February 2005

February 25, 2005: Well, we've been laying low off the website the last four weeks, but only because we've been busting our humps the whole time, and the master bathroom is finally done!

Pretty amazing to look back and realize we demolished the old master bathroom almost exactly one year ago today. Even more amazing to think that we actually bought this house with a master bathroom that looked like this:

Ugh... Most amazing was that we actually managed to live with it as long as we did.

From this...

 to this...     to this... 

And then finally to This...

(roll your mouse over the two photos below for before and afters, or click on either one for larger images)

Ahhh... sweet sigh of relief. Not only do we have one huge, expensive, blood pressure raising, homicidal rage-inducing project done, but for the first time in three years, there is no water dripping into the kitchen! The plumbing for this new bathroom is complete, and the hall bathroom has been officially decommissioned.

Since the day we moved into this house, the upstairs bathrooms have leaked down into the kitchen below them. And every morning, we'd come down for a cup of coffee after our morning showers, empty the buckets under the regular drips, move bins around every couple of weeks to catch the shifting drips, and shove towels in odd spaces to catch new and unexpected drips. But now we don't have to do any of that-- we just have an everyday, plain old dry kitchen.

Huh. It's not very exciting.

Kind of dull, actually. Does everyone live this way?

Anyway, on to the bathroom details...

From the moment we began planning this bathroom, we knew that a double vanity was critical. One sink for us, one sink for the Cat to drink out of. Nothing worse than fighting a large, attitudinal feline for the faucet every morning while he gets a drink and we try to brush our teeth. Pre-caffeine, we always lost:

The sinks are English Turn Vessel Sinks, Elizabethan Classics series, from Vintage Tub and Bath, and the faucets are Cifial, Highlands series, from Builders Home Hardware. Right now, the faucets are only mounted temporarily-- we're waiting on mounting nipples the proper length, and once they arrive in the next couple of days, we'll mount the faucets properly, flush with the wall, with escutcheons to hide the hole edges. The mirrors and light fixtures are stock items from the Evil Orange, as are the towel rings and toilet tissue holder.

The vanity itself, believe it or not, is a second-hand farmhouse kitchen table that we picked up for $20 a couple of years ago at a huge local tag sale, and have been storing in our garage all this time for just this purpose. We chopped off the back legs, cut it to 22" deep, and flipped the cut part up to form the backsplash. Pretty nifty, huh? The price was certainly right. Below are detail shots of the faucets and light fixtures:

The coolest things I found, though, were these silver things to the right of the basin in the photo below:

What are they?

Toothbrush Butlers!

Who ever knew such wonders existed? They hold toothbrushes, toothpaste, and all manner of flosses, picks, and whatever. And when you're all done, throw everything back in, close the cover and not only is everything out of sight, but it's also covered and protected from random flying and falling things (and germs!).

And before you ask, yes, it does worry me slightly that I'm excited about this, but actually having a decent bathroom for the first time in three years just does things to one's psyche, so I'm not rushing for the med cart... Yet.

The other critical component of the bathroom, aside from the double vanity, was a huuuuge Jacuzzi tub. Apparently, according to the bathroom cognoscienti, we are hopelessly out of date, because jetted tubs are sooo, like, um, yesterday. Instead, we're supposed to have installed some ridiculously high tech glass-walled shower with 15 heads shooting off in all different directions, so that we don't even have to move in order to get all our body parts clean from every imaginable angle. It's also supposed to have a steam function, so that you can sit back and pretend you're cleansing your pores in your own private spa. In a pinch, you can even cook salmon filets for your dinner party of 12 even if your oven breaks.

Uh-uh. Not for us. Call us old-fashioned, but it just isn't a bathroom fixture if you can't soak in it. Preferably with a glass of wine sitting next to you. And candles. Oh, and bubbles. Lots and lots of bubbles. And call us extreme radicals (yeah, we always were the type to run with scissors in Kindergarten) but we even use bubble bath with the jets on. What can we say... we live on the edge. 

Said soon-to-be-froth-filled bathroom fixture is a Jacuzzi Mito 6, from Designer Plumbing, a fabulously inexpensive internet supplier. The faucet mounted on the tub deck was an Ebay find, scrounged at the last minute when I discovered that the original fixture I ordered, a Kingston Brass wall-mounted one, wouldn't work because the tub deck was too wide, and if we mounted it in the wall, the spout wouldn't reach over the edge of the tub. Oops.

Hate those $400 mistakes. Oh well, what can you do? I'd ordered the faucet too long ago to return, so that just means either our hall bathroom or our daughter's bathroom will just end up having a Really. Nice. Faucet. Despite the last minute scramble, though, this one's just fine, and will suit the purpose-- tub filler for baths, and hand shower to rinse out the tub and hose down the walls during cleaning:

The shower valves are the Beaumont series from Hudson Reed England, and the nifty little soap holders are Samuel Heath, also an English company. Like any of the photos on the site, click on the one below to get a larger view for details:

Really we didn't intend to get bath fixtures from all the way across the pond, but we didn't have much choice. We knew we wanted thermostatic valves-- adjust the temperature control dial to wherever you want it, and leave it there. Every time you want to shower, just flip the lever on and off. The shower temperature stays where you set it originally, and you don't have to fiddle with it to adjust it every time you get in the shower. One valve and showerhead for me, and one for the Kilted One-- no more having to adjust temperature up or down, and no fighting over the water temperature when we're in a rush to get ready and out the door and have to share the shower.

