Watching Paint Dry

The Guest Bathroom Makeover continues!

As the title of this post suggests, it is NOT the most exciting thing you will ever read on my blog, but I did learn some important lessons that I want to pass on to my fellow DIY-ers.  As of this writing, we are much further along with the Guest Bathroom than these pictures will show, but I am finally finding the time to sit down and write about recent progress.

A few weeks ago (gosh, has it been that long??), my husband gutted the guest bathroom: old light fixture, mirror, counter top, sink, TP holder, outlet covers ... All gone.  (I will show you pictures of them in a later post, side-by-side with their replacements.)  It then took another 5 days to get around to painting the first coat of Relaxed Navy blue onto the walls, which taught me a very important lesson:

Lesson #5: It's probably not a good idea to take the most heavily used bathroom out of commission for several days when your 2-year-old is selectively potty-trained and still afraid to go anywhere in the new house alone - even in daylight.

Every time we heard the words, "I need to go potty," a high-speed tornado would sweep through the house as one of us would grab her and run to the master bedroom where our bathroom was available and still had working lights!

Finally, 5 days after it had become non-functional, I walked past the unpainted, taped-off guest bathroom for the last time and was determined to make progress!  I carefully taped down plastic (knowing that rollers produce paint splatter and whether you see it happen or not, you will eventually see that spatter once it's already dried to your floor and furniture), turned on the Black & Decker flashlight, put on my husband's forehead flashlight (quite sexy - take my word for it), and got busy painting!

I was debating whether or not to tape the cabinet so I could safely trim the walls around it, when I realized that I forgot to spray the poly on the cabinet to protect it!

Lesson #6: Finish one job before you move to the next.
And so I detoured slightly, setting down my paintbrush to go grab the polyurethane spray.  It only took a couple of minutes to cover the front frame, and I barely glossed the exposed side of the cabinet.  During the staining process a couple of weeks ago, we had determined that the side of the cabinet was totally laminate, and so I 'stained' it knowing that I was really just 'painting' it with a stain product.  I ended up with the desired black cherry color, very smooth, and that's all that matters!

Now, back to painting!  Time for the roller.

Wait ... where are all of our rollers?

Lesson #7: Make sure you haven't loaned a good portion of your painting supplies to a relative BEFORE you start painting.

The best roller that I could find in the garage was janky and covered in at least seven different colors of paint that reminded me of the walls in our previous house!  In fact, calling it a "roller" is generous; a better name would be "slider" because that's what it did with the paint on my walls.  It SLID the paint in streaky, uneven blotches!  My husband tried to muscle it into submission ("ROLL, DAMMIT!"), which got it rolling downward - but not upward.  Slide up, Roll down.  Ugh.  And so, the first coat of paint was streaky in places, showing some of the white wall underneath.

The husband purchased a new roller for me a few days later, and then I applied the second coat and trimmed the baseboards white.  No more streaks.

Ta da! Relaxed Navy blue walls.

Ok, so painting is boring, and reading about painting is boring - I know this.  I don't even have great pictures of the blue at this phase because the room was so dark.  However, I am setting the stage for more exciting posts to come... such as, what I did to make the inside of this cabinet super chic...

You can kinda see the wall color in this photo without revealing the new light fixture yet:

Stay tuned for Cabinet Chic!