Tiles and toilets and vanities, oh my!

To say that we're spending a lot of time decorating our future bathroom would be an understatement. This is not our first bathroom rodeo, so we're hoping some of what we learned upstairs will apply to the new room. Because of that, we know 1) don't trust the contractor when you say you want gray tiles and he insists that the tiles you think are beige will "read gray" (they won't--I always look at that room and think "this is greige at best--why did I agree to this?") and 2) don't spend lots of money on a custom vanity that isn't much better than a pre-fab one. There's also 3) don't skimp on faucets and shower heads - get the ones with metal parts is something that our upstairs bathroom contractor taught us, and we are forever grateful. The fourth thing we learned--don't skimp on the bathtub--doesn't really apply since we have a shower.

So tile. There are SO many choices. This time, we have a bigger budget than in 2012, but it's not infinite. We're trying to stay with $8/sq. foot, so of course my favorite tile, which we saw in-person when some family remodeled their house, appears to cost about $28/sq foot. Oops.

Fortunately, we have lots of others that we like too. This one highlights some of the star elements from the above tiles (similar styles can also be found that is white stars against a black background):

This subway tile has really cool varied patterns:

I really love this tile along the back wall, and like how it's using three different tiles to create the whole scene, but I have no idea what it is (and, let's face it, it's probably out of our price range):

We're also still trying to decide how to integrate different tiles into our space. Personally, I look at a tile and immediately judge whether it makes sense for floor or wall, though I couldn't actually say why I think that. So we figure we'll choose one busier tile and one simpler tile and whichever space gets which (floor vs. wall) will depend on the tile itself.

Right now, this is our current favorite:

While pictures show it as going anywhere, to me, it definitely screams "floor." I like it because D mostly sees three dimensional cubes and I mostly see flowers. Meanwhile the actual tile is a hex shape. There's a black and white version too, which D prefers, but I want my gray bathroom (and the black and white reminds me too much of our existing 1950s bathroom).

If did that floor, we'd probably want a simpler wall (though I *really* like the patterned subway tiles and I'd be sad to lose them). And to keep the room feeling big, probably in a light color. Here's a porcelain "marble-like" tile that we think has a good amount (i.e. not a lot) of veins that is pretty simple (and cheap, yay!). It also comes in different sizes, which I feel like would be good so we could use bigger tiles for the shower seat. I think? We really feel confused about what would look good where. I keep wondering whether it would make sense to use only the "marble" for the shower (including the floor) or use the hex tiles for the floor even in the shower. Suggestions welcome!

Finally (maybe? unless you see a missed opportunity to integrate even more different tiles?), I think we'd like to do something more colorful/whimsical for our shampoo/conditioner cut-out in the shower. What do you think of these blue scallops?

Why blue? Well it's one of our favorite colors to decorate with and also, we're seriously considering a blue vanity and want to choose another color element to compliment it. Here's an idea of what we're thinking as our vanity:

Obviously wherever we can, we'll want to order samples so we can see how all these elements match in real life. We're also nervous to order a prefab vanity from Wayfair, though we're trying to use pictures of the insides of the drawers to choose ones that appear to use wood elements and dovetail construction, instead of just plastic/MDF:

We're also considering some beautiful pieces like this, which obviously will add to the cost but will let us pick out our own sinks (all the Wayfair vanities we're looking at are undermount sinks, and that's fine but it would be nice to at least consider others) and top:

D like midcentury modern so much more than I do. I like some good trim (apparently I like "Shaker" cabinet doors). Also--and I know this seems strange, the wood ones remind me of the cheap "wood" vanities I've had in almost every apartment I've ever lived in, so they end up feeling cheaper than the painted ones.

Whatever vanity we get, we know we want it on legs (but not floating--we like legs) and we want the whole floor tiled, so it wouldn't be the end of the world if we replaced it at some point, say if we get the cheaper Wayfair ones and realize we made an error a few years later.

Ok, you'll note that this already very long post hasn't touched on the powder room at all. Well that's because most of the decisions we make here will apply to that room too. We want the floor to match, and we plan to use our simple wall tiles as the baseboard (no other wall tile needed there). We haven't really looked into sinks because we know we want a very simple, small design and don't much care beyond that. The one thing that will class up the powder closet is...the toilet!

We haven't actually figured out exactly what model we want, but we know (ok, *I* know--D doesn't really care) that we want a Toto Washlet, which has a warm water bidet and (maybe? probably?) a heated seat. It doesn't need to play music or whatever the top end of the line includes, but it will not be cheap. It also includes making sure that we have electricity running to the toilet. This will probably need to be its own post but at least putting it here for a placeholder.

