what I've been up to | Sunbury Photographer

As some of you may know, we are working on getting our house ready to sell.  So as any good home owner would do, we are finally getting around to decorating our house the way we would like for it to be.  You know, fixing things up so it will be more marketable.  Why we lived in it for 11 years without doing these things is beyond me.  But we are doing it now.  I have been working on it almost everyday for a while now.  A couple of hours here and couple of hours there.  I'm really bad about jumping from project to project.  But this past week I felt the sudden urge to have something FINISHED!

The first room that I am completely finished with is the kids bathroom. 

This is a little glimpse of what it looked like when we started.  Bright yellow walls that I thought might scare potential home buyers off.  After all, not everyone loves color as much as I do.  So I wanted to tone it down a little without making it completely boring and drab.

So after surfing around blog land for a while, I decided to jump on the Board and Batten bandwagon. 

I love the crisp clean lines of Board and Batten! 

I asked for a nail gun for Mother's Day so I could tackle this project (and many more) in a more efficient manner.  As you can imagine, I didn't have to do too much talking to convince Dennis to buy me a cool power tool.  I guess that's what you would call a nail gun.  I don't know.

I started by painting the bottom 1/2 to 2/3's of the wall with semi gloss white paint.

Then I went to Home Depot and bought chair rail molding and these tiny strips of mdf called batten.  Both were very inexpensive.  Can't remember the exact cost though.  :(

Then I dug through my husbands stuff in the garage until I found this.

I believe it's called a Miter Box.  I used it to make all of the cuts in all of the trim/molding that I bought.  The Miter Box even guides you in the corner cuts.  My corners didn't turn out precisely right, but a little caulk did the trick to make them livable.

I decided to paint all the chair rail & batten pieces with the semi gloss paint before I hung them.  That way I didn't have to do so many coats after they were hung. 

This past weekend we broke out the shiny new nail guns and had some fun got to work hanging all the pieces.  We hung all the vertical batten pieces first.  I measured 18 inch increments around the room,  adjusting where need be to make it look better.  Then we simply lined the batten up on the mark, put a nail right in the middle, then used a level to make sure we were straight up & down before nailing the top and bottom.

After all the vertical strips were hung, we placed the chair rail across the top and nailed it into place.  Very simple.  Once everything was hung, I filled in the nail holes and touched up with paint to finish it all off.

I found the four hook towel bar at Target and the bright colored towels at Meijer.  The shower curtain was purchased at Target a couple of years ago.  And the frames are from JoAnn's.

As you can see, there are still bright colors, but I think the white part of the walls sort of toned it down a bit.  What do you think?  Are you color phobic?  Would you be scared off by this bathroom?  :)