Plaster & Disaster

When we first bought our house, the bathroom was one of the least offensive rooms we had to work with. However, after a renovation that dramatically improved most of the other main living areas, the bathroom was left behind. We had painted and replaced the window and window-trim and solved a very exciting ceiling-vent-placement-conundrum, but it was still pretty sad and boring:

See, I LOVE pattern-filled, colorful rooms, and while all those neutrals were playing well together, they were not playing well with ME, and it was bumming me out.

Of course, I was expecting my yellow door painting project to bring in that punch of excitement, but I knew that it would be the shower curtain that would set the tone for the room. The problem was, despite the gazillion options out there, we just couldn’t find one that was the right pattern and the right price.

We loved punchy, graphic look of the Octopus Garden Shower Curtain by Anthropologie, but just couldn’t justify dropping $149 for a shower curtain. I also wasn’t sure if adding a charcoal and white graphic in my charcoal and white bathroom was the right call. Too matchy-matchy?

Octopus Garden Shower Curtain by Anthropologie

I wanted something interesting, and filled with bright colors and patterns. We almost bought 3^rd Period Science by Robin Faye Gates through Deny Designs. Now that’s a shower curtain. It was certainly interesting and would have been a big presence in the room! I actually still kind of love it. But we still didn’t think $89 was reasonable, and it seemed a little… out there… or a lot out there to have looming so large in a small space.

3rd Period Science Shower Curtain by Robin Faye Gates - DENY Designs - seen on Plaster & Disaster

3rd Period Science by Robin Faye Gates on DENY Designs

We actually lived with just a shower curtain liner for a long time because we couldn’t decide. Meanwhile, everyone was telling us to just buy one already. It’s just a shower curtain, what could possibly be the big deal?

Um…. did you not hear me say that this would set the tone for the room? This is about a big of a deal as it gets. (That’s my sarcasm voice.)

However, at the same time that I was lamenting that I didn’t like any of the shower curtain patterns out there, I was also lamenting that there was nowhere in the house to install some cool mismatched tiles. I just love that look.

Inspirational image seen on decoratrix.com - mismatched tile - Plaster & Disaster

Image from Decoratrix

Finally it I put those two ideas together. After a quick search to see if there was already a tiled shower curtain out there with the look I wanted (there wasn’t) I decided to design my own.

To start, I designed nine tiles that I liked using a free version of a graphic design software (Serif Draw Plus Starter Edition). I experimented with color palettes and eventually decided on just blue, gray, and yellow, since it would be busy to have a ton of different patterns AND colors going on in one place. That would work in a spartan or expensive looking room, but I didn’t think my space could handle the pressure.

I based a few on tiles I loved from images on Pinterest and designed a few myself from scratch. I edged each tile with a light gray color to simulate the presence of grout.

Then I tried different combinations. I liked the look of alternating individual tiles (like my inspiration image), but the Advisory Council (a.k.a Brad) thought it was too busy.

It worked better to alternate them in groups of four, which had the bonus of showing some of the patterns created by the tiles when they’re next to their own kind.

Once I knew that was what I wanted overall, I made a few final adjustments. I muted the colors and changed up the coloring of some of the tiles, because I thought it was still too busy. I also made them all a little smaller so they would be close to the size of real tiles once the image was printed on the 69″ x 70″ curtain. It was late at night and I was tired, so instead of doing math I just took my best guess by squinting at our existing shower curtain liner and imagining that it was made out of tiles.

It took a few tries to upload the huge file to Café Press, but once it was up it was easy to align the image and order it. With the sale code they were running at the time, it only cost about $50 plus shipping. Not the cheapest shower curtain in the world, but much less than the other options we’d been considering!

My main worry was that it would be all pixilated once it printed so large. It took forever to arrive, and by the time it did I was convinced it would be horrible and that the image quality would be terrible.

I was pleasantly surprised! The curtain quality is pretty good and the image printed really well, not pixilated at all. And, as luck would have it, the yellow and light blue are almost the same as the paint colors we chose for our interior doors and living/dining room walls. Usually I don’t want things to coordinate so tightly, but this is a small enough detail that it works for me.

Here it is hanging in its rightful place:

I love that it adds some pattern and fun to what is a pretty sterile space. It is bright in person, so I’m really glad that I decided to dull the colors and cut down on the yellow at the last minute. The grays and blues play well with the charcoal walls (which have a blue undertone).

The fun shower curtain and bright doors have really brought this room more in line with the rest of my house in terms of color and pattern. And it (obviously) feels so much more finished!

