toilets

m. knew he was in for it when i got off the train one night and announced that there were four different flushes on a toilet so we had to consider which one we wanted. as if that weren't enough there are more aesthetic considerations than you could ever dream! what i don't understand is how there's a market for SO many different kinds of toilets when you figure that each home has an average of what... two? three? and how often do they really need replacing? i think there are as many options in toilets as there are in blue jeans and i figure there's a much greater market/turn over for blue jeans. sigh. well, it's kind of fun i guess. we narrowed it down quickly to kohler and toto. i would really like to do a one-piece toilet because it doesn't have that little space between the tank and the bowl which creeps me out with how hard it is to keep clean. similarly, it would be great to do a fully-skirted toilet- which means that it wraps around completely on the bottom, hiding what m. refers to as "the intestines". so our toilet of choice seems to be the toto guinevere, the first one shown. bonus, it has the super duper turbo flush (that's not what it's really called, but you get the idea). I found a place that had this toilet in the show room and dragged m. over so he could sit on it. (i don't love the idea of sitting on toilets in showrooms, but m. doesn't seem to mind) consensus was-- it's comfortable. so we're good. problem with the guinevere? this toilet is expensive.... so if we justify it for the master bath, that'll be it. there's no way we're doing it in all the bathrooms. also it looks a little modern maybe which will work fine in the master bath with the fixtures we've chosen (coming up in my next post) but might look a little out of place elsewhere....

moving on, then, we have the guest/someday-kids bath. while the master bath is just a shower, this bathroom has the bath tub to factor in. this is more complicated than it might seem. you have to choose between cast iron/acrylic/fiberglass and then how deep the tub should be. after extensive research and consideration ;) we decided to go with cast iron (most durable, most classic, keeps the water hotter longer) and a depth that was slightly deeper than you might do if you were only using the bath/shower combo as a shower ie deep enough that you could actually enjoy a hot bath.... but not too deep that it would be difficult to lean over to bathe kids or step over to use the shower. at the bath showroom that our builders sent us to, i had the opportunity (haha) to climb into the memoires bathtub which seemed a good balance. pretty to boot. as an aside, my husband the showroom-toilet-sitter did not feel comfortable climbing into a bathtub, so had to take my word on it. i guess we make a good pair. so having decided that we liked the memoires bathtub, it made sense to take a look at the memoires toilet. The one piece memoires toilet was $$$$$ so that was out quickly. The two piece is reasonable so that's what we're leaning towards.

Lastly the powder/laundry room downstairs. Not too choosy here-- we want something that looks fine and works well. Friends of ours have the toto promenade (the last one shown) which we've seen and tested (ha) and suits our needs just fine. If it ends up being less than the memoires two piece then we'll do that downstairs, otherwise we'll take two of the memoires and call it a day.