flipped upside down and sliced to use as a tissue holder (seen in printables pic above).

Shopping complete, I had to bust out several of my "crafty things," as Jordan so lovingly refers to them: my Cricut and my laminator. I cut vinyl lettering to label the bins under the sink to keep everything in its place (and to be sure everyone else does the same.).

And printed some cutesy labels for the upper bins in the linen closet, on the shelves kept away from tiny people. But, I needed them to last, so I fired up the laminator and tied the labels on those with coordinating twine. The results turned out much nicer to look at than the previous contents and ultimately easier to find.

Again, there was little reno done here, and mostly reorganizing and decorating, but the results are definitely easier on the eyes and more kid-friendly. Here's the finished product: