Old-new Promises

I've promised you twice now, dear reader-friend, a grand tour of the whole house.  I'm here to tell you that I don't think I'm going to do that.  Before you get too heart-broken over my false promises, let me tell you about my new plan:  I think I'm going to do a detail of each room as it gets a little more settled.  A few things have occurred to me as I've settled in to write over the past month: 1. A grand tour of the house would be a giant (and probably boring) post.  2. There are all kinds of wee details that I'd want to know about if I were a reader of this blog that I've heretofore neglected.  And 3.  Even though the house is finished and this chapter of the story of the house is done, I'm not done telling you about it, so I need a way to stretch out the narrative a bit.  So here you go:  chapter infinity.  For those who are interested, here begins a new story of our old house:  some details about bits of the house, room by room (including "before and after," because those are the best), what I'm putting in it, and of course, more about how to protect your home from dead people.  That's clearly my thing.

No dead people today, though!

To start, a small and relatively un-intimidating space: the downstairs bathroom.

This is what it looked like before:

It was pretty nice before.  I love that big, cast-iron tub.  If you've never taken a bath in a cast-iron and porcelain tub, I highly recommend it.  The metal keeps the heat so you can keep the water really hot for a really long time.  However, I hated that baby-poo brown, but I was too lazy to paint all the beadboard because I'd have to figure out how to paint behind the tub.  Also, the water pressure was for the birds, and the floor was stick-on paper linoleum, which didn't hold up well to the two wee children I shared the bathroom with (Lots of splashing, poor aim).  Also, possums liked to hang out inside the wall behind the toilet.  I highly do not recommend sitting on a toilet in the middle of the night and hearing something large and hairy scrabble up the inside of the wall behind you.  

 We wanted to keep this bathroom, really, but just make it better.

It's so, so much better.  

Strangely though, it feels like the same place.  Both kids prefer this bathroom to their own, and I think that's partly because they're familiar with it (and partly because they take after their mom in that they get easily freaked out when alone because: dead people?  Probably).  It seems like the old bathroom finally got it together, threw out the possums, got a new paint job, and returned to its original 1920s sanitary-chic finishes.

You'll notice that it's bigger--there's a double window rather than a single, and the wall between the bath room and the guest bedroom has been bumped in about two feet to give extra room for a decent shower for our guests (you're welcome, guests!).  But it feels the same, partly, because it is the same.  Same sink, freshly re-porcelained: check.

Same bathtub, also refinished so that it's no longer painted a yuck color: also check.

I even hung stuff on the wall for you!

The beadboard wainscoting is new, but the same height and style, just finally painted a lovely, shiny white (Sherwin Williams "Snowbound").  Notice that the shelf that topped the old wainscoting is gone, since I whacked my head on it more times that I'd like to count.  Even the window and door trim is new, but substantially the same as it used to be.  The bathtub fixtures are new but are almost exactly like the old ones (just not crudded up with gunk from ancient pipes, yay! If you've never de-gunked a faucet filter, high-five!  It's not a fun job, even if you remember exactly how to put it back together the right way).  

Why do I have so many crooked pictures?

And even the door is one of our good, solid, five-panel doors from the old house.  The things that are new are so right that they fit right in with the old-new stuff.  New faucets, and new subway tile in the new shower (by the way, Andrea from 329 Design helped me pick these out, and helped me feel good about going all-in with white subway tile EVERYWHERE):

A new medicine cabinet that's so lovely and right at home because this bathroom SHOULD always have had a medicine cabinet, complete with a neat little milk-glass, beehive-shaped knob that I found in the antique hardware place:

An antique milk-glass interior knob with chrome backplate to go with the rest of the white and chrome/nickel inside the bathroom:

Some neat do-dads that look old fashioned-y even though they're shiny new (and they're useful):

And the best thing of all, white ceramic hexagonal tile on the floors.

So. Dang. Beautiful!

Just after we originally moved into the house the first time, I was poking around in the garage and found some of the renovation supplies the original owner had left for us.  Tiles for the kitchen counter, a few bricks, and some spare stick-on linoleum floor stuff, I think.  And there in that pile were chunks of white hex tile set in mortar, like someone had hammered out that old floor to put in plywood and paper.  I don't remember if I cried, but that's the feeling I had, mourning for such a pretty, durable, and easily clean-able floor that someone decided wasn't fashionable enough (though to be fair, maybe it was gross.  But I doubt it).  Not only is this absolutely the prettiest kind of floor in the world and my favorite, it feels like I've set the house right again by putting the proper floor back in the original bathroom.

I had thought I wanted to go all in on the oldness of this room, and I looked really hard at rewired period light fixtures.  They would have looked really good in here, I think, and I'm sure they PROBABLY would have been safe, but in the end I couldn't trust my house's safety to rewired stuff just because old stuff is so cool.  I just rescued it from frayed knob-and-tube (and possums), after all. 

So I got these lovely new guys and the pretty vanity light you see above as well as LED can lights in the ceiling:

Add plenty of towel bars, my stacks of fluffy towels, and it's a bathroom fit for real visitors!  I'm not actually responsible for ANY of the things that make this bathroom so nice, but I'm pleased to see it look so much like I dreamed.  It's just beyond awesome.