Mortaine’s Blog

Well, my husband and I finished the bathroom yesterday. I still have to do the gecko stencils, but that’s going to take forever, and doesn’t inconvenience anyone while I do it. That is, unless I take my husband’s suggestion and do the stencils up near the ceiling, instead of at the 3′ height that I was planning on doing them at. Argh! Doesn’t he know how hard it is to stencil near the ceiling? I don’t want to be leaning over from a ladder every night for the next 3 weeks! Grrr. . . . The worst part is, he’s kind of right– it’ll look better if it’s higher than the 3′ mark, but I’m not sure that putting it near the ceiling is such a great idea, either. I don’t like having designs that call attention to the ceiling in the bathroom– in general, bathroom ceilings eventually get mildew on them.

Meanwhile, I’m already thinking of the next color-scheme to use. We’re toying with a few ideas:

• “Wine Country” - grape motifs, burgundy, purple, and green in the master bathroom (the one we use daily), or possibly in the kitchen
• “Monet’s WaterLilllies” - using the paintings as inspiration for colors and style
• “Patriot” - red, white, and blue in the kitchen
• “Space” - a planets/stars theme in the bathroom
• “Midnight Sun” - Dark blue with golden sun/moon/star theme (a very popular design these days)
• “Las Vegas” - not sure how to do this, but a kind of “Vegas Strip” theme in the bathroom
• “Wild Strawberries” - red and white, with strawberry motif in the kitchen (I love strawberries!)
• “Black and White” - black, white, and silver in the bathroom– very simple, classic colors.

These, of course, are in addition to other, more conventional ideas like fishies and such. We’re also starting to think seriously about re-doing the den into an African Sahara theme (with lions, of course). I like the idea of keeping a kind of “desert” theme in my house– redecorate the den with African lions, and the master bathroom with Las Vegas.

The main constraints in the bathroom are that we already have nice, dark blue towels and bath rug. They are replaceable, but I like them and want to use them, as they were a wedding gift. Also, the bathroom is very small– it would be easy to come up with a design to make it seem even smaller than it really is. We have a glass door on the shower already, though we could look into replacing it with a simple shower curtain.

I watched “Trading Spaces” the other day as a kind of “see what other people are doing” for inspiration and such. On the show, they have $1000, a professional designer, a shared carpenter, and 48 hours to redecorate a room in a friend’s house. Kind of interesting, because the designers always have these great ideas that they use, and some of them are really hokey, while others are really good.

One thing I could go with in the kitchen is a red/white theme, which would easily convert to Christmas colors by adding green, Valentine’s day in February, and summer colors with the “wild strawberries” as well as a red-white-blue decor for the 4th. Our fridge poetry magnets are white and red, so we could really make them a major design element in that room.