Simple, yet brilliant... Right? The engineering's not particularly complicated or expensive, has been around for years, and is standard in Europe. But just try finding it here. Only a few companies make them, in one or two styles. All butt-ugly, of course.

Same with the soap holder. A simple little thing: arm screws into the wall, and has a magnet on the end. A small metal clip pushes into the bar of soap, the clip hangs the soap to the magnetic arm, et voila! No more gooky, slimy soap dishes. The soap hangs there, maybe drips a drop or two, and dries neatly, ready to be used again. The perfect relationship salve for completely frustrating-to-the-point-of-mildly-infuriating people like the Kilted One, who abjectly refuses to use a liquid body wash (thereby eliminating the whole soap slime problem) and people like me, who really hate cleaning slimy scummy soap dishes, yet inexplicably find themselves attracted to non-body wash-using men.

Once again, simple yet brilliant. But they're unheard of in this country, and I can't figure out why. Surely they're cheaper than months of couples therapy, they're definitely cheaper than a lifetime of Xanax, and they're infinitely less annoying than an appearance on Dr. Phil. And just think of how much money we'd all save in Tile-X: Premium Mildew and Stain Remover.

Anyway... Retreating gingerly from the realm of relationship-threatening soap scum, we back resolutely into the terra firma of Fun! Frivolous! Outrageous Indulgences! and present to you:

Warm towels. Courtesy of a Warmrails electric towel warmer. Quick, efficient, easy... lots of room for lots of warm, dry, fluffy towels. An unlimited supply, especially on cold, slushy, dreary February days, goes a long way towards healing the great gaping wounds in our relationship caused by the whole, well, you know... soap thing.

The final element in the bathroom is Storage. Nowhere near as important as actually having two sinks, two showers or a huge bathtub, because we don't generally have lots of stuff to store, but you've got to put the spare towels, hairbrushes, and toilet paper somewhere, right?

"Somewhere," was the big old armoire we'd dragged home from the same tag sale as the farmhouse table/vanity we showed you earlier, in November 2003 (click on the link and scroll down to the November 18 entry for the story).

We spotted the thing at the tag sale, sitting forlornly in the corner of this big old warehouse. I thought it was terrific, couldn't understand why it hadn't been snapped up, and happily plunked down $40 for the privilege of taking it home.

Of course, once we actually got our arms around it to drag over to our old Explorer to get it home, we started to understand just why, exactly, no one else had bought it. It was freakin' huge, freakin' solid, and ohbytheway, did we mention that meant it was freakin' heavy?

We roped our kind-hearted neighbor into helping us unload it from the truck onto a dolly, and get it wheeled across the house to the base of the stairs, where we all proceeded to herniate disks and burst blood vessels wrestling it up the stairs and deposited at the top of the upstairs hallway:

Where it sat for the last year, mostly because it was too big and too heavy to do anything else with.

Including, unfortunately, moving it into the bathroom. Mmm-hmm. Yup. We spent an hour twisting, tilting and turning it every which way, but it just would not make the corner into the bedroom. We briefly considered bagging the idea of using it for bathroom storage, but we had no other choice. It couldn't stay where it was (it was so huge, we had to live with it partially blocking the door to one of the guest rooms all these months), it wouldn't fit in any of the other bedrooms, and we most certainly were not dragging it back downstairs.

What to do? Why, dismantle the thing to move it, of course! Easy, right? Well, actually, it was, once I found the various screws holding it together. Except for the part where the last whack with the mallet brought the entire thing crashing down on my head. That kind of sucked. Oh yeah, and the part where the few pieces I'd left together fell apart when we moved them. That kind of sucked, too. And the whole reassembly bit, where the parts didn't want to fit back together the way they did originally. That really sucked.

But with some judicious whacking, shaving, clamping and cursing, it all went back together:

And we were right! It's perfect in the bathroom, it's big enough to store all our bath stuff, including towels, and the bedroom linens. Best of all, it was wide enough to fit one of our other little indulgences:

Our own mini fridge.

Hee! We're almost as excited about it as we are about the toothbrush butlers. Perhaps we ought to revisit the issue of that med cart after all.

The final photos are detail photos of the floor. The black is Black Nero marble, which we also cut in half to lay the six-inch border around the floor. The white is White Carrera marble, which we also used on the tub deck.

That's about it, for now. We've still got a few minor things to take care of-- aside from re-mounting the faucets, we've got to paint the door and install the doorknob, and install the window treatment for the window above the tub. That's another Very. Cool. Thing, but we won't give away the surprise... you'll just have to check out next week's entry to find out what it is.

Meanwhile, we think we need a bath. Well, we really don't, but we think we'll take one anyway. Why?

Why, because we can, of course.

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