A tale of two bathrooms

To continue the tour of the new addition, it's on to the bathroom. Or bathrooms, as the case is here. Remember that in order to keep the window in our existing bathroom and avoid having to move our AC unit, we split the bathroom up so that there are rooms on both sides of the hallway. You can get an idea of that here in our last post from 2024, in the first picture. We used the same decor on both sides (tiles, paint, finishes and fixtures, etc.) so that they look like one coherent whole. Or that was the goal at least. You'll notice from that post that the pictures don't look all that different than they did just before we moved into the space--bathrooms don't require the kind of filling in that a bedroom does. But still, we've accessorized and made it our own.

Here's the view "from the toilet" of our....powder room? We don't really have names for these split rooms. It's the one with the toilet in it. Still loving the wallpaper a year later and thrilled that we were able to find something to put on the shelves (with them being exposed and in the room with the toilet, we didn't really want to store towels there, and open storage for toiletries would get messy, so we went with pure decor--two samovars and two Asian vases--that had been calling out for a nice place to live. And the color complimented the room perfectly).

We were able to use the curtains that had been in the office, so that was a good repurposing. And a year into our Toto Washlet I can say it was definitely worth the splurge.

I don't think I really need to explain what all the buttons do but let me tell you it is great. The only problem is that even with the lid closed, it definitely makes noise sometimes in the middle of the night randomly.

And sometimes, it makes noises not-so-randomly. The cats are fascinated with this toilet (especially in the dark when the two sets of lights both on the side and in the bowl are lit. I believe they think the toilet is trying to communicate with them. It definitely makes using the bathroom...interesting.

The other half of the bathroom also looks a lot like it did a year ago. We are still living with our mismatched chrome medicine cabinets because buying new doors was too expensive. I barely notice them. Mostly. The heated towel rack, the second of our three bathroom splurges, also has proven to be a great feature. Even in the summer, I like coming out to a slightly warmed towel (that then continues to heat and dry up after my shower). It's also amazing for drying handwashing laundry.

Inside the shower, it's spacious and the bench makes shaving easy. It's dark, because the light is controlled by the steam shower and therefore can only be turned on when the steam shower is on. If we had known that was how it was going to work, we would have demanded a different set-up. But we can drop the steam shower temperature to something like 55 degrees F so that it doesn't produce steam to get the light on when we need it. Annoying, but workable.

Here's a picture of the steam shower panel, and our third and final splurge. I am not using it this time of year, but I turned it on most showers in the winter to supplement the water temperature (which seems to cool dramatically in the pipes, despite our attempts to insulate them--a future project, I suppose).

And with that, our addition tour is over. Next time, we'll start showing off all the other many projects we've spent the year working on!