Ha! Mine is not as major as yours, but I love the foam soap dispensers & not easy to find a nice one I like for the sink.

I refill my clear Method brand dispensers. I don't like the Method labeling imprinted right on the plastic, so I thought if I filled the dispenser with those colored, clear beads (like you use in floral vases and whatnot), it would add pretty interest, color-coordinate, and camouflage the Method label.

I knew it didn't look that great (okay...it looked awful), but left it there to see if it would end up growing on me.

My daughter had a ton of Q's on what those soap dispenser beads were & why they were there. Fine. She's 4 yrs old.

My mom came to visit and gave me same line of questioning my daughter did about the beads. I knew it was no good when my mom asked, "so this is a decorating thing, or is there more to it?".

Right there, I drained the soap and dumped the beads in the garbage. It was a good try.
Gayle

There's no problem with that headboard. It's the WINDOW that's wrong! You should have drywalled over the window. Now THAT would have been a big disaster.

Seriously. I like the headboard. Maybe it's a little too big, but the colors and textures are wonderful.

mclarke-
I agree. That window is a PITA! I tried and tried to talk dh into letting me drywall over it. The problem is, he wasnt at all confident in my ability to do it myself. Being the diy'er that I am :)

gayle-
You mean you put the beads in the Method container? You didnt put the soap in a new container with beads? It must have taken forever to stuff beads into that small hole LOL!

I don't have pictures because my biggest flops go back to the days when you had to have batteries, film, and get pictures developed which was about two steps too many for me to "waste" film taking pictures of anything but Xmas and even then.

1) my mother bought a small dresser about 60 years ago when she went to college and lived with two different aunts. By the time I remember it it was painted white with blue knobs and had toys in it. When I was about 12 my parents finished one of the attics into a room with white wood paneling and spring green carpet. I convinced my mom to buy me green and gold "oil drop" Contact paper and I covered the whole thing with that, filling in with pieces where I mismeasured etc.

The blue knobs didnt look good and no one was giving me any money to buy knobs so I found some old chrome ones. There were only six and I needed 8, and experimented with either the top or bottom drawer not having knobs. I also spent a lot of time pressing the edges of the Contact paper down until one day I got mad and ripped a big piece off and the paint underneath with it.

Around this time Better Homes and Gardens had a DIY on how to "tortoise shell" something, which involved a base coat and dashes of raw umber, burnt umber and terra cotta, a sponging technique, then multiple coats of shellac.

Since I did each drawer separately, it was obvious how I got better as I went along. I was on the last side when we had a big snowstorm and it overpowered one of the drains in the garage above where I was working and the only place the water dripped down was on the side I had just faux painted. I wiped it off and it kinda looked like wood graining so it was a tortoise shell dresser with one faux bois side. I was 13 so I was easily discouraged.

I stripped all of that off a few years ago and it sits in my closet partly old maroon stain (original) partly white in some dents and scratches, and partly tan basecoat from the tortoise shell. It still doesnt have knobs installed, they are inside one of the drawers.

Its still decorated on the back with a chalk drawing I did when I was about three.

We're allowed to laugh, right? Well then, LOL!!!!

Mine's sad. One of my new hobbies is drying flowers. We grew a wildflower garden close to the road and I have my flowerbeds all around the house. The wild flower garden was just gorgeous, Indian blankets, baby's breath..so many others! I'd go out there every day and snip a few flowers. I'd also snip a lot of my Roses and other flowers from my beds.

I bought a large pretty jar to put the flowers in and I had planned on making small jars of dried flowers for Christmas gifts.

I kept it on the kitchen counter and it was really pretty sitting there.

About a week ago I opened the jar to add a new flower, and somehow one or two of the flower stems didn't dry completely and the rest of my flowers were wilting. :(

Now the heat has pretty much stopped the wildflowers from blooming, and although my flower gardens are still doing well, it's kind of late to give dried flowers for gifts unless I want to go to a florist and buy a couple of hundred of them for thousands of dollars. lol

How sweet Pal that you still have it, I bet you were precious at 12.

Okay, Okay I've never had any so called flops in interior design. But I do remember a big flop when I did hair back in the day.

This lady comes in with maroon over bleached hair wanting a perm. And in those days and really today as well, you never perm bleached hair. I told her I couldn't perm her hair because it was bleached. She swore up and down it was not bleached and I said that it was. I was just beginning to do hair (think Vidal Sasson) but I knew bleached hair when I saw it. Again, I told her NO that I didn't perm bleached hair. She went to my boss and demanding a perm and my boss says, we don't perm bleached hair. She said again, "I don't have bleached hair". So, I told her I would only perm her hair if she signed a paper saying I was not responable for what could happen to her hair, which she did.

