Vase rescue with wallpaper. Really!

I sure didn't want to ditch this vase, it's heavy and a good size and I loves my vases, I do. I love to plunk arrangements in them of flowers and sticks and eucalyptus and twisty branches and wheat and berries and...you know what I'm talking about, right?

Right now I have a total of six within eyeball range; they're in my living and dining rooms. They are such a bright pick me up and give each room a pop of color.

But this vase lost a corner chunk when pebbles were dropped in with too much enthusiasm and blooey, this baby won't be holding water anytime soon. But it has a nice shape and heft and it doesn't really have to hold water if I don't put real flowers in it.....


Gorilla glue to the rescue! But it's still ugly and that corner piece is pretty heavy, so I reinforced it with packing tape. Unfortunately, it looks uggggggllllly. I considered my go-to Mod Podge finish of crumpled tissue and paint and glaze but then I remembered the wallpaper I used for the master bath cabinet. I had covered the amber pebbled plastic in the cabinet door with wallpaper then painted it with the wall color and it looks very cool.
So, Mod Podge and wallpaper ahoy!





I emailed the family about painting it a nice cocoa brown or white like the bathroom. After the votes were in (including surprising input from the retired Lt. Cmdr. and the current Air Force lieutenant on deployment and my son slogging his way thru pharmacy school) The consensus was the brown looked like Cocoa Pebbles but the white looked way cool. Tho I kind of liked the brown....








For those of you who wondered about the vase redo for my master bath, here she is in her place of honor. Yep, she's full of flowers and branches and twigs and berries......and it might be my imagination but she seems glad for the rescue, dontcha think?



I'll be linking to some blog parties soon, like the Penny Pinching Party at The Thrifty Home and Strut Your Stuff Thursday at Somewhat Simple plus Friday's at Remodelaholic. See you there!

Big Bang Master Bath Redo for Not a Lotta Bucks

HERE is our redone master bath, and it is still one of my best all time favorite restyle projects!

Because below is the before picture as we started the work. Yikes!

 URG! 

You can see the new medicine cabinet the hubs is building on the wall and yes, you see ivy stenciling on the cabinet and walls. I loved me some ivy stencils back in the day and I had them in my kitchen, too. I liked them. I liked them alot. But finally this year I knew the master bath needed a new look even tho, again, I had no room in the budget for such frippery. I had used alot of mirrors in there (badly) to make the room seem bigger but it felt outdated, you know?

But with lots of work, some yummy chocolate brown gloss paint and a whole lot of mirror reworking, we now have this........

                             
                                 I LOVE the new look of my master bath!! Yup, this is the SAME ROOM.

Since the biatch of a budget had no room for new towels I had to come up with a scheme that would go with the 80s and 90s oh-so-cool-at-the-time raspberry colored towels. They were still perfectly serviceable, darn it! I knew I wanted to go with a rich, dark color on the vanity and after seeing a few chocolate brown                                                               bathrooms in magazines I just went for it.

So I picked up a gallon of creamy vanilla for the walls and a quart of deep rich brown, both in a semi gloss finish. Soon the ivy stenciling was toast.

The hubs built the medicine cabinet to fit a door we already had which featured a pebbled amber plastic inlay but hey, it had all its hardware and was perfectly usable and it was the right size for the wall. I had some very cool textured wallpaper left from the kitchen redo and I mod podged it over the amber plastic then painted it with the wall paint. It actually looks pretty cool! Nice textural interest, too.

I picked up some big float glass mirrors from a local contractor. At $8 apiece these 2' x 4' mirrors were a steal! I found some bullseye corner blocks in the bargain bin at the lumber yard for 2 for $1. They had small flaws in the center but I soon fixed those with filler and once painted, you can't tell they were repaired. We framed the mirror out with molding and put those corner blocks in place and Voila! Big freakin' framed mirror in my master bath! I painted the molding chocolate brown, of course.

The light fixture was a steal at $3 from St. Vincent De Paul's, and when $$$ allows we'll replace it, but for now it's a bargain and it works well with the space. I can live with that.

I also shopped the house and pulled in all the accessories on the high shelf and the mirror shelf. We already had the curly brackets under the mirror shelf and the only other ones we had were the ugly, utilitarian shop grade brackets, so we put them on top of the high shelf and covered them up with the accessories. So the shelf is actually hanging down from the brackets instead of sitting on top of them. Almost all the original bathroom mirrors got their frames spray painted brown and my daughter gave me the decorative wood "carving" from an old couch she was junking. She actually gave me two and I used the other in the hall bathroom. Love the intricate, curvy, vintage look!

So, here's our old medicine cabinet in it's grungy, outdated wonderfulness.....

...And here's what that corner of the room looks like now......

See the corner block on the mirror? Love the way it turned out! And the vase on the shelf? A clear glass gift which got cracked across one corner. I glued it together and reinforced it with packing tape then took the same textured wallpaper I used for the medicine cabinet and mod podged it to this vase. That will be a whole blog post just by itself, I think! Please check for it! For the two tall flower arrangements I stole eucalyptus and some colorful flowers from other parts of the house, then filled in with twigs, branches and lots of manzanita from our Oregon mountaintop. The red bark and green leaves are PERFECT for this room.

So the costs for this redo break down like so....

Paint total $26
Lumber total $ 9
Molding $ 6 (including corner blocks)
Mirror $ 8
Light fixture $ 3

TOTAL $51

So let's add in $10 for the vanity light bulbs and the total is, what, $61? DRAT! I didn't get pics of the hardware back on the cabinets. Silvery brushed nickel, they look great with the rich brown paint. You know, I love it when a project looks this good and doesn't cost a lot of money! Don't you? Now if I can find a totally modern light fixture at a really bargain basement price......

Thanks for reading my post. I'm going to try linking up to some blog parties in my sidebar this week, hope to see you there.