“We’re building a house,” is a bold declarative. It puts a stake in the ground, but for most people it doesn’t mean you are pouring concrete, hewing beams, or nailing on roofing. Other, skilled people do those things. The point where your hands do get involved, then, is personal. Is it hanging curtains? Painting walls? Putting in flooring? Writing checks? At what point is one actually part of this process of putting up some walls with a roof and calling it a house?
When we first started this project, the house already existed so we were restoring a house, and it would be out two (or rather four) hands doing much of the work. We had some of the skills and plenty of confidence that we could learn the others. Then the plan changed, and we’d be starting from scratch. Now we’d entered a world that we didn’t have mastery of — imagined nor real. We held tight, though, to certain things. We would certainly cut and hang trim, plaster, and show our worth in other material ways. That, too, got complicated. The sequencing of a build doesn’t easily allow for the homeowners to skip in and roll up their shirt sleeves periodically, working on a ‘nights and weekends’ schedule when trades people need a crisper clip. So, trim went to trim carpenters, plaster went to a true master, and our docket grew thinner and thinner.
We kept a few things on it, though, ahead of the furnishings, lighting, and soft goods. Ben has his annunciator system, there’s slate he’s currently laying with our friend Ryan in patterns that no sane tradesperson would agree to without doubling the cost of the build, more vertical tiling, much of which will be a years-long project stretching far beyond move-in day, and Ben’s finishing off much of the wiring and lighting — more on all of these to come. What has been completed, though, is the bathroom.
Upstairs, we chose to do one large full bath instead of two compact ones. Sharing doesn’t frighten us, and what a pleasure to have room to spread out. This also meant that we had more bandwidth to make it special. That process started back at the beginning.
Years ago, we met a woman in the parking lot of The Millbrook School’s Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo. She opened her trunk and pulled out a heavy box. Inside were dozens of vintage British blue and white tiles she’d purchased for a kitchen remodel that had pivoted. No longer needing them, she had listed them on Facebook Marketplace. It was there that we spotted the hoard and pounced.
We didn’t know where we would put them, but the price was too good not to find a place. Then, for years, they sat. Until, of course, the bathroom.
The tiles posed a problem, though. They are stunning and are blue and white, but the white has an icy hue that makes them hard to pair with anything sold as ‘white’ that we could afford (our budget was, to be fair, very low). I held them up next to stacks of samples, and none of it worked. The logical next step was to use what we have on hand: clay, kilns, and a dear friend and team member: Aleah.
Aleah is, as we tell anyone who will listen, a magician with clay. She created a tonal range of whites that warm up the icy blue without trying to neutralize it entirely. Then, she made boxes upon boxes of tile — accounting for overage is a true math challenge.
That was delivered at the 11th hour to Daniel, the tiler, a magician in his own right, who used the tiles to create an immersive bath and shower “nook.”
With the Art of Building team, we landed on doing a limestone windowsill, canted away from the window to prevent water ingress, and a matching shelf for soap, etc. We plan to live here for the rest of our lives, and a recessed niche is too prone to mold and water retention for that timescale.
In front of the tub, which is a very basic ‘vintage-style’ tub chosen to look like it could have been there already, is a tiled ‘mat’ that meets up to the wood floor. Yes, a wood floor in the bathroom. This was inspired by rooms turned into bathrooms at the end of the 19th century, especially in the United Kingdom.
Once the tile was all set, the plasterer (Mike) came back in to bring the plaster up to the edge of the tile, creating a crisp corner that will be softened by a gentle shower curtain, but that’s a future puzzle to solve.