To say she could pass for Ronald McDonald's sister would not be a lie. All she needed was a striped pantsuit and some yellow clown shoes. Her hair was so porous and damaged that it took four hours for it to dry under the dryer.

When I combed that mess out it wasn't her that started to cry, it was me. Then my boss started to cry and the customer just sat there blinking and looking goofy.

I was mad at her for ruining my reputation as a hairdresser, I almost quit the profession. I should of and gotten into interior design like I wanted.

Never listen to clowns, I never liked them or trusted them.

Never listen to clowns. My new mantra.

Newdawn, I just love you!!!!

Dee

Oh, your a doll Dee!

....Jane

Oi, thank you for the laughs. I needed that today!

These are making me laugh so hard! Newdawn, I think I found my new motto to live by-never listen to clowns indeed.

And Gayle, this too:

"I knew it was no good when my mom asked, "so this is a decorating thing, or is there more to it?"

Priceless!!!

Ok, my decorating flop also isn't memorialized in pictures but I call it my beige period. When we moved into our house my first child, a boy, was 6 months old. I would go on to have a little girl. This is important: 2 infants/toddlers/children growing up in a home that I had done up in beige. Yep, beige carpet(!), beige couches, etc. Oh, and white walls. My goodness was that ever a mistake. Not to mention that after a few years when everything starts to look sort of tired anyway, beige morphs into 'was it white and now its dingy?' shades.

Of course now that they are older and not so destructive I have discovered color, leather that is indestructible and wood floors that don't develop cow tracks like BEIGE wall to wall carpeting....oh well, live and learn.

Ann

newdawn-
Are you as funny irl as you are in cyberspace?

Eclectic...wow! LOL! I do like the color and texture of the thing, and I can appreciate all of that hard work, but...wow.

Nothing outstanding comes to mind, but recently, I decided to make valances for the guest room. I had chosen a rather safe taupe floor length panel, and wanted a little more color and pattern. Spent a whole weekend making them out of fabric #1, then realized they were too small, and I didn't love that fabric in the room. Found the "perfect" fabric to try again. Spent another weekend cutting, sewing, pressing. Gorgeous! Wonderful! Until I hung them up...still didn't look right at all, so now I still have plain taupe curtain panels.

Pal, you MUST refinish that dresser!! What a treasure that is!

Years and years ago ,I learned that a bad paint color doesn't morph into a good paint color, no matter how many coats you paint, especially if you paint the ceiling and exposed water pipes too. My DH came home from work, opened the bathroom door, looked, and closed the door again. It was like being in an ugly pink brick.

I envy those of you who have only one memorable mistake! My most expensive (and stupid) mistake resulted from a DIY project that I undertook at my old beachside condo. I decided to paint my cabinets a lovely french blue. Being paint sensitive I took the cabinet doors outside on the 4th story private walkway leading to my kitchen door. I cautiously covered the railings and floors with plastic, lined up the cabinet doors, and proceeded to use a Wagner Power Sprayer (what was I thinking?!?) to apply the paint. Everything seemed fine until my upstairs neighbor came to inquire as to why her brand new white car (parked outside below) was covered in fine french blue speckles.... Don't ask how much it cost me to remove the paint from her car!

pamelan -
I'm LOL! I, too, have several flops. But never have I spray painted a car. Thats classic.

I am laughing out loud! I don't know whether the Ronald McDonald hair or the pink brick is my favorite so far.

Me?
Imagine a shag rug...really long, skinny, yarn-y shag...in three shades of green.
I thought it looked really organic and cool.

Give me a break. It was the early seventies.

My sisters had the long skinny shag (green in one room, blue in the other). When we had houseguests we had to make the rug stand up like grass before they were shown the room. Mom's orders. Luckily the blue room was where the dog chose to throw up (regularly), so their carpet was replaced after a few years with something normal.

bronwynsmom, that was my carpet too! In the early 70s. I did my room completely by myself. Well, with the exception of the faux French Provincial furniture my father foisted on me. The rest of it was MOD, baby. Green shag carpeting, flower power wallpaper on the one wall they let me put it on, a white vinyl round chair that spun, a hanging green glass petal lamp over it for my own reading corner...and then in the rest of the room, lovely curvy Thomasville girly French Provincial that related to me *not* at all. Even had one of those porcelain lamps of a milkmaid and her swain out in the meadow. I picked pieces of grass off it.

