It’s been several years since my bathroom was last redecorated and things had gotten a bit old and dingy. It turned out that the magnetic bathroom I did back in 2005 – although fun, unique, and highly entertaining – was getting harder and harder for my Mom to clean. So Mom said it was high time we took all the magnetic poetry out and did something else.

    Of course, this suggestion was a bit hard for me to swallow at first. I loved my magnetic poetry bathroom! And after all, it was never technically finished, since I never did find the shower curtain I really wanted. So how can you redesign a room you never really finished?!

    Sadly Mom always wins those arguments, though, when she’s the one who has to do the cleaning. 🙂 So that meant my beloved bathroom had to go. (I wish I could show you the old pictures of it and the blog entry I originally wrote about it, but for the life of me I can’t find it! I’ve searched through the archives, I’ve browsed through an entire year of posts, and nope, it’s not there! I know roundabout when I wrote it, it was done just as I was breaking up with a particular boyfriend from San Francisco, so I went through that entire year, and nope, still can’t find it.)

    Given how attached I was to that bathroom, I was having a really hard time thinking of something – anything – that could top just how fun that bathroom was. For those of you who don’t remember the original blog post about it, I painted the entire bathroom in my trademark raspberry (the same one from my logo up there). Before they were raspberry, the walls were a deep dark red, and there are only so many colors you can paint over red without having to deal with icky thick primer stuff. Raspberry seemed like the perfect answer, and it definitely was; I adore that color.

    Obviously just the walls being raspberry isn’t quite enough to transform an ordinary bathroom into something fun. No, the fun part came in the oodles of frames I put up all over the walls. I filled over a dozen frames with thin sheet metal, hung them up, and then littered them with tons upon tons of magnets. From magnetic poetry to comic strips to funny photographs to my own goofy artwork. The bathroom was a veritable explosion of magnetic verbage, and it was awesome! My nephews and niece loved it and it seemed like every bath time, they’d end up spending more and more time in there fiddling with the magnets and leaving their own funny messages behind. I still have a few of the blank magnets I made that Max found when he was little and started drawing on. I loved seeing those magnets every day when I went in to the bathroom. And still to this day I have different odd random phrases drilled into my memory that they had left up there. “We will know after they expunge and spurn the vulgar protuberances!”, “Miscreants have a tiny apparatus” and “The sea is as red as the sun leg” (that last one was from Max, circa age five). One of my favorites was always, “She may cry but always shines.” To this day I don’t know for certain who left that one for me, but I think I have a pretty good idea who it was. 🙂

    That bathroom turned into a kind of display of the different things that had happened since the year I put it all up. There were loads of “Boys Are Stupid” magnets left over from the angst of having to dump a boyfriend who turned out to be someone other than who he first appeared to be. Lots of funny phrases and quotes, like “Give me luscious chocolate, meat, and diamonds”, and my personal favorite, a magnet I made of the Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale along with this phrase spelled out in magnetic poetry: “Caution: Ferrari 360 May Cause Gratuitous Drooling”. That bathroom was definitely very much a symbol not only of the people who regularly occupied that bathroom, but of my own personality as well. It was great fun, and believe me, it was really sad to see it go.

    That said, it definitely was getting a bit dusty and dingy, so believe me, I understand why Mom wanted it gone. The trouble was, what can you do to top all those memories? What could prove to be just as much fun, just as customizable, just as entertaining, and just as prolific a dartboard for the personalities of all the various visitors to that hall bathroom?

    Easy: chalkboard paint! 🙂

    Yup, the magnetic bathroom has now been replaced by a long black strip of chalkboard paint along the long wall opposite the bathroom mirror. I must say, the charcoal-black looks pretty dang cool with the raspberry. It’s certainly much sparser and a bit less chaotic-looking than the magnets, so it’s definitely an adjustment that might take some getting used to, but it certainly has exciting potential.

    Since I’m in no condition to paint right now, I’m afraid Mom had to do all of the tough work. She finished it over the weekend and when I went in Sunday night to examine the bathroom for the first time, I was struck with a bit of inspiration. When you walk in the bathroom, the first thing you see is this gigantic flat wall-mirror, the kind they put in all the upper middle-class suburbs in the 1980s. From that view of the mirror, you see the long wall with the strip of chalkboard paint reflected in the glass. That’s just when inspiration struck. I spent the next ten minutes writing little messages in reverse on the chalkboard, so that when you stand at the sink to wash your hands, you can read the messages in the mirror! How fun is that?! 🙂 Hehe. I must say, that was a lot of fun figuring all that out, but it didn’t really take too long, surprisingly. Once I had it all done, I turned to look in the mirror and instantly started giggling. So all in all, I think the christening of the bathroom went pretty well and has shown there’s definitely a lot of potential in that room. 🙂

    I’ll try to get some pictures for you soon, but as of right now, the bathroom’s still in that messy post-redecorating phase. Once it’s all cleaned up and tidy I’ll try to get some pictures so you can see the transformation. And there still might be a few additions to the design yet – right now I’m keeping a look out for a wall-cling or too, cause so far, the room is still looking a bit sparse. More updates soon! 🙂