Please tell me your thoughts. I feel like I'm dreaming bathroom designs these days...and this doesn't even address light fixtures and other things we'll need!

The Hyphen

Ok we're getting very close to actually starting this project, so I better hurry up and blog the plans. Today, the hyphen! The hyphen is everything in the corridor that joins the existing house to the new bedroom. The architects call that section "the hyphen" and we like the term for it - it's the dash between two separate spaces (since I want a big bathroom, maybe I should  think of it as an "em" dash instead of a hyphen... yes I'm a grammar nerd). 

Very early ideas from the architect included altering our existing office and making it into a bathroom, but we already knew we wanted as little changed in our current home as possible, so I won't even show you those drawings. The first acceptable plan was this one:

You can see that past the brick walls of our home, the architect put a pretty traditional double-vanity bathroom to the right and a walk-in closet to the left. Nothing too exciting, but nothing problematic either. We were bummed to lose our existing bathroom window though (above the existing toilet, now covered by the walls of our new bathroom). We also went back and forth on whether we really needed two sinks (answer: no, but probably the next owner would, and actually they would be cheaper and more standard than getting a custom single-vanity for the large space). Otherwise, nothing really changed in this hyphen for a very long time, even as we tweaked the bedroom design. It didn't seem like there was much we *could* do. There's a bathroom and a closet, and we had a mostly fixed amount of space (and I wanted a relatively large shower). I also wanted a soaking tub but that seemed pretty unrealistic with our footprint.

But THEN, our summer brainstorming led us to move the walk-in closet behind the bed as a corridor, into the main rectangle of the bedroom and that freed up tons of possibilities for the left side of the hyphen. We decided that we wanted to go Euro style and separate the toilet from the rest of the bathroom. This would also allow us to shrink the right-side bathroom to where we wouldn't lose the window AND avoid having to relocate our existing HVAC. Yay! Then it was a matter of adjusting the layout to something that would feel comfortable and not too cramped.

This option creates a *very* small powder room (or WC, except since it has a sink I'm not really sure what the proper term is) with no window, and we worried it would feel claustrophobic. The door structure was also a little awkward, forcing us to enter a closet before entering the toilet area.

This one lays out the powder room with a window, though we lose a closet. The entry makes a lot more sense though, coming off the hallway rather than through a closet, but we worried it was excessively long and would look rather strange.

Using our "expertise" at CAD rendering, we made this suggestion to the architects:

Also not pictured, we proposed moving the doors to what is called the linen closet so that it opened into the powder room, since what you can't see here is that there are stairs to enter the hallway where it meets the existing house, so it made the door and shelving quite awkward. In the end, here is what we ended up with deciding on:

You'll see that the shower and vanity flip-flopped walls in order to make sure the two (now pocket) doors were in alignment, and we're strongly considering a steam shower (still researching, but it's in the plans). Our new layout has a powder room with open shelving and a closed linen closet on one side of the hyphen, and a double-vanity and sizable shower (possibly to include steam) on the other. This is all done without losing our existing window or HVAC (though we'll need a new unit to condition the addition, as you can see in this picture).

Now as we start to approach a contract and construction, it's time to talk products and mood boards, or whatever. Next time, tiles and vanities!

The Bedroom

A bedroom is really just a simple box. How hard can that be to design, you might ask. Well, it turns out that when designing the bedroom of a primary suite, it can be pretty darn hard. Here's the journey we took to arrive at our final bedroom design, from beginning to "approved permit" (YES! We have a permit!). There are quite a lot of fuzzy screenshots here, but I figured they were sufficient enough that you could get the idea.

First, after hearing our ask, the architect proposed three designs with different bed positions. I hadn't really thought about it before since we've always moved into a previously built home, but I suppose the bed position really is the key starting point to a bedroom. Especially when it's a king size bed, which ours will be (we are SO excited for that upgrade - soon there will be plenty of room for us AND the cats). So to orient yourself, the top of each picture is the back fence line of our yard (north-facing). The right faces out to our patio and the left to a currently empty lot that may one day be something more and which is the view of our house you get approaching up our street.

This look was nice, but we though having a wall with no windows on one of our more public walls might look weird architecturally:

This felt like some awkward wasted space in the entry way:

This one seemed ok, but that's a lot of windows looking out to a space that could end up being who-knows-what.