My decorating messup is that I seem to have a rule in my life (other than that room, which pretty much summed up my childhood): I'll debate and deliberate for weeks, choose something, bring it home, and THEN and only then does the right answer appear, and it's not what I bought (or, ahem, formed a relationship with, in other areas of my life). ALWAYS the second time around is the right one. Wish I could say it only happened once, but it's my M.O. Don't know why other than that I'm a Libra.

A-HAH! Outing the old shag owners. I'm so happy.

Mine was in my first apartment. I can't believe I remember all this, but here goes...
The curtains were sheets with a basketweave pattern in brown on off-white. I made giant floor cushions from some sort of rough cotton from I-forget-where. The sofa was a long, low, cream-colored cotton velvet thing that a friend was replacing, and sold to me for practically nothing. I found two wooden packing cases with Chinese characters stamped on them behind an import store to use as end tables.
I had an Indian printed cotton bedspread hung from a bamboo stick on cup hooks in the ceiling to divide the living room from the dining el with my old wooden drafting table backed up to it, and a lightbulb on a cord hanging over it with a basket with a hole cut in the bottom, inverted and lined with tinfoil, to shade the bulb, as my drawing lamp.
I painted the back wall a sort of paper bag brown, leaving a wide border of apartment off-white around it and rounding the corners (I drew them with a 45 record as a guide), and hung a group of reproductions of reproductions of reproductions of old master drawings, with (remember these?) glass and clips for frames.
Some boyfriend filched six or eight concrete blocks with enameled faces from a construction site somewhere for the block-and-board bookcases that were de rigeur. Half of that was covered with books, and half with houseplants.
My mother bought me some Thonet chairs from the state surplus, and I found an old English draw-leaf library table at a junk store for about $50, which was probably nearly a week's take-home pay in those days.
I had a Fisher stereo...a turntable and two speakers...in walnut cases, and a zillion albums.
I had long blonde hair and a guitar.
And I had...wait for it...a big lovely heavenly waterbed!
I thought I was the hippest cat in the jungle.
The girl who used to be me...

I hired a decorator at my last home. I told her I wanted a Victorian look. She said flowers? I said NO, I hate flowers, she said that's what Victorian is. ???? I showed her pictures in a book I had, she said that was traditional and I said OK....IF YOU SAY SO.....

She preceeded to pick out Waverly brownish pink paint, brownish pink flowered wall paper & matching fabric for gathered country style curtains. It was a disaster!!!!

My biggest disaster was after we moved into our first house. We were broke from the closing and the only thing I could afford was paint. I painted anything that did not move.

Our bedroom was a Kool aid shade of dark purple, with walls, carpet, door and trim all the same shade from the p.o.s. Luckily, they hadn't painted the mirror that shade, lol. (and I can't forget the hunter green plastic mini blinds to this day... ugh).

I painted the ceiling and was fiddling with touch ups with a full gallon of white paint on the painter's ladder I was on. Sure enough, I slipped and it dropped and we had a HUGE white splatter in the middle of our dark purple carpet in the middle of the area between our bed and closet. The can had fallen a few feet before impact, so the paint got a chance to really spread. If I had been anywhere else in the room, I could have covered it with furniture or the bed, but I happened to hit the wide open area... sigh.... We scraped together the money somehow and we got our new carpet well ahead of schedule.

Fast forward approx 7 years and we move into our next house (current one). The p.o.s had a pale bone color carpet in the master bedroom. DS, approx 3 at the time, comes barreling in with a full cup of hot chocolate, which ends up dumped just inside the doorway in full view of everything. We had plans to immediately extend the house including the master, so we did not replace the carpet (but I did get a lot of the stain up by acting quickly). Of course, plans got messed up and it is 4 years later and we are still a few weeks from doing the extension, getting a new master bedroom carpet and getting rid of the hot chocolate stain. With our track record in master bedrooms, I am afraid of what will happen to this next one!

These are great stories...love the 400# headboard...LOL.

Usually haven't had too many disasters but did this year. I wanted to surprise my 91 year-old Mother by sprucing up the guest bedroom that is hers when she stays with me. She likes bright colors and I don't so I picked out a yellow tropical print wallpaper, had the 1 big wall muded and papered. I bought a similarly matching quilt for the bed from Horchow and hoped she would like it...well she didn't like it at all, says it is too busy and I do have to agree with her. I really should have gone with something I wanted to do and not tried to do it for someone else. This room has furniture from the 40/50's and was my Mom & Dad's first true bedroom set. Needless to say I should have tired to decorate according to the era. When I have some extra money, I will get that paper removed and do something different in there. For now it is a tropical disaster. Pay no attention to any decor as I haven't even attempted to do anything else in there. The doilies are my Mom's from over 50 years ago a friend made them for her. (Excuse the poor quality pictures...used my phone.)