Meet My Yard: No Annual Tree

I didn’t do my annual “weird things” holiday tree this year.

Instead, I took $50 worth of mystery boxes from Michaels and made my least favorite room in the house into one of my favorites.

Here is the room before. Or just the wall, I guess:

It’s fine, I guess. You don’t need much more from a half bath. The toilet works, the sink works, and it has a door and two drawers underneath for storage. Like I said, fine.

The paint, however, is not my vibe at all. It’s this totally 90s sage green sponge paint situation, as you can see above. There is also a very 90s dusty rose wallpaper border that I do not like.

When we first moved in, my thought was to cover the walls in faux greenery to make it feel like you’re taking a pee in the middle of the woods.

Then I didn’t do that; the bathroom just stayed as it was.

One day, we received a new shipment of toilet paper from Who Gives a Crap? which was their special poetry edition. Side note: we’ve been getting TP and PT (Paper Towel) deliveries since before the pandemic, and I love it. I don’t have to worry about filling up a shopping cart with dumb paper products and then wondering where the rest of my groceries might go.

It just shows up at my house, and then we use it. The boxes are really sturdy, too. And sometimes they are taped together. Then, sometimes, when your friend moves and asks for boxes and you give her your HQ TP boxes, you don’t realize there is a whole box of paper towels taped to one of them.

If you want to try them, use this link — you’ll get $10 off, and so will I!

Oh, so one month, we got the poetry edition, and I was enamored with the environmentally sustainable wrapping. There were three words on each one, in the style of magnetic refrigerator poetry, on a colorful background.

I thought that mod-podging them to the walls of the hated bathroom might be fun. I mean, we saved them already to use for packaging up ceramics projects for shipping. So, I sat with the idea for a bit but didn’t take any action.

Then, one day, we went to Michaels so I could get ribbon to tie onto the ornaments I made in ceramics class. At the checkout, there were mystery boxes.

I am a SUCKER for mystery boxes. They were $10 and pretty large, so I bought one.

When I got home, it was the first thing I opened. It had two dog-shaped doormats, some cookie presses, some yellow flatware, and tons of fake flowers.

Immediately, I knew what I wanted to do to the bathroom.

The next day, we went back and bought four more.

Then Mickey went out of town for a week.

And came home to this:

I AM IN LOVE.

The first few days after I finished it, I would tear up whenever I walked into the room. It is beautiful in a way that warms up my whole body.

In the mystery boxes, I got a healthy amount of fall flowers, lovely oranges, and golds. Then, I got a fair amount of white and multicolored flowers with a heavy concentration of a deep wine/burgundy color. And a lot of greenery.

My initial plan was to start with the darkest color and make an ombre down the wall… on all four walls. It’s a small bathroom afterall.

Instead, I started with the greenery. It took me a full day of going up and down this lil step ladder just to make the greenery look like it was creeping out of the corner of the bathroom.

The next day, I started adding the deep red flowers, still planning on an ombre, just one that creeped out of the corner.

I stopped when I ran out of red ones and revisited it the next day.

I put away the yellows and oranges and focused on the white flowers. Here are the remainder of the yellows and oranges. Two huge boxes full!