The verdict from that exercise was that we knew we wanted our bed to be against the wall that is depicted here on the left, facing out to our patio. Next, we considered storage and sitting space. We briefly toyed with some options that would create a picture window or pop-out. With a few different mock-ups (only one shown here), we quickly realized it would overcomplicate the design and really affect different exterior options. We also decided we want to have wardrobes in the room rather than a walk-in closet, something like the IKEA PAX system, but with the addition of some architectural accents and drywall to make them look fully built-in.

We also added in a couple windows back to the left wall. We felt these would be small enough to not be terrible if whatever ends up on the lot is something we don't want to look at, but still help the exterior look and provide a little light.

And that was the state of the room when we paused the project last spring, which gave us all summer to think more about it. After some discussions with some very design-savvy family, we came back to the project this fall with a new proposal that involved putting the bed on a partial wall with the PAX built-ins behind it. So the whole area behind the bed is essentially a really giant walk-in closet (though the cabinets will still have doors also). We started out with four full-size units like this:

But quickly realized that the partial wall had to line up with our entry door or it would look like you're walking into a wall, so that created a narrower corridor and the need to have thinner shelving on one side:

Then we played with adding a window or two back in, first one in the center:

And then one at each end, which we liked better because it would send some light into the main room as well. We also lengthened the entire room just a little bit to allow for enough space on the partial wall for normal-sized nightstands. Also during this process, we came up with a cool way to use some of the space to add another PAX unit immediately to the left of the entry. This will make more sense when I get to the "hyphen" post (the architects have been calling that corridor with the bathroom on it the "hyphen").

And...that's really it. We made an additional tweak once the detailed, more precise drawings came in, when we realized that a third full-size PAX unit would fit against the wall, and we figured out (at least tentatively/for the permitting and for the contractor bidding), where the electrical stuff would go. Here's the final drawing:

We really like how we will look out over the biggest part of our yard (and the space we're most in control of), how we have a wall of north-facing windows that should provide some lovely even light, and how we have a cool area of storage that is separate enough from the bedroom to give us a more open-feeling room. You can see from the parallel dotted lines where the highest part of our ceiling will be, which I think will also feel very spacious as it continues to rise past the bed. Having a floor-to-ceiling wall behind the bed that doesn't connect to any walls feels like a bold move that made me a little nervous, but now I'm already planning how to make that into a really cool accent wall, maybe even with a pop of wallpaper (though we don't even know what color we want the room painted, so that obviously has to come first!).

Raise the roof

In trying to think of how to talk about all the components to our addition, I thought I'd break it up into a few different topics to make more manageable blog posts. This is where I'll walk through our decisions from the early phase to today (and by today, I mean the phase where we are literally in the final approval before it all goes off for permitting! Eek!).

I figured the best place to start was at the literal top, so here's the post where I'll talk about our roof--the planned roofline, the materials, and everything related to the top view of the new space. For several reasons, we knew pretty quickly in the process that we didn't want a traditional gabled roof (a gabled roof is the roof that comes to a point at the center. It's what you probably think of when you think of a "roof" --the leftmost one below):

Why not? Well, first, and a common theme that will come up with this addition, is that we don't want to attempt to match our current house too closely, and, most likely, fail miserably. Our house was build over 70 years ago, and trying to make an addition that looks original is going to fall short, probably in a really ugly way. "Matching" brick and slate and other components will make everything look just slightly...off. So we don't really want to try. The other reason is this:

Here's the view from the back of an addition with a gabled roof (ignore other things like the covered roof/porch--that's a different post). Now take a look at our three upstairs windows (here's the current view, to refresh your memory):

See how you can't see two of the windows once we add the new addition? Yeah. Imagine what the view likes like from inside...Who doesn't love a view of a roof?

Now check out the same view, with a shed roof. See how much more visible the upper story windows are? But we weren't done yet...

That shed roof was the planned designed for a while, since last spring when we came up with our "let's pause this for now" plans. But one of my main concerns was how bright it would be in our future bedroom, and how expensive the window dressing would be that we would need to block that extra light. In addition to that upper level of slanted quadrilaterals on the edge you can see from the above view, there was also this set of extra windows above the doors that look out onto our patio. It seems silly to pay extra for more windows when we want the bedroom to be relatively dark and would therefore have to find expensive solutions to cover them. Enter: the final roof design!

We arrived at this after a few more attempts to find the right way to angle the vault:

This one still had enough space on the porch side that we had to include windows there, defeating some of the point of the new drop. It also just looked ugly.

This one looked fine but by moving the high point so far into the room, we felt like we would lose some of the airy/lofty effect of the ceiling opening up from the bed wall, since the ceiling starts descending before it gets as high, and right over the bed rather than past it.

