Renovating my own home (and other horror stories)

Ever wonder if designers have an easy time pulling their own personal projects together? I’ll spill all the tea- living through a renovation on your home can be pretty tough, it doesn’t matter WHO you are!

So my husband and I bought a (very) old house in another lifetime-it was 2006-and we knew (somewhat) what we were getting in to, but we felt up for the challenge (dummies). One of the projects that was urgent (in my mind) was the en suite bathroom in our master bedroom. I don’t even have any “before” pics of this space, that’s how much I hated it (but upon further reflection I bet there’s an old cell phone in a drawer with a pic). It was tiny-no more than 36 square feet-and contained a tub, a 28 inch wide vanity, and a toilet, the latter thoughtfully positioned right in the line of sight when you opened the door. Now, as I said, this was an urgent project, so of course it only took us 12 years of living in the house to get to it.

The first bit of hesitation came with deciding to enlarge the footprint. This seems like a no-brainer, but it was going to cost us losing this little alcove in the bedroom that had a beautiful archway in the wall leading to the space. While I hated to lose an original architectural detail, we knew we needed to annex that area to make a decent sized bathroom, so we filled in that sweet archway and grabbed up that space to make the bathroom of our dreams.

We now had a 6 foot by 12 foot space to configure. One of the fun decisions was to take the large window that had been in the original bath and turn it into a door opening out to an abandoned sleeping porch. Once upon a time there had been an exterior staircase leading to this screened porch and our daughters had used it as a “clubhouse” that hosted sleepovers and many other fun times, but now this porch would become our “sunrise coffee porch.” It’s not exactly common to have a screened porch off of one’s bathroom, but hey-common is not anything designers usually strive for.

A view of the custom doors leading to my sunrise porch

Let’s talk about those doors for a minute. Remember this opening started life as a window, so narrow doors were needed. These beautiful mahogany french doors were designed and built for this opening (the Cremone bolt hardware was just me being extra.)

Carerra marble. I wanted it. Bad. And a herringbone floor. I didn’t know what else I wanted, or what the vibe of this space was going to be, but I knew it would involve marble. In a herringbone pattern. Choosing my tile set all the other wheels in motion. I knew it was likely that the bath was going to have a retro, traditional feel, and when I looked at cabinet door styles that sealed the deal. What can I say? I like a bit of detail on my cabinets. This leads me to the one regret I have to confess-I wanted white cabinets and didn’t do it because I had recently re-done our kitchen with white cabinets and carerra marble counters and I told myself that I had to do something different in the bath. I didn’t. Still wishing those cabinets were white, but live and learn.

Final decision was wallcovering. I knew I wanted something that was both subtle and bold-how hard could THAT be to find? After looking at about 50 options, I knew this Thibaut monochromatic oversized print was it! Completely happy with that decision, as well as the Moen faucets and Visual Comfort vanity lighting.

So the article title was a bit dramatic, as this project was really not horrendous to design OR to live through, and it is now, weirdly, my favorite spot in the home.

This 72 inch vanity with tower gives us a place for everything.