It's Bathtime

That's right, forget Christmas-time, we've got a much more important time to talk about.

It's bathtime.

Here's our downstairs bathroom when it had been waterproofed.

And here's the little bathroom drawn into our house plans. Shower over bath on the left, toilet in back right corner, vanity in front right corner. And that's exactly how it was plumbed in (except the shower is on the front left wall instead of the back left).

You've already got to enjoy my dithering on the subject of tiling choices and shower curtains vs. glass in this post a while ago, where I briefly entertained the idea of going with a dramatic black and white stripe option for the tiling.

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Most of you will be relieved to hear that I decided to reign in my enthusiasm a little on that idea, and settled on going for a small subway-tile-size black tile, to be laid like a brick wall along the wall above the bath.

I'm so happy with it. It looks even better grouted, and for the grand ol' price of $22 per square metre for the tile, it's got to be one of the cheapest feature tile walls I've managed!

But then there's the question of the opposite wall. The one with the toilet and vanity on it.

 

And here comes more dithering. At the time when I was contemplating what to do with this bathroom I was also watching past episodes of the Australian TV show 'The Block', and happened to snap this screenshot of Jason and Kirsten's bathroom in Season 2.

I know it's horribly blurry, but it's clear enough to get the idea. And the idea it gave me was that we could do a similar thing with a bumped-out tile shelf along the right wall, letting us do two very useful things:
1) Have a hidden cistern wall-mounted toilet = fanciness
2) Have a wall of mirrored vanity cabinets above it = storage usefulness

It seemed like an extremely sensible idea. Which of course meant that I wasn't convinced.

See, I had my heart set on getting something like this for our vanity cabinet.

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With a big ridiculous mirror like this (but in gloss black) above it.

Sourced from a Gumtree ad listing this for sale for $110

And that just wasn't going to work with my sensible shelf and boring mirror cabinets, was it?

So I thought... and dithered... and thought...

And eventually, it came down to three things:

1) Recessed cistern toilets are expensive. And I had plans to only spend the same $200 that we spent on our upstairs toilet on the downstairs toilet.
2) Boring made-in-China mirrored bathroom cabinets are EXPENSIVE! I remember in our last house we bought two single cabinets and one double cabinet from Bunnings for our ensuite, which ran us at over $100 each, so for this 2m long wall in the downstairs bathroom we'd probably be looking at $500-$600 just for plain stock-standard mirrored cabinets.
3) The fancy glossy black vanity idea (which would probably run us at thousands and thousands of dollars if I was able to find one in a shop - which in itself is unlikely) would be fairly cheap to accomplish if I could find a second-hand timber dresser and get it spray-painted gloss black just like we did with our upstairs vanity cabinet.

So, guess what? For what may be the first time in history, the fancy, designer-ey, more expensive-looking option was likely to cost us just a fraction of the non-fancy, sensible, functional option!

So, we forged ahead with the original bathroom plan (i.e. without any pre-framed shelves built into the walls). The tiler came to lay the bed on the floor, which had to be super deep so that we would only have a small step down into the room from our raised-height hallway. It took him six layers of bedding, with about 30 bags of sand!

Here it was in its finished state.

And then he tiled it. We used the same 300mm x 600mm off-white porcelain tiles that we used in the upstairs bathroom and ensuite.

 

And ran the same tile all the way up the walls to the ceiling.

So that took care of that side of the room. And the other side of the room was looking pretty great with my glossy black brick tile wall and all of the shower and bath taps installed...

And the other side looked a bit alright as well... except for that top corner where the cornice is missing.

Here's where another grand plan went horribly awry.

I had stumbled across this picture online while we were still in the early stages of planning the bathroom. And I thought... brilliant! That shelf at the end of the bathtub makes great use of that extra otherwise-wasted space, and in our case, even with our 1700mm long bath we would still definitely have enough room at the end to do something similar.

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So, I began a search for secondhand timber bookcases that could be enlisted for this role. And I found this guy for the grand price of $80.

Wouldn't he look lovely painted the same colour as our wall tiles?

He would. So, the carpenters built that ledge at the end of the bath up so that he would nestle nicely all the way up to the ceiling, the plasterers left the cornice off in that corner, and the tiler didn't bother cutting those tiles in the corner off at the cornice edge, because they would be covered up anyway.

But then we hit a snag. The bookcase was a bit too wide to fit on the ledge at the end of the bath, so the plan had been for the carpenters to pull one side off, trim all of the shelves etc, and then put him back together at the correct width.

But it turns out that Mr Bookcase had not only been pretending to be real solid timber (he was actually real timber veneer pieces covering easily-affected-by-moisture bones of MDF board. Plus, all of the timber pieces were glued rather than nailed, which meant that dismantling him without damaging him beyond repair was nigh impossible.

So now we are bookcase-less. And have to decide whether we bite the bullet and just cut off the tiles and finish off the cornice in that corner, or build our own bookcase from scratch.

What do you think?