The Bath - Part I

This is about the full bath.  The guest / half bath will be a later post.

And no, it's not completely finished, but enough.  Enough to enjoy, to shower, to do the teeth brushing and hair drying and such.  And to look at it every day and be grateful!

It started with clogged pipes in winter 2011 which Plumber Hampel repaired and said the rest of the pipe work was ready to clog up, too.  In our house, it's hard to tell how old anything is, but the pipes were pretty old. Whatever, it meant major work, so we thought might as well do it up right. Old bath had to go. We weren't sad about that.

 

 

So we studied and we looked around and we dreamed and we pared down the dreams.  But it needed to be kind of traditional.

The major piece was the chest that would go under the sink.  We found one at the Bauteilbörse (the salvaged building elements shop).  Ugly, right?  Nasty paint on the top and worse lacquer everywhere. Professionally made, but really simple.  Solid pine.  NO details. About 1920.  But it was just the right size.

And we found paneling, too, at the Bauteilbörse.  Equally ugly it was.  But it had some pedigree since it came from a bank that was built in 1911.  Well aged.  Good wood. We thought it might hold up to the bath moisture.

The sink had to fit in the theme, too.  None of these lovely-but-not-for-us modern sinks.  Had to look a bit dated. Found it on the internet of course. NOT from the Bauteilbörse.

TO WORK!  KNOCK DOWN WALLS!  That was an unexpected and not so pleasant surprise since we didn't really think the wall would fall down. But it did.

Put in floor tiles (they look like wood - very cool!)

And wall and floor tiles in the shower. 

Finally, the paneling starts to go in. Really, at this point my imagination was not meeting reality very well and I was beginning to doubt that it would turn out like I'd imagined as you can imagine.

 But of course, master magician Werner got it all to work

Finally, we placed the chest that was sanded and rounded on the top and had gliders for the drawers and was polished to a fare-the-well.  My man does good work.

We really like the open radiator that doubles as a towel rack / warmer (when the heating is on, which is a lot these days).

Next, relatively speaking, we'll find an old door to put on a corner cabinet that will go over the toilet to act as a medicine cabinet.  But that's small stuff.

The shower is so easy - open and bright and high enough at the far end to accommodate anyone we know!

Isn't it nice?  Please note the smaller mirror on the wall. It's a magnifying mirror Werner got me/us for Christmas about 10 years ago.  I used it every, every morning and felt like I was doing make-up by Braille for all this time.  SOOOOOO glad to have that back again.  I think people who look at me are glad to have it back, too.

I had my doubts along the way but it has turned out just like I dreamed.   Thanks, Werner!!