Updated bathroom

(The picture above is the before picture, but without the ugly shower curtain. It's hard to see, but the original tile was pretty hideous)

Our old bathroom was a bit of an illusion. It had been re-done by the previous owner right before he sold the house. Great, right? We quickly learned that it was not so great. The window in the shower wasn't properly water proofed, so needless to say, a bit of a problem in a shower.

The fixtures were cheap and the vanity much too large for the space. We had to put a shower curtain on both sides of the shower to address the window issue. Ugh. And the thing was, the light through that bathroom window was some of the best light in our house. We needed to do something, and fast!

As usual, I had very specific ideas. The tiles needed to be flat faced, with no 'puff' to them. I didn't want to get subway tiles and I knew I wanted white. Long story short, I searched forever and finally found the over sized laser cut tiles we used. We didn't want to replace the tub, as it was a deep soaker tub and it seemed crazy to get rid of it. The trouble was that it had a distracting wavy thing on the front, which I thought would not look good with the clean line look we wanted. This meant building out and tiling in front of the tub to cover it up. the contractor was skeptical, but he did a great job and it totally works!

Once we gutted it, we breathed a sigh of satisfied relief about deciding to re-do the bathroom. The original owner put the tile right on the dry wall! The sub floor was unsafe! He dropped the ceiling by over a foot just to accommodate the vent pipe! What a lazy trickster!

Once again, i wanted something minimal with clean lines but that still had a vintage vibe. We wanted to maximize the light and scale things according to the somewhat small space. While I was desperate for polished nickel fixtures, they were so pricey and just not the right choice for this house. Instead we focused on 1920's style fixtures and figuring out how to work with the modern over sized tiles so that they would work with the vintage stuff. The solution to that was to brick lay them (much like a traditional subway tile).

We chose a limestone floor in rectangular 'French Linen' (from 'Stone Tile'), as although we loved the classic but now very popular marble and hex options, we didn't want to be trendy.

A glass shower wall completed the look and now the space is very light filled and a pleasure to shower in. And the best part is that everything was done properly, so we don't have to worry about water coming down into the dining room!