“Get over it!” – Our Master Bathroom

Posted in DIY by Christina

Sometimes my Type A personality is a tough thing to get past. I’m a detail person. Details must mesh with one another, especially when it has to do with a project that I’ve worked on myself. And when a project feels half-done (or like it doesn’t flow) I can’t think of much else besides fixing it until it’s actually complete. Which explains why our master bath has been a huge mental pain in my arse for the past 5 months. My Type-A-Ness has been hitting the crazy-meter. And no, it’s not because it’s ugly. That’s a fact that I accepted when we bought the house. It’s a detail thing. A paint detail thing to be exact.

Just in case you haven’t seen our master bathroom, allow me to introduce you (prepareyourself)…

This room is decked out with navy blue and purple cultured marble (with swirls of mauve… we must not forget the mauve), 80’s floor tile with stained grout, peach walls, and what I like to refer to as our “coffin-shower”. I mean, just tell me that doesn’t look like I’m buried alive…

Not to mention the cramped, poorly thought-out layout with zero natural light. It’s quite the gem, really.

Honestly, nothing short of a full gut is going to save this room. We know this. So, the only things that I could think to do to freshen it up as we save for a complete renovation was to give it a good scrubbing and paint those awful peach walls.

And my color of choice was white. It was really the only option. I refused to give that terrible marble the satisfaction of trying to match it in any way.

My goal was to match the trim paint but use an eggshell finish (as opposed to the semi-gloss that was on the trim). Since we didn’t have any trim paint on hand, I basically just held up a bunch of color swatches to the trim and ended up with Behr Ultra Pure White 1750, which according to the swatch I had was a nice true white. Not too bright and blue, not too yellow. Just nice. Or so I thought.

Now, here’s where things got a little hairy. As I just mentioned, the color I was going for was a soft creamy white. But the color I was painting appeared to be brighter… more blue. I figured that it just needed to dry, so I gave it a chance. But after spending all day painting (it took three coats… yeah, not super impressed with Behr’s coverage in this case), I stepped back and realized that the paint was definitely more blue. And that blueness was making our trim appear yellow in comparison. Ugh. Not good. And then I held up my color swatch…. Yup. Wrong.Friggin.Color. You’d think I was crazy if I showed you the photo I took to demonstrate this. It just didn’t capture the difference as it was in person.

Now, did the paint color look completely terrible? Not completely. Did it look better than the peach? Most definitely. Some may be able to look past it, but I’m an undertone person. Colors either need to intentionally contrast or match exactly. The almost-matches-but-not-really thing is NOT cool with me.

So, I purchased new paint, this time emphasizing that the color needed to match the swatch exactly.

And time passed.

And nothing happened.

*coughcough* I probably should mention that the painting of the bathroom happened in OCTOBER. I even alluded to it in this post back when I painted our bedroom. I just didn’t want to post about the master bath until I got it repainted again.

But then, the repainting didn’t happen. And it kept not happening. For a long time. And then I realized something….

NOTHING will make this room look good shy of a full gut. (pause. rinse. and repeat) Nothing.will.make.this.room.look.good.shy.of.a.full.gut.

I mean, I know this. I’ve KNOWN this… So, after this statement bounced around my head for, like, 5 months I finally had a break-through: If nothing will make this space look good, then why am I stressing over a slightly different shade of white??? Lame, Christina. Totally lame. I guess sometimes it just takes time to realize that you need to step back and look at the big picture, ya know?? And I finally did. I weighed the amount of time and energy I’d spend repainting this hole (and mind you, it’s not a fun hole to paint thanks to all those ridiculous nooks and crannies. (Heehee! Gross.)) versus the reward (slightly different white paint), and I just.said.NO. Now, don’t get me wrong… If this were the final space, I’d totally do it. But really, this bathroom is gonna be ugly no matter what color white it is. So, we’re gonna rock it as is for a while.

Here’s how it looks now…

Remember how I discussed the difference light bulbs can make on a paint color? The above picture is a prime example of how a light bulb can make a space seem yellow. That’s a quick switch that I’ll probably make at some point.