This project totally won me over on Cafe Press. I always thought they seemed a bit gimmicky but the whole process was easy. It let me totally customize a shower curtain, rather than drive myself crazy trying to find the perfect one already in existence. I’ve since used them for other projects, including a gift for my Dad’s 60th birthday (which was super fun, and I hope to share soon).

Thanks for reading!

(Sharing at Think and Make Thursdays, AKA Design, DIY Showoff, Tip Me Tuesday, Sarah Celebrates, A Bowl Full of Lemons, Whimsy Wednesday, and I Heart Naptime – and FEATURED at Designer Trapped in a Lawyers Body and Shelterness)

Sometimes DIY really tests your patience. Sometimes it feels like a never-ending series of problems that beget more problems and you wonder if you’re just the most incompetent person in the world. Our toilet saga has been like that. And I’m here today to share another project that should have been quick and easy and turned into the bane of my existence. You’re not alone in thinking that sometimes, DIY is a real bummer.

A few months ago, Naomi and I shared a “Disaster Confessional” where we revealed that we both had some major holes in our houses. Hers are 12 holes scattered throughout her house where she hasn’t installed new air vent grates since her renovation wrapped up many moons ago:

Mine are three holes in the exterior basement door, creating a wee bit of a security hazard:

Or rather, mine were three holes in our door — I finally fixed them. FINALLY.

We were dealing with two issues: 1) We wanted to install new keyless locks on our exterior doors, and we were successful on our two doors upstairs but the hole for the basement door was too small to fit the new lock mechanism (oftentimes older homes have this issue), and 2) The basement door had multiple locks on it to begin with (thus creating multiple holes) but the seller removed them in order to pass a pre-sale safety inspection and then never replaced them. To remedy this disaster, I needed to find a way to widen one of the holes, and then patch the two in a secure manner.

Fixing this stupid thing involved a ridiculously long parade of failures (I don’t sound bitter, do I?). The parade unfolded as follows: First, I bought a new drill bit large enough to widen one of the holes to the size needed (the standard 2 1/8″). But when I got it home, I discovered that the shaft of it was too large to fit in the chuck of my drill. So then I bought an adapter that I thought would fix the issue, but it did not. So then I bought a new hole saw attachment that would fit in my drill. But I couldn’t use it because it was intended for drilling new holes from scratch with a pilot bit in the center to keep the saw in place as it spins, and since I was enlarging an existing hole the pilot bit had nothing to bite into to keep it in place. (photo below in case that made absolutely no sense)

So then I had to go back to the hardware store to buy a kit with a guide that clamps onto the door to keep the hole saw in place. Of course the first store I went to was sold out of the kit I needed (even though I’d seen it there the previous day when I bought the hole saw with the pilot bit), so I had to try a second store. Finally I tracked one down and brought it home.

It took quite awhile (like 15 minutes) to drill through the door, but when I could finally see my fingers wiggling on the other side I was beyond excited (by which I mean, I yelled something like “*$&!#@$* FINALLY.”).

With my new standard-sized hole, I was able to install my keyless lock. It’s a Schlage keyless deadbolt (affiliate link — read our policies) and then upstairs we have Schlage keyless lever locks (affiliate link — read our policies) on the front and back door. It’s so handy because now all our doors are programmed with the same code, and we can also add (and remove) additional codes as needed (so we can make ones for guests, service people, etc and then revoke them if we want without having to change our personal code).

I did have to chisel out some space for the new strike plate, since it didn’t line up with the old strike plate. But that was pretty easy to do with a screwdriver and hammer.

That still left us with two gaping holes in the door, though. I really wasn’t sure how to fill these, since they were pretty big. I did some online research and saw lots of suggestions for various epoxies that could work, but then I asked someone at a hardware store and they suggested just using wood filler. That sounded easy enough to me, so I just packed a bunch of wood filler into the holes and let it dry:

Then I sanded it down so it was relatively smooth (I wasn’t too concerned about appearance, since it’s the basement and the door is already less-than-charming). To finish it up, I touched up the holes with black paint to match the door, and then installed little handles to make it easy to open and close (since it’s just a deadbolt, there’s no handle attached to the lock itself…I could pretend this was intentional, but truthfully I just didn’t really think that one through when I decided to go with the deadbolt version and by the time I got it installed it was months later and I couldn’t exchange it). Here are the inside and outside of the door now:

Home improvement - drilling a bigger hole in a door for new hardware -- Plaster & Disaster

So gorgeous!

Okay so it’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it was one of those projects where by the time I reached the end I was so fed up that the choices were either to call it “good enough” and move on, or burn down the whole darn house and find somewhere else to live. At least our door locks now and there aren’t a bunch of holes in it. That sounds like victory to me.