Never Say Never, Now with Photos!

When Mr. Fluff and I put our house on the market last summer and started looking for a new one (not necessarily in that order, which you can remind yourself of if you look here and here), there were any number of criteria that I had for a new house. A quiet neighborhood, in which we wouldn't be subjected to the sounds of our neighbors at all hours was at the top of his list. At the top of mine? A remodeled, or already halfway decent kitchen andbathroom. I was absolutely done with having the construction crews ripping up two of the most used and important rooms in the house, and having to go without them for extended periods of time. Having lived through both in our old house, I was done with major renovation. Surface aesthetic changes I could deal with, but no plumbing, reflooring, or construction crews.

The important thing, I suppose, is that one of us got what we wanted.

The new Casa de Fluff is blissfully (see earlier post on suburbia) quiet, and that's a boon to my quality of life in ways that I would not have expected. However. Like any house built in the disco era, it has some serious aesthetic challenges, at least three of which require all of the things that I didn't ever want to have to deal with again in life. Ever. Seriously---isn't there some sort of maximum number of bathroom renovations any one person should have to face?

Regardless, we chose this house, and we planned ahead, and so job one was to do something about the insanely hideous bathroom. Truly, the only thing that could have made this bathroom worse, in my mind, would have been metallic wall paper. [Scratch that. I suppose if the previous owners had been true CBGB wanna-bes, they would have installed that glass that only existed in the 70's. You know the stuff---it has the gold leaf running through it? Klassy. Thankfully, none of that.] But wallpaper you could steam off. There's somethings only a contractor or alternative licensed professional can fix.

Exhibit B: matching sink and toilet, bizarre floor tile, and a "vanity" that can't possible live up to its name without wanting to kill itself.


We lived in this horrorshow for six months (and lest you think "gee, I don't know what she's complaining about. It isn't so bad," realize that I couldn't bring myself to photograph the years of grime and mold that had been allowed to build up in the grout to said tile, and the way that the inside of the blue toilet had turned green over time. I gag every time I think about what could have made that happen). Exhibit A: the blue tub.
, Finally, at the very beginning of my spring leave, I called in our trusty contractor and let him go to town, and I spent 9 hours a day for a week enduring the constant sound of power tools, corralling my animals, having my water shut off, and listening to the same audio tape of the Grateful Dead. I'd complain here about the hours of work leading up to the actual renovation---what with the researching fixturesand furniture, tile and grout, and driving across two states to fetch it all---but really, it was nothing in comparison to that goddamned tape. Argh! Curse you, Garcia, even beyond the grave!!

Ahem. So, I spent days hanging with the renovation crew, learning about tools, listening to the Dead. We spent a weekend with an unworkable shower, and got really greasy in the meantime. In the end, however, we had new tile, a refinished tub, and white toilet (which is neither blue nor green, for which I am thankful every time I sit down to pee). And after much hemming and hawing, paint sampling and swatching, we have achieved bathroom nirvana. As evidenced below. A word of caution: because I was both too cheap and too impatient to live through the consequences of having them chip out the tub tile and replace it with something else, we left the baby blue interior tile as it was, which created some particular challenges in choosing a color scheme. I happen to think that the end result is very chic, and Yogini assures me that it's Boden-esque, which makes me hope that it's very British (pictures below, as demanded by my favorite Academic Cog). Either way, it's done, and I can rest easy. Except for the times that I spend in the dark, linoleum/formica kitchen...