You can also see in the pic below that the coffin-shape of the black-shower-of-doom is replicated in our toilet area (…you can even see the shower in the mirror’s reflection! Nice touch, right? Haha!) …

I’m just imagining someone in the 1970’s wearing bell-bottoms and a a large-collared shirt, planning this bathroom, and thinking how clever and groovy it was to carry the coffin-shape throughout the space. Heehee! And ya know what?? I just realized that our bathtub (which is oddly vortex-like)…

Is reminiscent of something else…

Remember that wallpaper that we found behind our wet-bar mirror?? And instead of peach walls (like in the bathroom), they had peach countertops! Way to tie it all together. This house must’ve been the place to boogie in its heyday. 😉

So, anyways, that’s the master bathroom. I have a hard time seeing us doing anything else to it until it’s renovation time (aside from a bit of accessorizing and some hardcore grout-cleaning). The awkward layout and the fact that both the shower and bath tub plumbing fixtures are set on the weird partition walls rather than exterior walls…

And the fact that the step that leads to the bathtub (??) was tiled around and grouted in (as seen three pics up), mean that only major changes will make a difference in this room. If the plumbing was placed differently, we could at least take down some of the partition walls to open up the space. But we can’t. So, we wait. I’m excited to someday take a sledge hammer to this joint (given that I can actually LIFT said sledge hammer… I might just kick the walls a lot instead. Heehee!). 🙂

In the meantime, I’m (well WE’RE — Joey’s hatred of this bathroom is as vast as my own) daydreaming of adding a solar tube for natural light, a HUGE glass-enclosed shower with gorgeous tile, maybe a clawfoot tub, and completely reconfiguring the space so that it makes more sense. It’s actually a pretty large bathroom… The space is just used so inefficiently (and the tub is so massive) that it seems small. This project will literally be a gut down to the studs once we’re able to do it. And we wanna do it right, so it may take a bit of time to save enough, but we’ll get ‘er done eventually.

So, tell me… what’s your favorite part of the space? The coffin-shower? The vortex tub? Any design ideas or suggestions? Anybody been through a full gut of this magnitude? Any tips or tricks?

1Apr2015

Our new front door… sort of

Posted in Decorating Fun by Christina

Renovations can be hard. I’ve heard it all along, but until moving into this house, I’d only experienced it on a smaller scale (a MUCH smaller scale). Since moving in, we’ve had a lot of work done and for every single project, we’ve experienced setbacks.

For example…

Carpet installation – Installer nicked a pipe and caused a flood

Insulation/Radiant barrier – Lowe’s kept measuring our attic incorrectly so installation was delayed a month

Leaky roof fix – Roofer showed up 5 days later than scheduled (without telling us… we had to track him down and stalk him via phone to figure out where he was… Aaaaaand there was torrential rain the night after he was *supposed* to come.)

Painting the exterior – Remember that time I ran off a paint crew?

Pool resurfacing – The tile that we were attempting to keep was unsalvageable (hence, more expense) and we experienced 3 weeks of ice/snow midway through the project.

Vent/duct cleaning – Mold. ‘Nuff said.

Laminate flooring – I haven’t even told y’all about this yet…. Empire installed a faulty product that scratches like crazy, but they refuse to replace it (Tip: Don’t purchase laminate flooring from Empire Today.). However, they did admit that it was installed incorrectly, so last week, we had to completely empty out our living/dining space so they could finally fix it (which they only partially did. Ugh.). #shootme

Which brings us to our front door. Remember when I told yall all the story about how it came to be in this post??

Well, it took over 2 months to get it installed. After being rescheduled due to a snowstorm, the day finally came. We were so excited that we could barely contain ourselves. They were supposed to install it at noon, so as the slowly-moving clock hands finally struck the hour we waited. And waited. Then, we got the call that our installer was running late and would arrive between 2 and 3pm. So, we waited some more. At 3pm, Joey got a call that they were 30 minutes out. Aaaaaand at 4:30 pm, they finally showed up. It was a good thing that we didn’t already have plans being that it was Saturday Night, right??

