Customizing Your Forever Home

Our core belief is that everyone deserves to come home to a house that you love. Every aspect of that house should suit YOU – as your surroundings profoundly affect how you FEEL.

We practice what we preach and we like to share our own personal transformations. Here we’ll reveal a very small but special project – Faith’s bathroom!

A Blast From the Past

Faith’s ranch-style house had a bathroom which, until recently, had been untouched since 1952. When you are envisioning a 1950’s bathroom, you probably have a good idea of what it used to look like. And these “Before” photos below won’t disappoint!

Besides the standard tile in 1950’s pink and gray, with built-in nooks for the soap dispenser and toothbrush holders, the glaring issue here was with the wall that abutted the bathtub/shower. While this wall provided privacy between the tub and the toilet, it also made the whole space appear smaller; further, it limited the sunlight entering the room.

Working Within Constraints

First, you should know that because the bathroom was situated between the recently renovated kitchen and the stairs leading to the finished basement, it was “tiny” but there was no opportunity for the footprint to expand. This “locked” the bathroom in place, as the square footage could not be expanded.

As creative people, we do like to answer a challenge, and to make her tiny bathroom appear larger, Faith proceeded to find non-conventional solutions to physical constraints.

The room felt especially small because walls compartmentalized the room. On one side was a tub with a full height wall. Behind the wall was the toilet and a window. The full wall partially blocked the light.

The change Faith was excited to make was removing the full floor-to-ceiling wall abutting the tub. It was replaced by a shorter wall so that the light from the window beyond the tub can brighten up the entire room. Removing that full-height barrier “added” 3 feet to the feeling of spaciousness of the room.

One change often leads to a challenge, and this shorter wall led Faith to flip the tub around and switch the location of the faucets and shower head to the opposite wall, which remained full height.

But with a short wall, they couldn’t hang the shower curtain. Faith came up with her own system. The plumbing supply stores didn’t have a solution that fit her vision, but she did find it in a restaurant supply store. The metal railing and fittings she found were similar to the foot rails on a bar stool, but thinner.

As we encourage our clients to make their home their own unique, custom environment, when it came to renovating her bathroom, Faith followed suit and took her time in searching through all kinds of supply stores to find just the right elements that would all come together to create her “funky, vibrant, fun, purple bathroom”.

Not satisfied with the standard choices of accent tiles in the tile stores, Faith expanded her search – and found her perfect purple listello in a pool tile company.

Faith also searched far and wide for purple knobs to go on the vanity drawers. There were choices, sure, but she did a lot of “I’m not settling” until she finally found what she imagined.

It was helpful to work with just the right contractor – an equally detailed person who meticulously lined up everything including getting the listello to exactly the right height to become the backsplash at the vanity cabinet. And he cut apart the backing of the mosaic tiles because the height was great for a pool, but too tall for the listello in a tiny bathroom.

When you’re working on your “forever” home, you can be super creative and take the time to find the right materials to customize your space to match your preferences and personality.

Do you have transformational dreams for your house and
simply can’t “see it happening?”
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