home life – bathroom

Finally! I could not be more thrilled to start sharing before and after pictures of my new home with you. Since I did an almost complete gut renovation of this apartment I bought in April, there’s a lot to tell you. So I’ve decided to do a series of home life posts. Each post will focus on one room or area of my home. Let’s get this party started!

Today I want to show you what we did to my bathroom. The only original thing I kept was the bathtub. Apparently, ripping out a bathtub is a major pain. It requires extensive plumbing and co-op board approval and a bunch of extra paperwork. I ended up having the tub reglazed to look shiny new. Which it totally does!

My bathroom still had the original tiles when I bought the apartment. Although there was a cool 60s vibe, I wanted a glossy white bathroom. So these tiles had to go:

I was also not feeling the fixtures. The sink and faucets didn’t have the minimalist, streamlined look I wanted. And the toilet was one of those old catastrophes that didn’t really flush:

I’ve had enough toilet drama for one life, thanks. Did you read Keep Holding On? Well, all of that toilet drama really did happen to me. For some reason I’d never been lucky enough to have a non-bootleg toilet. Which is why I was DONE. My new toilet is a work of art. For reals.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before the shiny new toilet was installed, everything else in the bathroom (except the tub) was ripped out:

I remember the day the wall was ripped out. My architect called me all excited about this extra space that was discovered behind the medicine cabinet:

We could install a huge recessed mirror! With a shelf running along the base! And LED lighting around the edges! I was stoked. The lighting didn’t work out, but the mirror is gorgeous.

If you were reading my blog this summer, you may remember that my apartment renovation took way longer than promised. I was living here for five weeks while my contractors finished up. Tiling the bathroom was a big job. The new tiles extend from the floor to the ceiling, which took way longer than if we tiled halfway up the wall and painted the rest. During my first week living here, the bathroom door was removed. Oh, and my shower and sink were not yet installed. What did I do? Welcome to washing up at the kitchen sink and showering at the gym, everybody! Every day I reminded myself that after only one gross week, the place would be beautiful.

Of course things didn’t go that smoothly. Not at all. But you know me, the eternal optimist.

The important thing is that, despite having zero privacy and failing to smell like roses that first week, my bathroom is now pristine. Here’s the after picture of the left side:

These gorgeous bathroom fixtures I wanted from Fantini were outrageously expensive. But man, are they gorgeous. My architect and I would take field trips to the Fantini showroom just to drool over the elegant sink faucets. It’s all good. I will have Fantini fixtures in my next apartment (aka Husband Apartment, the apartment I will share with my future husband, which will be epic). For my bathroom, I selected beautiful Hansgrohe shower and sink fixtures, a work-of-art Duravit toilet, Samuel Heath towel bars, a Ginger hotelier light (with dimmer), and Baldwin doorknobs. All fixtures are in polished chrome.

The right side, after:

I get a little thrill every time I open those vanity drawers. It had been a dream of mine for many years to have drawers in the bathroom instead of a medicine cabinet. What can I say? Pretending to be fancy is fun.

Well, that was most likely more than you wanted to know about my bathroom saga. Next up in the home life series: floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves!