Before Blogging Throwback Thursdays #4 - One Fish, Two Fish

This month's party snuck up on me.  I've been super busy with the end of the school year's physical party planning, and the blogosphere has been jumping with the big Blog Party being co-hosted by a dozen fantastic bloggers.  Last month we had a great turnout, and hopefully we'll get a nice turnout despite my lack of planning.  So having done absolutely no planning, I got up this morning and walked around the house looking for something to take pics of.  Here's what I came up with.  The kids' Under The Sea bathroom.

This project started when we had to rip into the wall behind the shower in the toilet alcove.  We had some frozen pipes, and there was no access panel, so we had to cut a hole into the wall to fix the leaking pipes.  We wanted to keep access to the pipes available, but I didn't want an ugly door, so we built this removable recessed magazine rack.  It's basically a box with some doweling, and some applied case molding.  The whole unit can be pulled out if need be, because it just sits in the hole with no nails or anything.

As long as we were ripping into walls, I figured that was as good a time as any to replace the salmon colored toilet with a white one, pull down the apricot & blue floral wallpaper, remove the speckled tile wainscoting, and pull up the yucky bathroom carpet(why?!)  The tile floor was ugly and missing in a few spots, and we didn't have the budget to replace it.  I found an ugly $12 remnant piece of sheet vinyl flooring and flipped it to it's back side and painted it a sandy mix of colors with a couple of trompe l'oeiul accents like this starfish.

I found a remnant piece of green shag carpeting that I thought looked like anemones, and had it cut and bound into rugs for in front of the sinks and tub.

The whole room was painted including the ceiling.  I wanted the walls to look like a giant picture book, so I painted my sea critters in a cartoony style.  These floating shelves went in over the toilet.

The window needed an easy care valance, and what could be lower maintenance or more appropriate than a fishing net.  I got this net at the craft store, and boy did it ever stink when I pulled it out of the package.  If you're planning on recreating this look, make sure and give yourself time to air your net out outside for a couple of days before bringing it in.

The bathroom had a giant plate glass mirror like you'd find in a movie theater restroom.  I created a frame for it with 1x4 lumber and wrapped the frame in hemp rope.  It was easy to do, but my hands were torn up something awful by the time I finished wrapping the frame even with leather gloves.

Not wanting to miss a detail, I painted a switch plate cover at the local paint your own pottery store,

and hung the shower curtain from little fish hooks.

I'm linking this up to A Glimpse Inside's Catch a Glimpse Thursdays, Paisley Passions' Thrilling Thursdays, Funky Junk Interior's Saturday Night Special, Remodelaholic's Anonymous, and I <3 Naptime's Sundae Scoop.  That's my Before Blogging entry, now let's see yours.

Remember this is a party for anything you bought, made, or did Before Blogging.  Could be something big or little, just something you'd like to share.  This link will be open for a week, so you have plenty of time to take a pic and link up.  You can grab a party button here.