A Worldly Bathroom

I find it hard to type this as my little (OK, pudgy) fingers scream every time I pound the keys. I spent the better part of the day working on my downstairs bathroom. The little room off of the kitchen- Yes, there is a bathroom off of the kitchen (Rule #1, no #2!)- has been bare since the painters left. No lights, no mirror, no pretty towels. So I set about to the fixing that today, one tiny tack at a time.

I know I've professed my love of maps on here before, but I don't know if you believed me. If not, you'll see in the coming weeks just how much I meant it. Starting with today's update:

Yup. That's my (dirty) faucet with a nice assortment of worldly images behind it. Actually the whole bathroom wall is covered in the sort.

My mom and I got the idea to do this when were were visiting the East Coast and were treasure hunting with my professional-treasure-hunting-Auntie. We were in an antique store and found a stack of old National Geographic Maps. I got them on the cheap without knowing exactly what I wanted to do with them, other than they were going in my house somewhere.

My first thought was to put them above my counters as a type of back splash, but that didn't seem practical (fire anyone?), and I didn't think they were exciting enough to just display as art. That's where my genius mother (she gets it from me) came in and suggested using them as a wallpaper. From there we chose the bathroom as the location and thought the best way to do it was to casually hang them in up in no real pattern with silver tacks, like the old school ones used for bulletin boards.

The hanging process took a lot longer than I thought, and I probably should have put more thought into it, like I did with the pictures. But I didn't, and started hanging and carefully cutting around all the plumbing fixtures (and sometimes not so carefully). Four hours later, my little fingers felt like they do after putting together a large piece of furniture of IKEA that came with a million tiny little screws and dowels. Only it wasn't just the Swedish that made my fingers sore this time, it was the Russians, Greeks, Chinese, Tibetans, Kenyans, Vietnamese...