Uptown Bathroom

Our bathroom renovation is done. I don't know how to express my relief. Last Sunday I saw friends for the first time in 5 weeks for reasons other than food delivery and showering at their apartment. 

Because a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the before, during, and after shots.

Before...

After!

We finished the bathroom on schedule at the end of August. We have been putting the "finishing touches" on it for the past few weeks. The quotes around "finishing touches" are ironic and meant to convey that sometimes a "finishing touch" can take 2.5 hours to execute. Like caulking around the floor line. Or hanging the shower curtain supports, or cleaning up the construction staging space, better known as our guest room.

We love the bathroom. I feel like a billionairess every night when I brush my teeth and apply moisturizer under its warm and well-placed lights. I call it the Uptown Bathroom because it is so sophisticated and timeless and luxurious.  (Though timeless is a dangerous adjective. The last time I heard someone say "timeless," she was lamenting the wide-brimmed asymmetrical sunhat she wore with her wedding dress in 1986.)

It is hard for me to pinpoint what I like most in our bathroom. Here are some of the most adored elements:

The charcoal tub. I sanded the exterior of the original cast-iron tub with fine sandpaper and applied Rustoleum, a very smelly-but-simple priming product. The Rustoleum was followed by flat gray paint called Dakon Gray by Philip's Perfect Colors and a flat finish varnish by Pratt & Lambert. I painted the feet a silver and coated those with a varnish as well. We had the white interior of the tub professionally refinished by Miracle Method. That is not a DIY project--their process was identical to painting a car.

The double sink. Having two sinks is pretty awesome. We don't have to share and we each get a medicine cabinet. That is cause for a baseline "hooray!" 

I had been eyeing the sink on the Restoration Hardware website for over a year. At my mom's suggestion, Dean and I drove one hour to Vacaville, CA, and checked out the Restoration Hardware outlet. Bingo!

The outlet has amazing medicine cabinets, sinks and hardware for 30% of the sticker price. The Robern medicine cabinets that we bought for $200 each are practically worth their own blog entry. They are so well-constructed and well-designed. They do not compare to any other medicine cabinet I have ever seen. Well worth the money.

The concession was that we had to mix metals in our bathroom to get the outlet deals. All hardware above the sinks is Satin Nickel (lights, medicine cabinets, and faucets). All other hardware in the bathroom is Polished Chrome (towel rack, shower system, sink base, and exposed plumbing below sink).  I think it works for one reason--we have grouped the metals in regions in the room. There is not obvious contrast between the nickel and the chrome because they are never within two feet of one another. Many designers are mixing metallics in their designs nowadays. Even so, it was a risk but I am happy with the finished product.

We had our own marble fabricated from an outfit called Marble City in San Carlos. They specialize in 1.25 inch marble which is the thickness we needed for a sink base that only had a frame, not a solid surface on which the marble could rest. On the marble lot we choose a giant slab of uncut and unpolished marble called Blue Sky. It looked very white with a few gray and blue accents before it got polished up. Low and behold, when that marble was sealed and delivered it looked much more detailed and colorful, primarily blue with dark gray detail, like a stormy sky. We were lucky the colors worked well in our bathroom because the finish definitely surprised us. Lesson learned--marble is accentuated when polished.

The lighting is great. It is so smart to position lights in the bathroom at eye-level. It makes you look so pretty when light floods your face from a horizontal direction. Plus, you should horde light bulbs that will soon be illegal with a really warm tone. We recycled the overhead light from the old bathroom to make up for my environmental naughtiness with the warm light bulbs.

The Italian porcelain floor is great. The herringbone pattern turned out beautifully. The subway tile walls are also lovely and inexpensive. Doing all of the tiling ourselves was not so lovely, but I must admit it was inexpensive. Dean will tell you those tales but I will announce that 3 out of my 10 fingers were worked raw one Sunday from tiling. I had a painful time washing my hands with soap afterward.

We also splurged on a new shower system which is beautiful. It is from an outfit called Sunrise  in Oakland, CA. I definitely recommend it.

Dean and I are breaking from renovations to ski all winter and also get a puppy. I am already scheming about our kitchen renovation and have a file folder of "inspiration clippings" for the project. Dean refuses to look at the file folder.

Bathroom Schematic Design

Our bathroom renovation has begun—in my mind and on Dean’s budget spreadsheets. This stage is called schematic design.

It is a minor miracle that Dean and I agree on what we want for our bathroom: a classic, clean design with a mix of modern elements and nods to the home’s 19^th century roots.

Restoration Hardware Gramercy Double Washstand, $2,475 without faucets (left); Pottery Barn Apothecary Double Washstand, $2,797 with faucets (right).

We have narrowed it down to two very similar sinks. One of these sinks is from Restoration Hardware and one is from Pottery Barn. I like the Restoration one slightly better because the legs are a little bigger. They are different sizes (one is longer and skinnier and one is shorter but wider) so we are going to re-measure the space before placing an order. I am trolling for coupons on the Internet, so send one along if you have it. If your cousin works at either retail establishment and has a discount, tell me that too. This sink is definitely the Snoop Deville of this bathroom.

A 'gaggle' of pastel bathroom fixtures.

Which brings me to the adventure portion of this blog… Dean and I have been spending our Saturday mornings at architectural salvage yards around the Bay Area! We are looking for the perfect built-in cabinet. Salvage yards are where remnants from destroyed buildings go to languish, until they are re-sold at bargain prices to renovation yahoos like us. Urban Ore and Ohmega Salvage in Berkeley and Building REsources in San Francisco have been our stops so far. You can find anything at these places—a zillion old doors, windows, appliances, tiles, architectural elements, and a whole lot of random junk like this gang (or gaggle?) of pastel bathroom fixtures.

Much like the Greek ideal of man, our perfect cabinet is unattainable to us. It exists and we can admire it—it is sitting in our basement laundry room, unused, in fact. But our landlord cannot sell it to us because it belongs to someone else. The Greek ideal cabinet is the perfect size—about 32 inches wide, 14 inches deep, and over 6’ tall. It has doors that can hide mismatched towels but also a counter space for display of the important stuff (like an obscene amount of Q-tips in an apothecary jar, a pitcher of cotton balls, a dried seahorse collection). Size is a critical factor in our cabinet because the bathroom is 10’ x’ 6’, which is big, but there is also a lot of stuff to fit into this room.



Our Greek Ideal of a cabinet (left) and the $300 cabinet at Urban Ore (right).

At Urban Ore we saw this cabinet, which is the closest we have come to our unattainable Greek ideal cabinet.  I love the glass doors and the hidden storage below, but at 46” wide it may be too big. We are going to have to re-measure to be sure.  This thing also costs $300 bucks! A little hoity-toity for the salvage yard, if you ask me.

Below are our inspirations for the existing tub. We are planning to hire an outfit called Mr. Bathtub to take it from its current condemned state to restored fabulousness. This is a two-day process involving many chemicals, so we have decided to outsource this to the pros. Mr. Bathtub is highly lauded on Yelp.

Bath tub precedents: Meryl Streep's cool tub from "It's Complicated" (left) and a random tub found somewhere on the internet (right).

Stay tuned for “before” photos and progress shots, coming in a few weeks.

Does anyone have any advice or want to express concern? Now is the time to do it!

Andi