After we bought our home in 2004, one of the first things I wanted to do was renovate the two bathrooms.
In 2019, I actually did it.
The old bathrooms were really old and really tired. The cabinets and the countertops were brown or taupe, or brown and taupe. In the master bathroom, the toilet and the shower were separated from the sink by a wall and it was impossible to get out of the shower without running into the toilet. In both bathrooms, the sinks were so low and under the vanity the storage space was basically unusable. And, again, so much brown. Take a look..
Regardless of what took us so long to do it, once we committed last summer, we got to work.
Since we were not changing the footprint of the space, the first step was tile. Oh my goodness…there are millions of tiles. Patterns, sizes, textures, and colors. Vendors, timelines, lot sizes. Then there’s the grout. Why are there so many varieties of grout? If I told you my grout had glass in it, would you believe it? So, to face the overwhelm of the choices, I decided I would just choose a showroom and get to work. I loved Ann Sacks, so I headed to the Design District and started putting my options together. We knew we wanted to stick with white and gray, generally, although I admit to being distracted by lots of other non-white, non-gray choices with the tiles.
We put together our final tile selections and placed the order. Oops, out of stock on the tile for the hall bathroom. Back to the drawing board. Our final choices for the master bath were Carrara Mosaic Hexagon for the floor and Savoy Field Tile in Chalk for the shower. In the hall bath, we selected Savoy Mosaics Stacked in the color Lotus (“Lotus” is code for gray!) for the shower walls and Benton Mosaics in White Thassos/Shell for the floors.
Then, it was the fixtures. Again, one million choices. Settled on the same vendor-centric approach and chose Kohler. After perusing Houzz and Instagram, I knew I wanted bronze in one of the bathrooms and that chrome made sense in the other. We bought everything and then changed our minds about which bathroom to do in bronze and which to do in chrome. So glad that Home Depot takes returns. Learned that after I bought the wrong bathtub. The right bathtub makes all the difference!
We are big fans of built-ins, and we have had a great experience with RoundTuit. While they were building the dining room/butler’s pantry, we engaged them to build our custom bathroom vanities. They are brilliant, and after showing them photos of what we wanted, that’s what they built for us. We got our master bedroom cabinet pulls from Kohler and the cabinet bars for the hall bath vanity from Restoration Hardware.
My takeaways:
- Once you make a decision, order it fast. Stocks can be limited, and you want what you want.
- Only buy from a vendor that takes returns. Renovations are dynamic, and you want to be able to change your mind.
- Be patient. Production delays, shipment delays, contractor delays, weather delays, and/or inspection delays will all conspire to drive you crazy. If you let them.
- Take the before pictures, especially if they are ugly.
We could not be happier with how each bathroom has turned out–so luxurious and so open!
