Spring 2013 Pinterest Challenge: DIY Roman Shade

Since we finished the master bathroom about six months ago, I've been wanting to replace our crap-ola miniblinds with a Roman shade.  The trouble is that I could never make up my mind on a fabric.  Mr. GI finally guilted me into finishing it, so I looked in earnest last weekend for the perfect fabric -- and I found it on sale at JoAnn's:  Robert Allen's Baja Damask Greystone.  It was marked down to $10/yard (originally $20/yard), and I'm glad I swiped it up because it's no longer available online.  (They also have a beautiful blue version of the same pattern).  To spoil the ending, here is the finished product in our bathroom.

Bathroom Humor {DIY Wooden Sign}

I'd been brainstorming on something to make for the space on our master bathroom wall just above the toilet.  I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do until I saw this photo on Young House Love with a long, skinny canvas.  Then I got to thinking that something long and skinny would suit that space just fine.  Read on for how I made it.

Master Bathroom: Complete!

Six months after we started it (well, really nine) and two months after we finished it, I'm happy to reveal our master bathroom!

Another Guest Bathroom: Guest Amenities

I hope you all enjoyed the reveal of E's guest bathroom earlier in the week!  It's just in the nick of time, too, because UGA football season (starting today!!) brings all sorts of guests to E's house.  She pretty much has a revolving door every fall (we also run our own bed and breakfast during football season).  :-)  With that in mind, we worked some guest amenities into E's guest bathroom.

Psst... in case you're curious, the font I used is "Channel" on PicMonkey.

Another Guest Bathroom: Complete!

A few months ago, I introduced you to my friend E's guest bathroom.  She had been renting a home for the past two years with a roommate and now has the place to herself.  We worked together to make a plan for her guest bathroom.  Here's how it turned out!

Master Bathroom: Board and Batten

So far in the master bathroom, we've bought $5 paint, repaired and installed drywall, and painted the top half of the walls.  What's next, you ask?  This:

Clockwise from top left, images pinned here, here, here, and here

Master Bathroom: Paint! {Kind of}

This is more a tease than anything else.  I can't show you the entire paint job because that would reveal the next step!  So here's a peek at the new color we're loving.  This paint, as I mentioned in my first post about the master bathroom, was a $5 find in the Lowe's oops bin. It's a multidimensional color-- when I first saw it in the store, I thought it was green.  Then I put some on the walls and it looked gray.  Light shines in the window, and it shows a little blue.  So obviously the colors in these pictures vary, too.

Master Bathroom: Mr. Great Indoor's Favorite Things {Dry Wall!}

You might remember that I came home to this on the first day of Mr. GI working in the master bathroom.  Seems like progress...

Master Bathroom: Humble Beginnings

That's right.  In addition to working on my friend's guest bathroom, we're tackling our master bathroom.  I will have an update about E's bathroom soon; life has gotten in the way of blogging recently!

As a reminder, here's what our bathroom looked like a few summers ago after our first run-in with moisture a few summers ago (shoulda known then!).

Summer Pinterest Challenge: $5 DIY Vintage Sign

It's that time again!  The fearless ladies (and fellas) behind Young House Love, Bower Power, Centsational Girl, and Ten June announced this summer's Pinterest Challenge last week. I made some window art last summer, framed paint chip art last fall, and the always fabulous redneck Mason jar chandelier this winter, when Sherry and Katie were nice enough to ask me to host!  So I was definitely on board with a challenge this go 'round!

Another Guest Bathroom...

...but I'm not paying for it this time!  One of my good friends has challenged me to make over her guest bathroom, given a $60 budget.  I'm always up for spending someone else's money decorating someone else's house!  :-)

My friend E is in a rental house, and this bathroom used to be her roommate's.  Now she's got the house to herself, and she's excited about changing things up.

