Decorating with Suebob – Help me!

Thank you to Kleenex Hand Towels for sponsoring this post about how I’m making my mom’s bathroom guest-ready! To learn more about Kleenex Hand Towels or to find out how you can save money when you buy your own, check out this site.

The guest bathroom at my mom’s house is pretty plain. It used to be my dad’s bathroom. He passed away 2 years ago and ever since, it has been devoid of everything but hand soap and toilet paper.

When I heard about the opportunity to write a bathroom blog post for Kleenex Hand Towels, I knew what I had to do. I wanted to spruce up the bathroom without doing anything that would involve:

• Paint
• Power tools
• New carpet

I’m not much of a decorator. I didn’t grow up in a family where we would go out get all new stuff at once. We’d usually get by with things we purchase as we need them, so they’re funky and mismatched. Come over to my house. You’ll see.

But I decided to forge ahead, despite my lack of skills at this sort of thing. Hell, I’m only 51 years old. I can learn new stuff! I went out and shopped at Target and got:

• 2 each green bath towels, hand towels and washcloths, on sale for $26 total.
• A blue, green and tan striped bath rug, $12.34, which I didn’t end up using because it clashed with the existing carpet. It works fine at my house, where multicolor is the theme of the day. Instead, I used a $20 memory foam bathmat I had bought for the dog to sleep on while I was laundering her other memory foam bathmat. She’ll just have to find somewhere else to sleep for a couple hours.
• New cabinet knobs $11 for 4. I used 2 but will find another use for the other 2

• A trash can, which went with the rug I didn’t use but not with everything else, but it was only $3 and I can use it at my house. So then I bought a cute quilted-looking metal trash can for $20. I rock at this. I’m decorating two houses at once.
• A basket  – $7 – for the Kleenex Hand Towels, which are single use guest towels so your friends don’t have to decide whether to actually use those cute little lace-edged guest towels you put out

• A set of 4 silver frames for $6 total. I ordered prints of some of my flower photos online from Target for 19 cents each. I also chopped up some other flower photos and put them in photo cubes I got from the thrift store for 95 cents. I’m decorating here, people! A total of about $10 in prints because I made lots I ended up not using. So let’s say $5. (I used flower photos because I thought it would be rude to put photos of people in the bathroom. I don’t know why, it just seems disrespectful to stick my loved ones in the bathroom. Is that weird?)

• A fake candle for $10. It’s made of scented wax, but it has a flickering tea light inside so you don’t burn the house down. Good idea.
• A canister thingy with three sections for cotton balls, cotton swabs and something else I’ll think of later. $6
• I also stopped at the hardware store and got a new metal switchplate and outlet cover to replace the dingy old plastic ones. About $12 total. (Update: but then I had to return them because I swear to God, Mom’s incompetent painters PAINTED the switchplate and outlet cover to the wall in such a fashion I could not remove them without taking chunks of paint off. Who DOES that? I hate people.)

Sorry you had to turn your head sideways. That’s thanks to Yahoo killing off the Picnik photo editor in Flickr, and replacing it with Aviary, which SAID it was rotating the photo, but then just didn’t. I hate Yahoo.

Edited to add: The first person to use the guest bath was my sis, who said “Where do you GET those Kleenex Hand Towels?” She wanted to buy some for a gift for her family member who has such dainty, beautiful hand towels that no one ever dares use them. She says her whole family is sick of wiping their wet hands on their pants. Hilarious and perfect.

Join the 14 million people who have already joined the Clean Hands campaign by using Kleenex Hand Towels, and click here for savings and more!

I was selected for participation in this campaign as a member of Clever Girls Collective.

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