apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

yaknow what's funny....i found it all by its lonesome and couldn't for the life of me find the rest of the pieces in its series. last time i was at b3, i saw the brushed stainless version (again, by its lonesome) on the clearance rack. maybe they no longer carry the series...

i already took the little sticker off the bottom, but i do believe it was by Wamsutta.

good luck, steve!

Love the tiles on the floor and also the sink fixture. The bathroom looks very "minimalist", however its a little too sterile almost like a surgical suite. Perhaps that is the look you were going for? I can understand that since it is a bathroom...

i really like it; it's very much in the vein of what i was thinking about for my upcoming bathroom renovation. clean, light, airy.

Hey that's a mighty nice pedestal sink. I have never seen an attached towel bar like that before.

There are some close ups of the floor tile in the directory of images that are worth the extra effort to look. They are gorgeous... not yer basic black floor tile. So's the tub/shower mixer.

But your bathroom needs something... (still on my "decorate the bathroom" soapbox!!!), and I'd recommend one of your own gorgeous photographs... I love the black and white baby swing for that room, or the fishnet self portraits.

curious why you chose that toilet with out the tank? that's not to say i dislike it at all, i'm just curious!

overall - gorgeous job!

Wow - huge improvement! I like it a lot.

I prefer your final floor tile choice to the hexogonal ones you were originally considering. So cool... Also, I love the wall color. To me, that's seems like the perfect gray. What paint color is it? (I'm really tempted to paint my bathroom gray now!)

Someone already beat me to commenting on the towel bar, but it deserves to be mentioned again. Very cool.

thanks for all the comments so far! this is so exciting for me :)

here's an easier way to view more photos without having to click around my directory...flickr!

http://flickr.com/photos/kdkaboom/sets/72157594582252178/


decorated soapbox, patrick 2.0: welll, we just finished it and i'm stilll in the process of cleaning up the apartment, heh. we haven't decided yet on any additions to the room - maybe a nice glass shelf above the toilet and a few black and white photos...(your choices of my stuff are spot on, too!)

brandy: the tankless toilet. in our building, that's the way it had to be. we probably could've gotten a tank toilet, but this one's flushometer is commercial! the pressure in our building ain't so hot. ten years ago, they installed in every apartment these Gerber toilets. we just went out and bought a new one, but with a commercial flushometer to help us from having to flush twice. also, the exposed plumbing is very attractive to us!

enrique: we battled it out over color. warm grays, cool grays, no red grays, maybe yellow grays, on and on. this is "whitestone" by benjamin moore. we've got a really beautiful gray in the kitchen, too...it changes color with the light from morning to afternoon to sunset. gorgeous!

I LOVE the tankless toilet and would do this in our bathroom in a heartbeat.

I also love the tiger in photo number 9 in the parent directory.

Really excellent job on the bathroom!

Very handsome job.

I really like the look that you have achieved. I'm sure you a few personal adornments to put the finishing touches on the project.

It sounds like you had some quality work done. It's very hard to find good contractors!

My wife and I have wanted that sink for a while. We have a kohler pedestal right now and it has 2 exposed bolts in the back holding it against the wall. We are going to try to find just the towel bar from your model and attach it to our sink.

I don't know if there are Great Indoors stores on the east coast but if there are, they carry that sink.

I think the style you went with works perfectly with the toilet. You were very clever.

This is so beautiful, especially when you see the original bathroom. I kept thinking of that fictional designer Oishi from the show Ugly Betty - "minimal, white, round."

You have a gorgeous place - how nice to wake up to such lovely surroundings every day!

I think its beautiful and a huge improvement without question. I really love the tiles and the sink with the wraparound towel rack. And the cat.

However, I noticed in the before pic that the most unpleasant thing about the old bathroom was its dirtiness which seemed to me like it would have cleaned up with some bleach and scrubbing.

It's kind of like those before & after pics of people in cosmetics commercials where the lighting, angle and facial expressions are changed to make a fair comparison impossible.

I love it, it looks similar in size and layout to my small co-op bathroom which desperately needs a similar makeover.

But I have to ask, where do you hide all the toiletries? Mine has two ugly medicine cabinets and a gross built in hamper to hide stuff.