Here's the finally roof design from the patio view, as well (you can tell it's from much later in the design process, when we're getting into the nitty gritty for permitting). Yet another reason we liked angling the roof back down a little was to get some roof line back into view here. Otherwise it was just a rather imposing wall of (many) windows:

And so with a final roof slope for the addition in mind, let's talk materials. We've now gotten to the point where we have a "spec sheet" with brand names "or equivalent" to price out with contractors. So we already know our roof will be a Berridge Tee-Panel standing seam metal roof. It's hard to talk roof color without talking about siding, and we're not there yet, but I think based on our siding choices (next time, maybe), we're going to go with a lighter gray roof, maybe Zinc Gray or Cityscape. The hope is that a lighter color might get less hot and and ideally, we'll get a pretty close match to our current gray house siding. We'll hopefully get to see some swatches in person. We've asked for it to be well insulated both for energy and also sound purposes (rain on a metal roof--peaceful? or deafening?).

A note on the part of the addition where the bathroom and hallway are--what the architects are calling "the hyphen": that part will match the addition in material (i.e. be a metal roof) shaped in a traditional gable centered over the middle. The only CAD view we have of that is from above:

The Start of Something Big

 I'm honestly not sure how to start a post that is months in the making of our new planned addition. We've gone through so many iterations of our idea and I want to go step-by-step through them, but I also don't want to wait forever for the final reveal. So excuse me if I seem a little scattered.

The background to this project was the inspiration we got from visiting family last Christmas. They had gutted the inside of their home, remodeled it, and added on a beautiful primary suite. While we were absolutely certain that any major project for us had to factor in us continuing to live in our house during construction, we thought there were probably some things we could do. There was just no way we were willing to rent a place and move out for a few months--that felt like too much. That meant no major additions in the main living space, especially since the kitchen and dining room overlook the backyard above the walk-up basement stairs (meaning a pop-out in that direction would require somehow rerouting the basement). So while we would LOVE a completely new, larger kitchen (rather than the cosmetic refresh we did 5 year ago), it wasn't something we would want to live through.

We realized that the office and guest rooms could easily be avoided for a few months if necessary, and decided to focus on what we could do in that area. We consulted a few design experts and arrived at the idea that expanding into the backyard through the office would offer us extra space without totally disrupting our lives during construction. We are only doing one floor of construction, rather than build up a second story, again to avoid having to totally move out of the upstairs for a while. 

And so, I present our current plan: a primary suite (bedroom and bathroom) off the office, expanding into the backyard. It will have a small deck that steps down to connect the space to our current patio.

Here is the zoomed-in view of the new part:

You can see from this picture that we're really getting into the structural design phase, so ignore all that extra stuff. The main idea is that from the office, you step down into a hallway (the step is because our yard slopes downward, so this reduces how high they have to build the foundation) with a bathroom on one side and a toilet/powder room on the other (more on why we did that in a future post). Then the bedroom is at the end of the hallway. It has wardrobe-style closets built into the wall, set off from the main bedroom by a floor-to-ceiling partial wall, then a large open room (king-sized bed, here we come!) that opens up onto a small deck.

Here's what it will look like from the top. I'll write a whole post on the roof angles soon, but this just gives you an idea of the overhead view.

And here it is looking at the house from the back yard. 

With this giant addition in square feet (516 sq. ft.!), it's funny to me that we don't actually get to say we're adding a bedroom, since the office (which currently counts as a 4th bedroom), will become an antechamber/sitting room/whatever into our new suite, so it can't continue to count as its own bedroom. This doesn't matter to us, but is annoying for if/when we ever sell. Still, we'll gain an extra bathroom and a huge new, modern addition, even if it will still be considered a 4-bedroom home.

The addition opens up lots of other follow-on possibilities for us, which we'll certainly be documenting in painstaking detail over the next year or so. Most importantly, and one of the reasons we're doing this addition, is that the kids will each get their own room upstairs, essentially taking over the top floor just in time for them to become moody tweens who don't want their parents around.

A word on timelines before I close this post out--we started talking with architects and came up with our initial designs last spring. Then we paused the discussions as we worked out our financing plan and just because of other life priorities. That turned out to be a good idea because it gave us the summer to rethink some of our design ideas and come back in the fall with some new thoughts. As I go room by room in more detail, I'll show you some of our early ideas and how we arrived at what we think is mostly our final decisions.

And get ready for tons and tons of pictures of bathroom tiles and paint swatches.

