Bathroom paint color

Since P worked his magic and installed the bathroom floor--the floor we selected on a whim--it was time for me to stop agonizing and just select a paint color already.

I decided, based on some advice from my loyal blog readership (hi, Dad!), that it wouldn't create too much gray in the house if I painted the bathroom gray, as well.  Plus I couldn't think of anything else that would work.  My concern over choosing a color that would flatter our skin tones has only built over the past month of using the hall bath.  P was looking at himself in the mirror a few weeks ago, and said, "I look terrible!  Or is it the light?"   Yeah, it was the light reflecting off the paint in there.  (Since we rarely use that bathroom when the master is functioning, I didn't take "flattering" into account when selecting the paint, and was duped into "pretty.")

I got two paint testers: Behr's Dolphin Fin and Benjamin Moore's Horizon.  I was looking for a gray with warm undertones; nothing too blue. 

Dolphin Fin is on top, and Horizon is on the bottom:

Wait, you don't see a color on the bottom?  Try here:

I decided Dolphin Fin was too taupe.  Initially I thought Horizon too light.  I've painted dozens of test swatches on the walls of our house, and that's the first time that's happened!  Then I decided, despite my rant last week about people using off white colors, that it just might work.  Paired with crisp white baseboard and ceiling, I think (I hope!) that it will read as a light gray, rather than a dirty white.

Plus I'm always more adventurous in a bathroom--they're so small, the stakes seem lower.  Though this one has some much detailed cutting in work to do, I doubt I'll ever want to paint it again!  There's less than 1/2" of clearance between the frames of the bedroom and closet doors--still haven't figured out how I'm going to get a paintbrush in there!

Help! Mystery bushes

One afternoon last week, I was sitting in my cubicle when I (and everyone else at my workplace) got an email announcing that they had completed the new landscaping installation around our building, and there were leftover plants.  Help yourself.

Score!  P and I (mostly I, perhaps) had declared that this fall/spring, we would install some more bushes and trees.  But good ones are expensive. 

I ran straight outside, and was surprised to see that there were some nearly waist-high bushes remaining.  I quietly cheered my luck at having worn my jeans to the office that day, and stuffed the two largest in the trunk of my car before anyone else could claim them.

But here's the conundrum: we need to plant these, but we don't know what they are.  So we don't know how big they're going to get--which makes it hard to decide on a location.  (My guess is they're going to easily double or triple in size, or might even be more properly classed as small trees rather than shrubs--but I"m just going with my gut here.)

Anyone out there have any guesses?  Here's shrub 1:

And shrub 2:

Weekend giggles

An ad from our local paper:

I love it when people try to emphasize what they're saying with quotation marks, but just undermine it instead.

Magic bathroom!

A friend of mine coined the phrase "magic drawer" to refer to a drawer that magically refills with clean socks.  Her "magic lawn" was mowed by the landlord's landscapers, so she never had to notice or think about it.  I love the concept, and have freely appropriated it for situations where a person doesn't mean to be thoughtless of another's labor, but never bothers to notice that labor is occurring. 

It was no innocent coincidence that I decreed "date night" to pick out new flooring for our master bathroom a mere 36 hours before leaving on a four-day business trip.  And P is very good at taking a hint.  :-) 

To review, when I left, the master bathroom looked like this:

There was still quite a bit of prep work to do before laying the flooring.  P had to remove the rest of the old vinyl, pull all of the molding, take the toilet out (so flooring could be laid underneath it), and add the last 1/4" layer of subfloor to the repaired section.*

He also took pictures for my blog!  Isn't this guy totally dreamy?  (I'll ignore the fact that half of the pictures were of the toilet and icky toilet plumbing.)

Those tasks, in and of themselves, would have been a quite respectable set of tasks for three days (two of them weekdays, at that). 

But P is nothing if not an overachiever. 

I'll spare you all of the details of what he did--because I don't really know what he did.  It's magic, right?

Here's what I came home to:

Detail:

Not bad for the cheapest laminate we could find, right?

Look how nicely he did the door frames:

And because he's a ridiculously hard-working guy, he also taped the new drywall in the closet:

I don't even try to keep up anymore.

I love you, sweetie!

*For some reason we can't understand, the subfloor in the bathroom has an extra layer of 1/4" flooring on top.  Perhaps it was to make the bathroom floor, just covered in thin vinyl, line up a little better with the bedroom floor (covered in carpet padding and carpet)? 

Whatever the original intention, we decided to match it by adding a 1/4" layer to the repaired subfloor.  We could  have laid a single, thicker subfloor.  But doing it in two layers will allow us more flexibility in the future.  In particular, it would make it very easy to lay one continuous type of flooring in both the master bedroom and master bath.  (i.e., if we remove the top 1/4" in the bathroom, we have a continuous subfloor extending between the rooms.)

white!

I'm no interior decorator--that's probably why I don't understand people's concern with finding the "right white." Especially when they want a white that's warm, not too stark.... we painted all of our ceilings and trim with just the basic, off-the-shelf white paint. the kind that used as a base for tinting anything else. and we love it.

I forget how much of a difference this has made to our house until I see something like this:

Yeah, what happened here is that I ran out of painting steam, and never got around to painting out guest bedroom door. The walls, ceiling, trim, everything used to be painted the same almond color as the door. Doesn't everything look so much crisper and cleaner now, with the brought white contrasting with the greige walls? I love it!

I'm always amazed by how much of a difference this paint job has made. With no contrasting true white in the room, the almond paint just looked dingy white. but with the trim painted a true white, it's easy to see how dark the old paint really was.  It definitely took some time to paint all of the trim and ceiling and everything, but it was so, so worth it. Both P and I love the way this room is turning out!