Welcome to Adulting, which is me being an adult. You would think that because I am a 34-year-old woman with a mortgage and four children I might already be an adult. That’s possible, I guess. Technically I am an adult. But I am also someone who never puts away laundry, always has dishes in the sink, hides messes instead of dealing with them, and ignores all possible hard things as long as possible. In my mind, those are all things adults don’t do. Those are things trash people do when they are in college and live in crappy shared apartments.

My goal for 2017 is to stop being a trash person and start being an adult. I need to get my junk under control – all kinds of junk, both physical and mental. One of the ways I’ve started doing that is by fixing and changing things in our house that do not bring me joy. (If that phrasing sounds familiar, it’s because I’m reading The Life-Changing Art of Tidying Up, although I’m not ready to commit to it as an actual lifestyle.) I’ve hated our kitchen faucet since the day we moved in, but I’ve never done anything about it. Now we have a new faucet and I am 100% more likely to do the dishes and wipe them with fresh flour sack towels.

The first room I decided to make more joyful is our downstairs powder room. It is a teeny, tiny little bathroom and I had a budget of approximately $50 so it isn’t as dramatic as a real bathroom makeover. I would love to replace the tile on the sink and the floor eventually. But there is plenty I can fix right now. And I did!

Here are the befores:

It really is teeny tiny. And whoever put in the tile used brown grout. I hate them.

I found that painting at a garage sale in our neighborhood years ago and plan to keep it forever.

This was a very misguided attempt at making the cheap plywood vanity look nicer. I messed it up and never fixed it.

At least the huge mirrors on this wall make the room feel a little bigger.

And here are the afters:

The wall color looks different in EVERY single picture. It’s a medium-dark green, not quite kelly green and not quite hunter green. I was going for emerald and it makes me very happy. It’s called Tournament Field and it’s Behr semi-gloss.

We have to have full coverage on that window because it looks right into our neighbor’s yard. But the curtain felt messy and the mini-blinds were always dirty, so this nice solid shade is a huge improvement. The kids still need their stool, but with the small trash can on the other side I can move the stool out of the way for grown ups.

The painting stays.

I painted the vanity the same color as the walls, so it looks more built in.

This container can hold my mascara, face lotion and wipes, a few bandages and other tiny things that used to just sit on the counter.

Tiny fake succulent from TJMaxx because I would kill a real plant but the green looks so nice in here.

This seemed like a good reminder to see several times every day.

Nice matching hand towels. I still need one more set so I can rotate when they’re in the wash, but the embroidered Christmas ones had to go ASAP.

Isn’t that color so much happier? I am definitely 110% less embarrassed to let people use my bathroom than I have been for the last decade.