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"Yesterday I showed you the before photos of my guest bathroom. It was an ugly mess, I admit. I decided to challenge myself to see if I could do a few cosmetic things to make the bathroom look better without having to embark on a redo. I chose to paint my walls a dark shade of navy blue in order to create a jewel box-like effect. I figured dark walls might draw people&amp;#039;s eyes away from the ugly bits. The walls are now Benjamin Moore Soot in semi-gloss, and the trim and door are painted Ben Moore&amp;#039;s Gentleman&amp;#039;s Gray in high-gloss. (A hopeful name...do you think it will send any gentlemen my way?) After I stripped the walls of the bad wallpaper, I found that my walls were not in great shape. I blamed previous workmen, but I&amp;#039;m starting to believe that I&amp;#039;m the culprit. A set of early 18th c. prints were hung to hide the wall&amp;#039;s flaws.  Soot on the left and Gentleman&amp;#039;s Gray on the right  What made things easy was that I chose to treat my guest bathroom as a powder room instead. I didn&amp;#039;t have to worry about the shower as no one would be using it. (That&amp;#039;s the beauty of living in a building with guest suites; you can put guests there rather than having them stay with you.) So, I chose to hide the shower behind some greek key curtains in navy and cream from Pottery Barn.  In order to hide the vanity, I whipped up a tailored skirt using Stitch Witchery. I went with a pale blue cotton/linen fabric from Lewis and Sheron, and hot glued some tape trim at the top. It&amp;#039;s kind of a pain when you need to get underneath the sink as you have to flip the bottom of the skirt up over the sink, but hey, I&amp;#039;m not down there very often.  Lighting became a bit of a problem, especially as the dark walls made everything, well, dark. I put two column lamps on the vanity to help with lighting and to help distract from the medicine cabinet behind. I had to go with off-white shades, something which I normally don&amp;#039;t use, in order to maximize the light. That said, I like to use only the lamps for lighting in there to keep things a little moody, a little dramatic. The medicine cabinet actually came in handy- it gave me a place to shove the lamp cords. I really got stumped about what to do with the hideous fluorescent light fixture above the mirror. With the help of my sister the artist, we came up with a wooden valance to hide said fixture. The design was inspired by a bedspread from a 1940s bedroom. The nice thing is that you can still use that light, but it&amp;#039;s been toned down considerably.   Now maybe I&amp;#039;m kidding myself, but I do think that with the dark colors, the pattern, and the lamps, you don&amp;#039;t notice the bad stuff quite as much as before. I think that there is enough there to catch one&amp;#039;s eye, perhaps even preventing them from paying attention to the vanity or the mirrored thingamajig. And I was amazed at how little I actually spent on the whole thing. My goal had been to create a temporary fix for the guest bathroom to buy me about a year until I was ready to forge ahead with a renovation. Now, I&amp;#039;m actually liking the powder room and may not even bother with redoing it. If only someone could help me come up with a solution for the french fry lamp in my ceiling.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.housebeautiful.com/room-decorating/a360/and-the-after/?click=hbu-more>