It gets to the point where no amount of cleaning will make a difference. Sometimes it comes down to just putting perfume on a pig. It's like an old rusty dirty car. No amount of cleaning will make a difference.

To be able to gut a place that depresses you every morning and be able to revitalize its spirit is a great accomplishment.

Ahh, the simple pleasure of an exhaust fan!

wow, gorgeous! (full disclosure: my bathroom in cambridge, ma has the same footprint, tile, and colors, so i'm definitely biased here...)

adore the towel bar on the sink, your faucet, and the gleaming black & white tiles. congrats!
xp

thanks all!

michael: you're very lucky i didn't take close ups of the old bathroom! oy vey! i mean...no amount of cleaning could've helped it. tiles were permantly yellow (and orange, and black) and the walls were buckling out from moisture damage (and very bad construction to begin with). when we started to demo, tiles came out with no effort whatsoever. they used some weak cement back in the 60s. also, while we maybe could've recaulked (all the mildew around the tub was in a bad caulk job (done by someone who didn't know how to do it). pretty much, it was beyond repair, and had been in a state of neglectful disrepair for years. gut gut gut was the only way to go. :)




robbie: well, the robern cabinet is generous, but honestly...we just decided to keep it sparse, and to store stuff elsewhere, in a rarely used half bath, the hall closet, or in our rooms. we just wanted CLEAN (for once!) and totally simple...


art: amen to that!! i've been so overprotective of the new bathroom, too. i'm a good girl and keep the fan on for nearly 20 minutes after the shower to make sure, positive positive positive, that it's DRY as a bone in there :)

Okay, I guess the wide angle photo doesn't really capture all the other grossness you are describing... Again, it's really nice. Congrats on your wonderful new bathroom.

Fantastic bathroom - where did you get the great looking soap pump?

Really pretty! I love the calm and clean feeling and I'm a total sucker for white subway tile.

Too bad about the hex. I was actually considering grey hex for my guest bathroom at one point and I some grey unglazed porcelain samples around somewhere. If only I'd known you were looking!

Kudos, kd! A wonderfully clean, serene place to start or end your day. The more I think about a tankless toilet the more I'm liking the idea. You don't see them in use in residences here on the west coast, but tankless = 1 less place to set something that probably needs to be somewhere else.

Great job!

We are re-doing 2 bathrooms in our house (both rentals) that looks similar to yours. I second the notion that a good tile guy is key. The only thing that I would point out is your bathroom is small and doesn't appear to have any closet space. Why not get a modern looking vanity with a towel rack so that stuff can be stashed away easily? My random survey shows that while people like the look of pedestal sinks, they think are not practical at all.

hey sammie! you're right, there's not much storage...but the thing is, big vanities in our small bathroom would not have worked. not only are they ridiculously expensive, but they're very WIDE. this pedestal sink is only 25" wide! that's all the room we had to work with...

as far as the storage goes...there isn't much to keep in there aside from toiletries. towels and such go elsewhere, as do cleaning supplies. so practical? yes, for us it's fine!

steve: i got the soap pump from bedbathbeyond well before we even started the renovation ahah - i had it on the bookshelf for weeks, just waiting to use it. once everything was done, it was the first thing to go in! :)

kd - thanks for the info - went to B3 last night but couldn't find it. any more info such as brand name would be much appreciated!

Great bathroom. I will now go and convince my wife that this is what we need to do!

Quick question. On a scale of yes to no, was the tile guy expensive?

And, I must know where you got your shower curtain rod. We're removing our doors this weekend, and that rod is what I want. Please divulge.

Thanks!

hi g!

warren (our tile pro) is great, but i don't know his cost (since we did a barter, and my brother who has worked with him for a few years is out of town right now, so i can't ask him)...

i'd try calling him for a quote on what you're doing, the size of the room, how complicated the tile work is, etc. he's got a nice portfolio, too (www.dazzeltile.com)

as for the shower curtain rod, there was just something on AT about it! it's the Polder "Duo". it has two rods - towel bar, curtain rod - but i use it for liner and curtain. it's really dreamy, i've gotta say... but we decided not to mount it since it would require two holes instead of one. but it's very sturdy as a tension rod.

cheers!
katy

oh, and we got the rod at bedbathbeyond for $40 :)