Autumn Petals

When we bought our house in--oh wow this is becoming the far distant past--2009, the gardens were all very spring-bloom heavy. We had mostly azaleas, rhododendrons, and camellias. Oh and LOTS of "decorative liriope grass, of course." Over the years as we've replaced some dying plants and reshaped our flower beds, we've made a point of attemping to plant native pollinators and a three-season garden with lots of food for bees and bugs that make it to fall. When the azaleas, camellias, and our newly planted irises died, the coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, cardinal flowers, milkweed, and bee balm came out. We had made it through summer!

But fall still left a lot to be desired. We had some beautiful volunteer goldenrod that I've cultivated (cultivated as in "didn't cut down"). The bees were clearly happy about that.

Then this spring, in planning for fall, we bought a few varieties of aster that seem to be pretty happy so far! The hot pink ones in front are "vibrant dome" aster. The light purple ones behind are "October skies" aster. In the background, you can also see some unevenly growing mums (they never seem to take off--I think it's too shady there for them). It's so nice to have some color in our fall garden, finally.

It wouldn't be a fall post if we didn't take a quick tour of some of our fall foliage, specifically with our newer trees. After bunnies nibbled a willow oak we'd planted in this very spot in the front yard two years ago, last year (May 2022), I planted this northern red oak, which was already starting out much bigger than our free 6'' willow oak. Based on the description here, it sounded hearty with good odds of survival (I feel like our tree survival rate is about 50%). It was a little floppy so you can see here that a bamboo stake is holding it up--the actual trunk is still just a skinny stick. But even young, this tree seems to be willing to put on a fall show. Here's the tree in early October:

And here it is two days ago. It's like someone flipped a switch and the tree decided it was officially time.

It would be so great to get a big shady oak tree in the front yard, if this fellow survives. It claims to be fast-growing, but I'm not convinced yet. Or at least it doesn't compare to the willow I wrote about in my last post.

Finally, we have an October Glory maple in our back yard, a replacement for the one that the deer got to in 2018. Planted in 2021 at the same time as the sycamore, dogwoods, and the willow, it seems to be doing ok so far, moving from this:

To this:

We were a little worried about its health for a few reasons. First, deer seemed to be nibbling all its lower branches (but, fortunately, aren't rutting its trunk, which we wrapped in chickenwire). Second, this spring we dug it up from its original location and relocated it about a dozen feet away. That always stresses a tree out. This picture, taken in June, shows where the tree is now, closer to the back of our lot. It used to be between the sad magnolia and the house.

Why did we relocated our maple? Well, here's the big news for those that made it to the bottom of the post. We're in the planning stages for the biggest project we've yet taken on: a new addition that will expand the house into the back yard! Now that I've more or less caught you up on the state of the yard, I'll write a series of posts bringing you up-to-date on a completely new addition that will expand our footprint all the way to the magnolia. We're so excited!

Giant Willow

I'm so excited to come inside and tell you some big plans we have for the house, but I feel like I can't leave the yard yet until I document a few more details there. It has been pretty uninspiring, but bear with me. So in on our back rock garden, things have progressed beautifully  this year. All the things planted there appear to be happy and growing. After the landscaping crew installed all of the things in the linked post, we made a few changes, adding some cardinal flowers and, most notably, planting a fast-growing willow hybrid in place of one of the red chokeberries, to provide some privacy from the parking lot in the back:

They were not kidding when they said it was fast growing...here is a picture of it in March 2022, right when we planted it:

Here it is again in June 2022, three months later:

Fast forward to August of this year, and it has long surpassed the shed height and is giving the trees a run for their money:

I feel like if we watch this tree for a few hours, we would *see* it growing...

I mentioned the cardinal flowers, so I can't get away without showing a picture of them--here they are with the rest of corner, looking all pink and pretty:

And a close-up, because they are so lovely. More important, the pollinating bugs love to hang out on them:

A short distance from the rain garden, next to the shed, another garden is blooming. First--a blast from the past, when D. put pavers around the edge of the shed to give it a bit more protection from splashing mud and just to make it look nice (you can see this picture is from before we had the rock garden):

Then this spring, after we'd taken down the vegetable garden and returned it to grass, oldest kid asked "can I have a garden?" So we made her a little one, cautioning her not to bother with veggies because, as we'd all learned, lots of animals will eat them unless they're well protected. So she opted for flowers. D dug up a portion of the grass next to the shed ramp, put in some brick edging, and added some soil. The rest was all child labor. Lots of annuals and a few perennials planted, and even regular watering:

It started filling in and looking great:

Here it is in early fall, with some very happy zinnias and a new iron border as well to help frame it. We definitely plan to pair it with another small plot on the other side next spring:

We still have a quick fall plant recap to go and then we move indoors for a while!