bathroom updates

Our masterbath shower door is installed. It looks so faaaaancy!

...and most of the hardware in the shower is installed. The whole bath is gorgeous- can't wait until we can actually use it! We did run into a snafu with a couple of the handles of the RH Dillon faucet and diverter. After a lot of worry and a lot of phone calls we hope it's resolved. RH is sending out replacement handles and hardware which hopefully will arrive soon. That's the only thing holding us up from being able to use our bathroom.

See that hole in the wall above the main shower faucet? That's where the diverter is suppose to go which will switch the water flow from the overhead to the handheld.Also, here you see our sink.. with sadly only one working faucet. Still, I can be patient, the bathroom LOOKS amazing even if it isn't yet functional!

and talk about life changing--- we got a towel bar and tissue holder installed in the guest bath (which is what we're using until we 'move' into our bed/bath). What a difference that makes! No more hanging our wet towels over the shower curtain bar-- no more reaching around to the back of the toilet for the tissue roll. It's the small things that you can sometimes be most thankful for!

master bath

Look at these beautiful floors:

and dear husband and our friend Adam picked up our vanity which had been in another friend (Don's) garage for the past, oh, six months!

Pretty spectacular, no?

I cannot believe that these spaces will actually be ours... our everyday life... I am just so amazed and so thankful.

hall bath

The hall bath looks Amazing!!! There are a few elements that aren't quite right and are being changed-- the paint (yellow, currently) is all wrong (everyone is allowed one paint mistake, right?) and we're going to change it to the same "Paris rain" that's in our bedroom. This will pick up some of the greens that are in the soapstone. The other thing is the vanity will not have beadboard-- it will be a standard raised panel. Okay, that stuff aside... the tile is out of this world. Out of this world! I love the combination of the diamond pattern with the subways.... and the tile on the floor is gorgeous... the basketweave is beyond my dreams and our builders had the incredible inspiration to do the base molding with the pencil rim in a black honed granite to match the soapstone. stunning.

I cannot wait to take a bath in this bathroom. ahhhhhhh. heaven....

Here's the soapstone countertop and sink in the hall bath.

...and here's an up close of the tile. look at the detail-- the way all the lines match up and that lovely detail on the side of the tile in between the diamond and the subways. It is sooooo beautiful!

I don't love this photo because the vanity doors are wrong and the yellow is really irking me... but look at that lovely pencil molding on the base. wowy!

really FLOORED

WHOA!!!! The bathroom floors are gorgeous... The basketweave is beyond my expectations. I actually love all the greys in it. We agree that we're going to do a different color in the hall bath (rather than the yellow you see here)-- one of the other colors we're already using in the house... that better compliments it.

Okay, hold onto your hats. We had hoped/planned to do a 12x12 carrera floor in the masterbath with the basketweave for the shower floor. Our builders figured out how to make that happen and then up'd it to a whole new level.

Stunning, no? I'm over the moon about it. The photo doesn't even do it justice. I actually called the office of our builders expecting to leave a message, but instead I got Anthony on the phone. I told him that it was so beautiful that I was contemplating sitting down and just staring at it for the rest of the evening. He laughed and told me to go home and have a glass of wine. So I'm following his instructions.... but considering staring at these photos for the rest of the evening. Here's one more:

Absolutely to die for. I'm floored.

Powder room vanity

Here it is for real. We had to stop at the cabinet place to confirm the hall bath vanity and I was able to stap a photo of our exact vanity (they sold us the floor model at a discount!).

Here's a close up of the countertop.

Here you can see the farmhouse sink.

So it's all in one place- these are the sconces that will go on either side of the mirror.

And here are the shades that will go on each of the sconces.

We have heat!

No photo to share, but it is FREEZING COLD tonight in the garden state. Home from work, we went over in the dark to the house, pushed open the front door-- and it was warm inside. Incredible. They also cleaned up alot of the mess (nails, saw dust etc.) from hanging the sheet rock. I was getting worried that we might be behind schedule, but I confirmed with our builder today that we're still on target for a March first move in. (Huge sigh of relief.) Tomorrow we meet with the painter first thing and then we're escaping to VT for the weekend with friends... I'm bringing my design magazines and fan deck and house plans (i go no where without these!)-- but also my crocheting, a book, and my snowshoes. It will be nice to have a little break.

Okay, I can't Not post some photos. Today the window treatments and sconce shades arrived from Ballard. The sconce shades are for our powder room. I've posted this before, but our vanity/sink looks like this (only in a cream color, not black):
Here are the sconces from RH that will go on either side:

And these just in (literally!) the sconce shades from Ballard. They look really great in person. I had ordered a fabric sample and the brick red is so pretty. We'll have a kind of slate grey floor in there and BM "alpaca" on the walls. I think it will be a nice country-esque yet refined look.

this is G-rated, I promise.

They built the seat in our master bath shower which was a surprise the other night. I never thought there would be photos of me in the shower on the internet... and M. is really excited about this as you can see... but here they are....!

shower floor

Found this photo online of someone else having done a basketweave carerra floor in the shower. ooooo it gives me goosebumps, it's so pretty....

Perhaps this is a good time to mention the hilarious escapade taht M and I had at the end of last week. Our builders called on Thursday that the plumbers would be working on Friday and needed to know the height of the showerheads-- could we go out to the house and mark how high we wanted them. First off, I thought this was the sort of thing that was standard, but apparently not. In fact, dear husband tells me (look who's been researching) that there is a whole debate online about the proper height of shower heads. In any case, it was almost 7:30 by the time I got off the train and DARK. We went over to the house in our winter coats with flashlights and spent the next twenty minutes taking turns standing in the bathtub with the showerhead held over our heads while the other person balanced the flashlight and sharpie pen to mark the height on the wall. It was pretty hilarious. Goodness knows what the neighbors thought of the flashlights flashing in our empty house. Also, turns out that shower heads are Extremely heavy-- this added to the awkwardness of the whole thing.
Ultimately I think we'll be fine- as long as it's tall enough that it doesn't him M. in the head and short enough that I can actually reach it on tiptoe, then we're fine.
One more thing down.....

carrera tile

Another splurge we decided on was to do carerra marble in the master bathroom. We made preliminary selections at the tile place and were waiting to hear back on the pricing from our builders. Surprise was that they came back saying that if we wanted to do carerra they actually had some in storage from a previous job. I guess it was a high-end job that when the tile showed up the lady of the house freaked out saying that she Never would have possibly ordered that tile and wouldn't pay for it (meanwhile she had signed her name to the order). In any case they've been left with the tile in storage ever since. They said they'd give it to us at cost or at a discount if we liked it. I've been sooooo excited about this because they said that one of the things was a basketweave carerra floor. I love the basket weave look but knew enough not to even browse that section of the tile store because it is $$$. Anyway our builders dropped off samples at the house on Friday. It's gorgeous. Now I'm thinking, if we could, do the basketweave floor in the hall bath and in the floor of the master bath shower. Do the large carerra tiles in the master bath floor and the subways (which have such a pretty honed edge to them) in the walls of the shower....

powder laundry room

hmm. i'm overloading with inspiration photos today. but just day dreaming about our laundry/powder room. the sconces are already purchased, the vanity w/ farmhouse sink is close to a a done-deal. just thinking about how much i like the navy/green/white/beige/black color scheme and how i'd love to add the greenery of live plants across the window.....

master bath fixtures

...from Restoration hardware....

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.

Here's what the powder/laundry room vanity looks like, only the floor model is an antique white (off white) color.