If at first you don't find what you want...

... make it!

I present to you: Our future medicine cabinet!

I know it looks like a humble shadow box from Michael's, but soon it will attain its true form!

Part of my distracting myself from the world includes working on bits and pieces of our fall bathroom mini renovation. We'll be replacing the current comically small medicine cabinet with just a mirror ($5 from Goodwill, baby!), which means we'll need a proper cabinet on the adjacent wall. I couldn't find an official medicine cabinet shallow, small, or light enough until I started to consider non-cabinet options. An additional challenge came from my want to have it customized like our beloved coffee bar.

Gratuitousness coffee bar shot!

Gratuitous coffee bar detail!

Back to our future medicine cabinet!

The cabinet door has a 9x 12" window--the perfect size for a painting. I bought a $10 piece of birch from Gomez Art Supply (love them, forever and always) and had our local hardware store cut out the dimensions I needed. (They're delightfully used to my random requests and always look forward to seeing photos of the finished project.) The leftover wood will later be cut down into the inner shelves.

Now to prime the centerpiece!

Far be it from me to part from the cephalopod theme we have running throughout the house. Just as our coffee bar matches our purple, gray, and black kitchen, I wanted the medicine cabinet to compliment our bathroom's green, black, and gold. This immediately suggested absinthe to me, but that hardly went with my established coffee company.

Enter the "Sleepy Cephalopod Speakeasy!"

Why frogs? We've several prints of Chinese ink paintings featuring frogs in the bathroom, and I wanted to better tie them to our other cephalopod decor. Plus, how could I resist painting tipsy frogs?

Detail of a painting by Ito Jackuchu, 1790, fondly referred to in our house as "Derp Frog." I love him.