Bathroom Update No.147

This bathroom remodel is sucking the life out of me. Must celebrate small accomplishments; acknowledge setbacks and move on.

The tile is all laid in the kids' bath except for what's supposed to go behind the vanity. We fell behind just a little on that because we had chosen and assembled the IKEA bath vanity, but our contractor inspected it and told us that he couldn't, in good conscience, install it. He said the material was so flimsy we'd have to replace it in just a couple of years. We respect the dude, so now we're looking at other options, like this guy. I sure hate having to make design decisions with a time crunch. --That's an easy way to make an expensive mistake.

***This just in: My friend texted me to tell me that vanities and tops are on sale at Menards. The vanity we like is at Home Depot, but since they do price-matching we can apply the sale to our purchase! SCORE.***

Moving on to the master bath, our beautiful Porcelanosa floor tile is installed! The only disappointment here is that the grout color turned out much lighter than anticipated. We'll need to go back and darken it with a special grout tint. Other than that, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The tile looks like wood planks and they are of different sizes and some are designed to appear "end grain" to break things up and introduce interest. Swoon. Below you'll see that I'm trying to find a paint color for the accent wall. Everything else will be steely or cool white, so this is our rare opportunity to bring warmth into the space. Y'know, besides the warmth produced from the massive firebox on the wall. . .

OK, see the wet splatter on the cardboard? I turned on one of the faucets and it just shot out. Tim chose those open head faucets for the double sink and there was nothing to keep the spray from nailing me. Gotta work on that water pressure. . . As you know, this isn't the largest master bath in the world, yet we're trying to cram all sorts of things in here. The trick to accomplishing this, we've found, is to search for items using the metric system. Pretty much everywhere except the United States knows how to do modern, space-efficient design. -Like that vanity top, it's delicious to me. 

There's actually quite a bit of tile left to install in the master. All of the walls (yes, we're crazy) are getting covered, and we still have to come up with a scheme for the firebox wall. For the latter, we're having to strike a balance between cost and beauty. We chose what we consider to be the most beautiful tile for the job, but it was so pricey we couldn't afford to cover the entire area with it. We gotta come up with something creative to solve this problem. Stay tuned.