a bathtub and some faucets

We're gearing up to get both bathrooms remodeled. Whoo-ee, it is going to be a mess around here for awhile. But I'm really thankful we get to do this, because they're both falling apart right now. 

I met all of our contractor's subcontractors the week before last, and they seemed like knowledgeable guys ... an electrician, a plumber, a tile guy, a structural guy (he was to make sure we can take out the wall on one side of the shower in the big bathroom and replace it with glass without having the ceiling cave in) and a demo guy. That was encouraging.

I've been pricing things and figuring out what to get, and then over this past weekend we actually made a couple purchases online.

We are wanting to put a 5-foot-long clawfoot tub in the big bathroom, and I'd had sticker shock looking through the catalogs over at Home Depot. A very plain and basic 5-foot acrylic clawfoot tub we had liked was $2040. Yikes! 

Then I found out Rejuvenation was having a "half-off clawfoot tubs" sale. This 5-foot cast iron tub was originally $1145, but is now $573. Yay! For the first time in my life, I have ordered a bathtub online.

(The shipping wasn't as bad as you'd think.)

The only thing I'm worried about is that I really like my UPS guy, Mark, and I am thinking he may never speak to me again if he has to haul a cast iron bathtub off his truck. That may be the final straw. Did I ever tell you about the time he crawled up on the roof of our porch after a DHL guy mysteriously threw a package up there? I love Mark. 

I found pedestal sinks I liked at Home Depot (from the Kohler "Memoirs" line ... who comes up with the wistful and dramatic names for bathroom lines, anyway?), and I've been looking for faucets. I looked at all the in-stock faucets at Home Depot, and went through their special order catalogs, but didn't see anything I liked that was in our price range. So then I started looking online. 

I peeked in at Restoration Hardware, even though I knew they would be too expensive. But I also knew they would be lovely, and would give me some design ideas.

The Grafton is $469 onsale. Yikes! But so pretty.

Then I mosied on over to Pottery Barn to look at their faucets. I like the Cole, but at $299.00, that's still way more than I want to spend for a sink faucet.

Then I checked out Overstock.com, and lookee here. It's "The Metropolitan." It looks a whole lot like The Cole! :) But The Metropolitan is $139.99.

In fact, I'm kind of thinking it is The Cole. What do you think? It's made by Kingston Brass. I wonder if that is who Pottery Barn uses to manufacture theirs? Anyway, it had good reviews on Overstock, so I'm hoping it's solid. I can return them if they're not. (I ordered two -- one for each sink.)

That's still a chunk of change, of course, and I don't want to get that disease where you think "oh, that's an okay price" just because you've been looking at really way-too-expensive things right before that. I mean, it's a bathroom.

I remember my bathroom when I lived in Poland. Boy, there was a bunch of stuff jammed into that bathroom. The toilet was separate (a true "water closet"), and then the bathroom had a tub with handheld shower attachment, a sink, a washing machine, the clothelines over the tub, and the hot water heater for the bathroom, which was mounted over the tub.

These were not pretty western European bathrooms. These were eastern European bathrooms, made of plastic and laminate and all of them under some strange Communist-era mandate to be entirely ugly while not always being functional, either. You'd always hear wild stories about people's gas hot-water heaters blowing off the walls if they weren't maintained properly. In one bathroom I saw at a school, the faucets were too short and you couldn't get your hands under them properly in the sink. But that was Poland in the early 90s ... I trust things have picked up a bit in the past 20 years.

Americans were always going over there and trying to decorate and pretty-up their bathrooms, and my Polish friends thought that was hilarious. "Why would you make it pretty? It's just where people go 'w celu gówna,'" somebody said, doubled over with laughter ... a highly pragmatic approach. 

I won't wear you all out showing you every little thing about the bathroom remodel. But I'll post some before-during-and-after pics once it's done. It'll be awhile yet.

I just had to tell somebody that I ordered a cast iron tub online. Ha.