Once they finally arrived, they showed me the door on the street…

For anyone curious, it’s the 4-lite straight B Door with hammered glass from the Metro Collection by Feather River. We’d ordered it unpainted with just white primer (which saved us over $1K). The door looked pretty good, though I remember feeling like something was off. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something…. The door was turned around so that the interior was facing the street, which made it harder for me to recognize. Since everything seemed mostly fine, they moved forward with installation.

They removed our old door, then started installing the new door. Which is when I walked through the foyer and realized what it was bothering me…

The door opened in the wrong direction.

I told the installer this, and after a moment of thought, a panicked realization hit his face. I was right. Our previous door had opened the other way. And he hadn’t caught it. Crap. He looked at all the paperwork and figured out that the initial installer who’d come out to measure had entered the door swing into the computer incorrectly when placing our order.

Great.

Two months and the order was wrong to begin with.

So, now we had a bit of a pickle. Our old door was in pieces, and we needed a front door, obviously, so at this point our only choice was for the installers to continue installing the new/wrong door.

And it was painful to watch.

Not because the installers were unprofessional in any way (they were super friendly despite this huge disappointment and did a good job), but because installing a front door is a TON of work. I had no idea until I saw it first-hand. We figured out the mistake at around 6:30 pm, and they didn’t leave until after 10 pm. And they didn’t even do the finishing touches on the inside (like caulking or installing our new door handle – they used the old one as it didn’t require drilling any more holes) since they knew that the door would be replaced soon. And it STILL took them that long.

I considered leaving it the way it was. I walked in and out about 20 times to see how it felt, but I just couldn’t do it. Door swing has a surprisingly big impact on the feeling of a space. Having it in the opposite orientation completely changed the flow of the foyer. Before, you opened the door to our beautiful lawyer’s cabinet and a view of our mid-century dresser-turned-tv-stand in the living room. Now, you opened it to a closet.

Not quite the first impression I was aiming for. I wanted our house to feel the way it was originally intended and it was definitely more open and welcoming in the other direction. Plus, functionality-wise, our door bell and interior light switches were located on the other side (now behind the door).

It was clear that the door needed to be changed and installed the way it was supposed to be.

That Monday we spoke with the manager of Home Depot’s Door department, and got confirmation from the manufacturer that it was fine to replace the door and door jamb only rather than having to completely reinstall the entire unit with sidelights. This was a benefit to both parties… for us, it was less wear and tear on our doorway and a shorter installation time, and for the installer it was less expensive and would take less work. We were guaranteed that this would not compromise the strength or integrity of the door frame. So, that’s what we decided to do.

So now, we have to wait again.

This shot was taken as I started painting the wood trim. The trim is staying and is untreated wood, so I needed to paint it to shield it from the elements. I refuse to paint the sidelights until the permanent door is installed since I know the paint job will most likely be ruined during install. So, in the meantime, our door looks like this…
It’ll eventually all be that charcoal grey color (Black Bean by Behr) and the door will model the super cool new hardware we purchased, which I cant WAIT to see on there. It’s currently in the original box in our foyer. Just sitting. All lonely. Just staring at the front door. Waiting to fulfill its destiny. Hopefully, it’ll get to sometime soon. I hope.

At this point, it’s been almost 3 weeks since the door was installed and as of yesterday, the HD hadn’t received our door yet. So, cross all fingers, toes, arms, legs and knock on wood for good measure that our door not only comes in soon (and is correct), but that the installers get us in pronto (as opposed to the month we had to wait for installation last time).

In any case, despite any of these setbacks that we’ve experienced throughout the various reno projects, all of them have been worth it in the end. And this one will be, too. I have no doubt about that. And I know that they won’t deter us from taking on more projects in the future. In fact, weirdly enough, we’re looking forward to those projects… things like redoing our bathrooms and an eventual kitchen renovation. There’s no feeling like making your house your home. And that’s what these experiences are all about.

So, what kind of renovation stories do you have? I’d love to here ’em! 🙂