spray paint | Operation Home

Well, folks! It’s my favorite time of month again… Monthly DIY Challenge time!

For any newbies, this is a monthly challenge where several bloggy friends and I are assigned a theme or item and must simply make something of it. And in honor of Earth Day (which was on April 22nd), we chose….

Trash to treasure!!!

Before I get into my project, let me give you a little background on the space where this project will go. Our master bedroom “atrium” as I call it, is an area that I’ve had some difficulty with on the decorating front. This little hallway-ish area of our bedroom (which leads to both our closet and bathroom) looked like this when we first purchased the house…

Very purple and very dark with VERY little natural light. Our master bedroom is pretty large and has only one window. Since our backyard is so shady, it’s often a darker space anyways. Which makes the atrium REALLY dark.

After we moved in, I painted the bedroom a soothing grey color and I relocated our vintage Bassett tall-boy into the space to try and dress it up….

Clearly, it wasn’t finished, but even knowing this, something was still bothering me. The space was dark and lifeless. It just wasn’t doing it for me. I tried painting the mirror white, but never ended up taking pictures because it still didn’t jam (Plus, I really wanted to use that quatrefoil mirror in our hang-out room instead anyways… post to come).

Then, out of nowhere, something random (and totally awesome) happened. If you follow me on Facebook you may have seen this post about it….

#dumbanddumberforever

And the stars began to align (as evidenced by this grainy iPhone shot that I excitedly sent to Joey as I danced with glee — which, in my head, was the most graceful thing ever, BTW 😉 )….

The mirror was the perfect size and shape for above the dresser. The curved top was a great way to add some softness and interest to contrast all of the straight lines that were happening. Plus, the huge size really helped bounce light around the room. And all of the sudden I could see it. A vision of a cool chandelier which reflected off the top of that curved mirror. A linear, light-toned fabric brightening the wall behind it. It ALLLLL started coming together in my head.

Boo-Yeah.

So, now that I’d decided on a location for the mirror, next came the question of color. Obviously, I wasn’t going to leave the mirror as it was. I’m personally not a fan of the sorta-matches-but-not-really-thing. Which is exactly the description of this wood tone. And I knew that I didn’t want it to be a light color as this would emphasize the braided detail seen below….

So, a darker color. I wanted to tie it into the other side of the room (Which looks like this now minus that off-balanced bench in the corner… still lots to do. pleasedontjudge)…

And I decided that navy blue was totally the way to go since I already had some navy accents going on around the space. So, I purchased a can of this spray paint…

I taped off my mirror and elevated it on a few scrap pieces of wood, then applied several thin and even coats of spray paint…

This was taken after about two thin coats… there were many more after that. Once everything was dried and cured, Joey helped me hang it. Which left this…

Notice my little mirrored planter from last month? Still going strong!

And here’s that entire wall now…

Still far from finished, but a step in the right direction. I really love how the mirror turned out, though I do think it could stand to be hung a little higher. We’ve actually been meaning to do that but ran out of time before today’s challenge.

It just never ceases to amaze me what a little spray paint will do to change up a piece, though. That’s what I love the most about DIY… it doesn’t necessarily have to be hard or time-consuming to be effective. It just took a little good luck in finding the mirror and $5 worth of spray paint to take our little atrium from this…

To this…

See how much more alive the space looks now that the mirror is tall enough to reflect the lighting fixture? Me-OW. And speaking of light, you can see that another easy trash-to-treasure hack that I employed in this space was adding an old drum shade to our existing boob light…

I actually followed the same process that my bloggy friend Mary Beth used in this post (which includes the genius use of a simple rubber band). I’m sorta jealous that I didn’t come up with that little tidbit on my own. Lol! I’m not gonna go into details, but you can read her post if you wanna see how I did it.

In any case, I’m so happy that this area is starting to come together. I still want to add a light-colored, patterned fabric to the wall behind the mirror to brighten up the space and add interest. It’s really just a matter of finding the fabric. And then I want to change the lighting fixture out for more of a chandelier-type aesthetic (The drum shade is a great way to camouflage the boob light in the meantime, though). And I would LOVE to get that weird outlet in the middle of wall beside the dresser (aka: The zit on the nose of our atrium) moved to a normal location behind the dresser. I have no idea why it’s so high. It makes me wonder if there was once a built-in against that back wall or something.

**Update: Wanna see our atrium area now?? Click on this post!**

So anyways, that’s my Trash to Treasure story, now check out the other awesome projects created by my other bloggy friends…

InLinkz.com

I kid, I kid. It’s not portable. But, it is a tiny room with a toilet …

Literally. They call it a “half bath”. But, I’d like to know where the rest of it is. Oh wait, it’s in the laundry room. The bathroom itself is only big enough for a commode. You have to wash your hands in the work sink in the laundry room. Small price to pay for a decent pool bath, though. I think it’ll function really well for this purpose when it warms up again. It’s close to two of the entrances to the backyard and is wholly surrounded by tile which pretty much quadruples it’s useful-quotient. But still… a room with a toilet only. Iiinteresting (taps fingers together)….

When it comes to decor, it’s a total blank slate. Last year a pipe froze and burst in the attic above, requiring the previous owners to basically rebuild this portion of the house. They simply sheet-rocked this little toilet room and (muchtomydismay) painted it the same dark purple tone as the master bedroom (before I painted it grey). While purple isn’t exactly my cup o’ tea, I thought I’d at least try to make it work before taking the plunge and painting it myself. I mean, it’s a teeny room that I don’t spent much time in, so I figured that maybe the color would be more tolerable in this setting. I decided to accessorize the space and then objectively reevaluate the color.

Among other things, the room is desperately lacking in storage. Up to this point, we’d just been stacking toilet paper on top of the precariously rounded toilet lid… not the best of plans, especially being that the flush buttons are also on the lid. It made for a toilet tissue Slip-n-Slide of epic proportions. So, being the “use what I got” person that I am, I took stock and realized that the shelves that were in Lucas’s old room would fit perfectly above the toilet. Thus, I proceeded to install both shelves (ALLBYMYSELF! WOOT!)…

…then I tossed around some accessories that I already had.

I liked having a mirror up there to bounce light around, but wasn’t digging the dark frame. In person, it felt very heavy. So, I taped that sucker up with painters tape (we’re friends now, remember?) and plastic wrap and gave it several thin and even coats of spray paint in matte white…

And I ended up here….

In hindsight, I probably should’ve restocked the toilet paper in the basket before snapping pics. But, that’s okay. The shelving now allows space to PUT toilet paper, which is a vast improvement from the previous situation. So, that’s enough to make up for it in my eyes. I’m really liking the mix of white, black, green, and natural wood… not to mention, the stainless/gold mixed metals. I still need to get an actual toilet paper dispenser for the wall so that that awful toilet bracket can hit the road (P.S. that isn’t ours… it was left by the sellers. So, uh, yeah. It’s gotta go. Something about using somebody elses attached-to-the-toilet-paraphernalia gives me the heebie jeebies.).

As for the paint color… Seriously, ya’ll. I’m trying. I’m REALLY trying. But, I just can’t do it. I really can’t. It needs to change. So, I’ll be changing it. It feels way too traditional for my taste. I need a lighter, brighter, more modern-feeling hue to blow my skirt up. So, now this room is definitely on my “to paint” list. I was tossing around the idea of a soft aqua-blue tone. I thought it might feel nice and beachy given that this is a pool bath. What color do y’all think I should paint it?