We have lights in our bathroom!
Behold. A chandelier. In the bathroom. On a dimmer switch that turns the lights low, WAAAAY LOW. Honestly, it’s so romantic and beautiful that I’m afraid to share it. Really, I am. You walk in, the light goes dim, and you’re filled with the urge to strip down and dip sloooowly into that waaaarrrrrm waaaterrr…
It could make dinner parties a bit more intimate than we’d intended.
Luckily, we have kids. They are REALLY GOOD at spoiling the mood. It’s one of the things they do best.
Yes, yes, I know that there is nothing on the walls. Good heavens, people. We just got lights! There are no doors! There aren’t baseboards in half of the room and the shower is in pieces! Stuff isn’t scheduled to go on the walls for at least 2 or 3 more years.
While I picked up the kids tonight, Paul took the progress one step further and installed the base boards around the vanity. The pictures don’t do it justice. It is starting to look like an actual bathroom. (Please ignore the shower, the trauma of which we are still in the therapeutic stages of recovery and not yet ready to face with a solution.)
We knew we wanted a chandelier in the room from the beginning. I searched some of the local salvage places a few times, but nothing particularly interesting turned up. The idea was to find something unique, with classic details, New Orleans charm, and not at all what you’d find at Home Depot. I found this particular model on Big Time Clearance online — with a coordinating vanity light. It was some fancy-shmancy designer that makes no difference in quality and was about 80% percent off. We agreed that the pictures were risky, but intriguing and we for it, picking up the set for a song.
Except for the mirror. That’s just a place holder. The actual mirror should arrive later this week — it’s a hugely discounted return on a slightly damaged product. (We get our best stuff that way.)
Here’s the shocker: the accessorizing doesn’t stop there! Today, we went to The Bank (local architectural salvage) and ordered DOORS. Next week, we’ll be able to install doors on this bathroom! It will put a real damper on the conversations we’re able to have with company — that’s quality bonding time, sharing those moments — but it will make it so much easier to keep the kids out of the bathroom when those lights take over and we just can’t help ourselves…
Here’s a few mood-spoiling pictures of the kids in the tub. Just like a cold shower.
(Paul took this one, cute eh?)
jenny | 03-Dec-08 at 7:30 am | Permalink
holly – i love what you guys did with the countertop cabinets on the vanity – what a wonderful idea! much more storage space than a medicine cabinet!
gary and i are playing with ideas for ours (i really should post some photos, but we’ve stalled at “shower and tub functional… what, you mean we should actually paint the green board?”) – we’re probably going to go with two sinks, but you’ve definitely provided food for thought.
(and i’ve often wondered why having kids around isn’t a better contraceptive… *grin*)
admin | 03-Dec-08 at 7:56 am | Permalink
We really wanted to do double sinks, but we just couldn’t come to grips with how much storage we’d loose. There were also some plumbing concerns — right now, the faucet is centered between the same studs as the main controls for the shower, located on the other side of the wall. It would have been hard to properly place two water supplies for two sinks with the way the shower is arranged (thermostatic valve, overhead shower, hand-held mist/shower, 2 jets)… not that any of it is functional while the tile remains unfinished.
The cabinet was not my first choice for “look,” but we are friends with the cabinet maker (great deal) and this really solved a lot of our storage dilemmas.
We can TOTALLY get on board with ‘it’s functional… what do you mean there is something else to do?!’ I can go months not seeing that there is no trim, no place to hang a towel, no doors.
The only downside of the cabinets is splash factor — the wall faucet definitely creates more splash. I love the wall mount (this was an affordable unit and was in line with comparable countertop mount models and since Paul was doing the plumbing, any increase cost of installation was not applicable) — BUT it does make more splash and you’ve got to be careful bending down to wash your face. Even with those issues, the clean-up is awesome… no fixtures to get around. We figured it was any easy way to give the room a bit more posh.
Julia | 03-Dec-08 at 10:39 am | Permalink
Wow! I really like your blog. I also did November NaBloPoMo and am now attempting December. I would like to follow your blog but am unsure as to how to do it, aside from just saving your page in my favorites.
Violet | 03-Dec-08 at 10:56 am | Permalink
I think it’s a beautiful job. Well done.