We Have a Bathroom!

Thank you all for your patience! Our bathroom guys came on Saturday for some retouching and they finished so late into the night that the light for pictures was all wrong. And then yesterday I thought it would probably be better if I actually used the shower before I wrote a blog post about it, so that delayed me a bit as well. But at long last--three weeks, to be exact--I can show you our finished bathroom.

Just a quick note--we have a shower curtain on order but we still have no idea what to do about window treatments (we're leaning towards sheer white cafe curtains) and definitely have no idea what kind of pictures to hang on the wall, so even though it's "done" it looks a little empty and lacks character. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments on what we can do to really own it (besides leave dirty towels around, dirty the sink with dried toothpaste, etc.).

First stop on our bathroom tour, the sink and toilet area. We now have a toilet that doesn't leak--after redoing the whole bathroom to replace the awful leaky pink toilet, we got a defective one right out of the box and had to return it to Home Depot and get another. Thankfully, because it's a two-part toilet, our contractors didn't  have to unseal the base part, just replace the tank, so it wasn't too much trouble to fix. (All details on brands and models for those who care are down below.)

For a teeny tiny bathroom, we now have a fair amount of storage space. The medicine cabinet is particularly spacious. I am definitely putting liners in those lovely, wood, dove-tailed drawers before loading them up with supplies, so we can keep them in nice condition.

Now that we have two lighting choices (this scone below, plus the light/fan combo on the ceiling), we realized that our paint choice isn't as purple as we first thought. The bulb on the ceiling is a very cold light, bringing out the cooler purple tones in the paint. These bulbs are warmer, making the walls look appropriately blue-gray. I guess it all depends on the lighting.

 Our fancy switch controls both lights independently of the fan, which is on a timer:

And now the tub area, with all the fixtures in place. It will take some getting used to, because our low-flow shower head in our main floor bathroom seems to have a lot more pressure than this one (even though it is much much cheaper both in price and quality). We are trying to figure out if that is at least partly related to being upstairs, because the water pressure from old shower head in this room, as I recall from the few times we used it, was pretty weak. Our company had recommended a much more forceful shower fixture, the Kohler Flipside. But at 2.5 gallons per minute (rpm), we turned it down and opted for this one at 1.75 gpm. Maybe we miscalculated? We're currently trying to decide if we will get used to it or not. In any case, it's certainly not the remodelers' fault.

I'm not sure if you can tell from these pictures, but we have one of those curved shower bars to give us a little more space. I think I'm glad that we went for an actual attached bar instead of a tension rod, even though it means that we will have holes in our tiles if we ever want to take it down.

Other than some concerns over water pressure, we enjoyed our showers in the new spaces (though we will feel much better with a curtain on the window--toweling off inside the shower was a little tight...).

Last view is of our doorway. Our only space issue is where to hang our bath towels. We have this tiny hook on the door but even with the fan, I'm not sure it will do a good job of drying out everything. We will probably have to rely on the shower curtain bar too, just to spread everything out.

A nice detail they installed is the door stop, to keep the door from slamming into the tub. We didn't ask for it, but once we saw it installed we realized it was a necessary addition. Oh, and I love that they used new door hardware--brushed nickel everywhere!

And now the threshold in front of the door. Looks great! The bathroom floor is lower by at least an inch, so they needed to put in a new threshold and paint and blend all the surrounding trim.

I committed a blogger sin by forgetting to take a "before" picture but trust me when I say that last week, this view did not make me very happy--the wood plank just outside the bathroom looked incredibly damaged and gray. We complained and they sent a guy over who spent over an hour sanding and treating the area and then staining it to the warm honey color of the rest of our floors. It's not an exact match but it's not noticeably different, especially given the variety in some of the planks on our landing.

Because of the height difference between the old and new floors, we have a large clearance under the door. D was not a fan but actually, I'm glad it's there. The bathroom is so small that the door has to clear any bathmat or rug we set out. With this added space, it can actually do that--any lower and it would get stuck.

Now the nitty gritty details for potential shoppers. First the stuff we bought--toilet is Kohler Cimarron, sink faucets and tub spigot are Kohler Forte from Home Depot, toilet paper holder, towel ring, toilet flusher, and towel hook are all Moen Banbury. Home Depot didn't carry the Kohler Forte line for these small details and from a design store, they would have cost at least 3 times what the Home Depot Moen line cost. They're pretty similar, so we didn't think the price was worth ordering the Forte just to match minor trim details. Tile is Marazzi Ghiberti. The accent glass is something from the Tile Shop.

Next, the "exclusive" design store stuff--shower head, hose, and slide bar are fancy Kohler products not available in places like Home Depot (the hose at HD is plastic and this one is metal, for example). Same with the sconce (too many plastic, cheap parts for the HD version). The granite is from a local stone place and it's called "Blue Pearl." The vanity is Merillat. The soap dish, shelf, and towel bar inside the shower are Lenape. The vent fan is Panasonic.

Psst...they're not quite done. Back when they demolished the plaster bathtub walls, they did some damage to the adjacent walls in our bedroom. They made good on their promise to patch it up, so they plastered everything on Saturday and are coming back tomorrow to sand, prime, and paint.