Thrifted shelves made mine.

My bathroom never gets any decorating attention. It's a pretty nice bathroom, though, and there's a lot of space that I've never utilized well. It's actually kind of astounding that I haven't put any shelves in there since I've lived in this apartment!

But I have this wall:


The necessary "before" picture. There's a photo of London hanging under the bank of lights, and then just hang something for the sake of hanging something, I put up a test sheet for some stencils I sprayed last year sometime. But there's no point to them there. They had to come down.

The other day, I ran across one of those sets of floating boxes that you can find at pretty much every big box store, except that these ones were only $5 for all three and someone had taken the time to put little foam padding on the back so that they don't scrape the wall. Sold!

Thing is, why do these shelves always come in black? It's like black is the obligatory "cool" color. Maybe because it's so neutral, it's the go-to for these shelves. But I didn't want that out-of-the-box look, so I dug around in my box of spray paint and found a lovely interior-exterior Krylon paint in a light olive/celery color. I decided that was EXACTLY what these shelves needed!


I gripe and gripe about my screen porch floor not being finished. It's plywood currently, which I cover up with rugs of various designs. Thing is, a screen porch is perfectly ventilated and with an unfinished floor, I didn't have to worry about putting a tarp down. Heeeee! ;)


Each side took about 10 minutes to dry, so it was a paint-wait-paint-wait sort of thing, but it was well worth it.

Materials:

Shelves to paint
Spray paint in color of choice
Tape measure
Nails
Hammer
A level, if you're not confident in your eyeballing prowess
Spackle and scraper (if you mess up, like me!)

So, patience is the biggest thing here: waiting for the paint to dry thoroughly on each side is critical, because if you turn it and it's not dry, depending on the paint it might run or drip, or more annoying, dirt will stick to it or it might become textured in an unappealing way. Make sure to cover the paint evenly and if it looks like it's starting to drip, don't keep adding. Stop, wait for it to dry, then go over with another coat. This will keep it looking smooth. These shelves only needed one coat; it didn't take much on something so small.

Then, for hanging, I laid them out on the floor to see if I could come up with an arrangement I liked. And as you'll see, I came up with one where the medium-sized box was turned to a diamond rather than a straight-on square:


Cute, but not very practical. Sooo. I took that down and tried again. But then I ended up with this mess, because I can be a little careless sometimes:


This is where the spackle comes in. Luckily, the paint on this wall is white, so spackle doesn't show up well anyway. But I do have leftover paint from these walls, so I'll go back and touch it up if it really needs it. I got that awesome spackle that comes pink when it's wet and then it turns white as it dries. Amazing stuff!

The final product looks like this:


I realize the menagerie of items is pretty eclectic. It occurred to me as I was putting things on the shelves that I just don't own very many decorative trinkety things. Maybe some day I will manage to amass enough of some kind of collection that I can display like items here. Until then, my eclectic mix will do!

Also, for the heck of it, I found a new shower curtain the other day that I like loads better than the one I had before (which was bought on the cheap just so I could have one, period). But I can't say I ever totally warmed to it, even though it's not super ugly. Just not right:


The color scheme in this bathroom is starting to take shape, accidentally and thankfully, though it is a challenge to have to work around the yellow tile. The tile has little clouds of orange in it, so when combined with the wrong hues, makes it look dingy. It's not. It just needs some good matchy-matchy. I think this works, so it's a good start:


Next on the bathroom list: a curtain to replace the one pair of blinds in the entire apartment, and the one pair of blinds my cat has created a climbing-hole through. They look terrible. Time to fix!

And today begins kitchen painting, officially! Hurrah!

Another lovely, lovely summer day. So happy to see the sun again.