Guest Bathroom: The Numbers

Admittedly, it's a lot more fun to look at after pictures of the bathroom than it is to talk about the money we spent to make it happen.  But in case anyone else is in our position (and for my reference in the future), I figured I'd outline what we tugged out of our wallets for this project.

After adding everything up, I have to laugh at our initial $150 budget, which certainly limited us.  But with a 20% mark-up for incidentals, we were still only looking at spending $180.  Well, that didn't take into account the $160 we spent on drywall, new trim, plumbing, and other random stuff that it took to get the room from moldy to ready for paint. 

Guest Bathroom: The After!!

I have another post I'm getting ready for next week with some meat (i.e., numbers) in it.  For this post, though, let's just admire the finished product.

Guest Bathroom: The Iron Curtain

Old Winston would be proud of this curtain.  No, not THAT curtain (although it is a lovely color scheme, no?).  We're not Communists.

Image here

I guess I'm getting ahead of myself a bit.  A month ago (although it seems like that was just yesterday) I posted about the end of my burlap-colored dream.  My grand plan for the guest bathroom shower curtain was to DIY an extra-long burlap curtain, bringing in a nice variation in texture and trying out a new type of fabric.

Guest Bathroom: Closing the Curtain

We're in the final stretch of the guest bathroom right now, so we're at the point where I need to be making up my mind about the finishing touches.  Artwork, shower curtain, and the fluffy stuff that Mr. GI doesn't have to do I get to play with.  I had been thinking about bringing in a burlap shower curtain into the guest bathroom, for two reasons:  first, it introduces a neat texture into the room where just about everything is painted (vanity, crates) or ceramic-ish (toilet, tub); second, burlap is dirt cheap.  Think under $3/yard from Wal-Mart cheap.

Image here

Guest Bathroom: Crate Shelving

I definitely wanted some storage in our guest bathroom, and I considered a few different options.  I loved IKEA's Lack shelves, but we were trying to do this remodel on the cheap.  And $50 for mostly-aesthetic shelving wasn't going to make it in the budget.

 From left:  here, here, and here

So then I started searching for reclaimed materials that would make good shelves.  Drawers, windows, wine crates, and more.  But unfortunately drawers didn't seem very practical (probably not deep enough, and which way would you hang them, anyway?), windows were pretty but again had not much storage space, and no one in town uses wooden wine crates any more.  Boo!

Clockwise from top left:  here, here, here, and here

Guest Bathroom: Water We Doing?

I almost can't believe that's the worst best pun I could come up with for this post.  But those you who know me well enough have probably heard my "deer" jokes at least twice, so maybe I should believe it.

Anyway.  The point of that terrible pun is to say that we finally figured out what was actually causing the water damage in the bathrooms.  Given all this nastiness, we thought it was a faulty ring on the guest bathroom toilet (read about that here).

Guest Bathroom: Polishing Up Our $5 Light Fixture

One of the most awesome finds for our guest bathroom project was this $5 light fixture.  We stole grabbed it from a really nice contractor's yard sale, and even though there was a $10 price tag on it, I asked once if they'd take 5 and they did!  Score!

Guest Bathroom: Lay It On Me

It felt like things were snowballing this week in the bathroom-- after getting the room cleaned up and painted, I knew it wouldn't take much longer to do everything else.  And actually, everything in this post took about thirty minutes to do.  Mr. Great Indoors really wanted this one done.

You might remember we were going with this 12x12 vinyl tile from Lowe's.  We bought one tile of this gray slate and another of the beige slate to try it out, and the gray one looked great against the existing fixtures.  And I loved the dimension of it.  It looks deceptively like ceramic tile

Image here

Guest Bathroom: Painting the Town... or the Bathroom

I knew Mr. Great Indoors was ready for the bathroom to be finished when I came home to this yesterday:

Our usual arrangement is that he builds it and I paint it, and boy has he done a lot of building for this project, mostly in the form of floating drywall.  But things are serious if he picks up a paint brush-- and he spent a few hours cutting in around the bathroom yesterday.