The Valentine's Day Surprises

I hope you all had a lovely Valentine's Day with your loved ones!  Anyway, as mentioned yesterday, I decided to surprise my Valentine my adding some little touches to our bathroom.  We purchased the house a couple of years ago, and got a couple of inexpensive bath mats right away.  Then before we moved in we repainted, but that was about it.  When we installed the towel rods later that year, Wayne picked up a matching toothbrush holder and soap dish, but those can be kind of expensive, and I was fine with just using our old ones.  (In our last house the two sinks were on the same counter so it was easy to share.)  Anyway, I finally decided that I was tired of mis-matched things, and that there was actually some money in the budget to do something about it, so I did.  And since it was a very last minute decision, I was able to keep it a total surprise!

So, here are the before pictures:

How long ago was peach the "in" color?  And I decided that even though I love my wooden jewelry box (a gift from my parents when I was 16), it just really didn't match the decor of this room.  Until I find something else, there's plenty of room on the closet shelf for it.  I also moved the black clock from Wayne's counter into the closet.  He loves the fact that he can just press a button and see what time it is anywhere in the world, but it's old and ugly, and we're going for matching and coordinating here.  That also means the beautiful orchid had to find a new home as well.

This was my Mother's Day gift in 2011.  This is the third time it's bloomed, and I'm actually amazed I haven't killed it.  Once these blooms fall off, we'll replant it in a pretty pot and finally get rid of the grocery store paper!

Today the gift was a dozen roses.  I expect these to die, so won't feel guilty when I throw them away.

And here are the after pictures:

 

 

It took a lot of work to find the accessories; maybe that's why it's taken so long.  Some decisions I can make quickly, but finding the balance between what I like, what I think Wayne would like, and how much I want to spend is hard work!  Anyway, you'll notice the peach wastebasket is gone (still need to find clear garbage liners) and Wayne has a pretty silver clock that reminds me of the alarm clock he brought into our marriage.  I found a pretty colored plate to hold my perfume (even though I remember hating having to clean my mother's perfume tray when it was my turn to clean her bathroom, which is why I've never gotten one for myself before).  I guess if I chose perfume based on the color of the bottle it wouldn't be so hard to make it coordinate, but we'll continue basing our decision on how it smells, not how it looks.

By far our favorite thing in the room now are the prints I had enlarged and framed.  You'd think finding matching frames would be easy, but it's not.  Maybe next time I should find the frames first and then decide on the sizes.  However, we've been to some beautiful places (St. John's Island and Miami Beach), and it's nice to be remembered of that.

After all the agonizing and deliberating over the new rug choices, we decided we're not happy with the blue ones, so back they go.  The original plan was to buy one a month for a few months, but these were so inexpensive I decided to give them a try.  We'll go back to the original plan!  Wayne wants to buy a long, narrow painting of some beach scene to hang above the windows, which I think is an excellent idea, and he thought shells in the bowl would look nicer than stones.  I'm still trying to decide; which would you prefer?

 

Anyway, that's our pretty "new" bathroom.  Now I need to decide which project to finish next!