In Progress: Pink Bathroom Update
by Laurel ~ November 11th, 2009
I am going to attempt to show some progress by talking about some of the many projects we have been working on here at La Belle Vie over the past 6-8 months. I’ll begin with the pink bathroom, connected en suite with the “pink room.” Sometimes we call this Amy’s room in homage to the child of a previous owner a long time ago. Other times we call this the Woodland room because of the William Morris based wallpaper design that will eventually be on the walls in this bedroom. And we do call it the Pink Room too. One syllable makes it simple I guess.
The Woodland Room has been discussed before and if you wish, by revisiting this link, you will be able to see the room in its current condition. The pink bathroom is situated en suite within the room. In the image below, the door to the right is the entry to the room; the door to the left (with the mirror) offers entry to the bathroom. The room itself is a decent sized room at about 16 x 12 feet. Llewellyn’s floorplan of the room is below and I scanned it just to make talking about the update a little easier.
On the floor plan above (clicking will get you to Flickr, where this image may be seen larger) the room to the right is the half bathroom we began with. You can see some photos of this room below. It is an oddly shaped room due to the chimney placement (we still have not figured out how this artifact worked with the house years past). It was our hope the bathroom closet — seen at the bottom of the image — could be converted into a walk-in shower to make the room officially a full bathroom.
We planned on updating the toilet to something more water efficient. The pedestal sink, though we liked the look of it, was not going to work for our B & B goal. With chips in the porcelain, which we probably could have repaired, it also had old-style separate faucets for hot and cold water and would need replacing. People like to control water temperature, at least I know I do.
The pink wallpaper was worn thin in many areas, and we wanted it out in order to have something that would work with the Bradbury paper we had selected for the bedroom. In this bathroom, the ceiling had also been papered, and that would need to be removed, prepared and repainted. We also thought bead board would be a nice feature in this room too and planned to install it ourselves. We should have looked more carefully at what was serving as baseboard.
People have pointed out the closet removal is an issue. We are aware of this and have a large armoire – cabinet that will easily serve in that capacity. We’ll show you that another time.
As in all projects, particularly those involving old houses, this seemingly straightforward project was not without issues. This is really a general goal-setting post and a into of what we would be working with. To be continued.
