Mother's Day surprises are hard to pull off if you're married to Melissa.

For Mother's Day this year I watched the boys (including cousin Kimble) so that Melissa and her sister Amy could go out for the day--do some shopping, get lunch, see a movie, etc.

Of course, my real motivation for getting Melissa out of the house was so I could paint our bathroom, which while it is really lovely for lots of reasons, had a serious case of beige-itis.

 (If you've never heard of beige-itis, that's a disease in which a room in your home is so overwhelmingly washed out and boring that you find yourself inexplicably wanting to sit on the couch all day watching reruns of the home shopping network while painting hotel art and subsisting on a diet of wonderbread and mayonnaise sandwiches...Our house currently suffers from beige-itis in most every room).

So I asked Amy to keep Melissa out of the house for at least three and a half hours and as soon as they walked out the door I got to work.  The paint color is "Atmosphere" from Behr, and in addition to the paint, I got some white towels at Wal-Mart on clearance, and I cut a faux frame out of 1x3 stain-grade pine and glued it onto the mirror.  As pictured below, the frame has one coat of  gel stain on it, but that is all I had time for (I'll get the few coats on soon).  Eventually we'll swap out the light fixture, and maybe find some art to put up, but for now, this was change enough.  It's my favorite room in the house now.

 

The best part is, I got it all finished about thirty minutes before Melissa and Amy came home, and even after they arrived, it took Melissa nearly two hours to make her way back into our bedroom to see what I'd done (Amy kept trying to come up with ways to get her to go back into her room -- "Don't you want to change?" She'd say...).  

Of course Melissa knew I was up to something (she told Amy in the car, "I think Joey is building me something"), but she didn't catch on that I was painting the bathroom (which is a feat, considering three days earlier I'd had a subtle conversation with her about paint color as we sat at the computer looking at bathrooms on Pinterest. I almost painted it green, which I would have loved, but she would have hated).