Master Bathroom Reveal

Can’t believe summer is coming to an end!

I have been MIA I know.  We took a much needed vacation to Provence, France and Geneva Lake, Switzerland in the beginning of July.  It was a great trip; Provence was soooo scenic and the best smelling place ever!  Imagine driving along country roads with fields of lavender, sunflowers, wheats on both sides.  The air smelled like a mixed of sun-baked lavender, herbs and wheats…just yummy! 
Geneva lake was also very pretty, we stayed in a small town among the vineyards along the lake and took a day trip to a glacier.  I’ll write a post on the trip when I get a chance. (But if you love nature and photography, Provence is a must!  It’s definitely one of my dream places to live, so far the list includes Paris and Tuscany)

After returning, we painted most of his parents’ apartment and redecorated their bedroom.  In between, we worked on laundry room and the basement bathroom…still works in progress.

BUT the good news is that I finally had time to take some photos of our master bathroom! 

It’s my personal spa! Living in NYC, no one I know has a bathroom this big, so the size of it alone feels luxurious. 

The color palette is water with touches of green and orange inspired by the sinks that I wrote about earlier.

Our shower stall is BIG, so to keep the costs down, we used white subway tiles (which we bought A LOT of in the beginning of the renovation when they were on sale) with some mosaic tiles of glass and marble.  The mosaic tiles add just the right amount of sparkles to make it special. They represent water running down.  For the floor of the shower, we also picked a mosaic of glass and marbles but in rounds to represent the bubbles/stones (of a river bed) when water hits the floor ( we worked a concept while tile hunting J).  The little circles really have been great to provide the right amount of friction (no slippery floor here!).   I will write a post on water-proofing and tiling a shower floor in another post. 

Oh, check out that 10" rain shower head, soo relaxing to just stand under that after a hard day of work, melts the stress away...well almost.

I know I wanted storage above the toilet for towels and toiletries.   I figured a cabinet would be best to keep the towels fresh from umm…the other bathroom smells that are not so pleasant.   Lucky for us, the kitchen cabinet from Ikea fits perfectly in the space.  The glass mimics the shower door.

Oh I forgot to tell you about the shower door.   I wanted floor-to-ceiling frameless glass with as little of the metal structure as possible but wowww, are they expensive!  So internet to the rescue! After much searching, we ended up getting one from Overstock.com.  The installation was pretty simple; HOWEVER, that thing is heavy!  And with only the two of us, it took us the whole Sunday night to install.

Onto my lovely tub! To me this is a big tub, it’s meant for two people after all. But with him being over 6 feet tall, he keeps saying we should have got a much bigger tub!  I think it perfect and this corner of the bathroom gets beautiful sunlight in later afternoon. I would love to soak in a nice bubble bath with the sun in my face but hasn’t happened so far, since we are always busy during the day.

The wall by the tub was very hard for me to decorate; I am still not really satisfied with how it is. 
We put some floating shelves for candles and some whimsical finds.  I also mounted a couple of  Staghorn ferns on wood rounds.  I wonder if I should replace the ferns with a huge photo since I am a bit lazy at removing the ferns every  week  to give them a good soaking :) .  But it will do for now, feel free to leave any suggestions.

As for the window, I guess the contractor forgot that it was supposed to be a bathroom (used to be a kitchen) when he ordered the windows.  We didn’t even realize it was clear until we started working on the bathroom.  To solve the privacy issue, we installed shutters that we got from Lowes. 

The chair is from a set of six (two of them are kinda like wing back chairs), I got them for  steal on ebay for....10 bucks! for the whole set!  they are really comfy! you will see them all around the house, redone in different fabric and paint.  I just finished one for the laundry room with wheels added :)

Hopefully we are will be done with the laundry room soon, can’t wait to share that!

And there is also the walk-in closet, kitchen …..so much to share! Stay tuned!

Some more photos

Bathroom Vanity

We are just about done with the master bathroom, which has been a very slow process once we started.  I think because it's tucked away (an out of sight, out of mind thing) and we are so used to using the bathroom down the hall; unlike the kitchen which we had to deal with everyday, so we worked our butts off to get that done ASAP.

My first taste at buying second-hand is a large french provincial mahogany dresser that i got from an antique dealer for around $250 (which is WAY more than what I am willing to pay today!). 
It sat there, moved around a few times (not far because it's damn heavy!), waiting for its day to shine. And after nearly two years, it's finally in its rightful place serving as a vanity for our bath.

The dresser had a beautiful  curvy top (which i am still wondering what can i do with it, too nice to throw away) that i wanted to copy onto the marble top (we decided on Carrara marble because I just LOVE it and it is not quite suitable for the kitchen...).  The stone company we used told us to do a template for them.  I tried drawing it free-hand but it was just too long and I couldn't get the symmetry just right.  So I decided to use some of that engineering skills and drew it up in AutoCAD, that way I could make sure the dimensions were exact.

The sinks are also one of those first purchases for the house, I might have bought them while we were still looking for a house!  They sat in my parents' attic for two years, I even forgot how they really looked like, all I remembered was that I LOVED them when they arrived.  The design in each sink was hand painted so there are variations.

We modified some cabinet drawers to accommodate the pipes.

So once we were done,  the DH decided to clean it with Windex and what do you know!? the patina I thought the wood had was just DIRT! YEARS AND YEARS of dirt.  The vanity is soooo much lighter now, it no longer look reddish brown but a reddish orange.  I like it because it matches the flowers in the sinks more.

Afterwards...which was like a few weeks later ( I told you we are slow on this project), I finally came around to buff it with Restor-a-Finish in Mahogany.

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Look at the difference!

Cleaned the hardware using Brasso.

And VIOLA!

We paired it with an antique (dresser?) mirror, which is a bit over-the-top but I like how it contrasts to the subdue tones and clean lines of the rest of the bathroom, which I will reveal soon :) .  And look at the shell design, it was meant for a bathroom!

We used kitchen faucets because we wanted the height.