Serenity Now!

Once upon a time, nine years ago, my husband and I bought our house with the anticipation that we would slowly renovate it to fit our grand vision.  We stripped wallpaper and painted.  We extirpated carpet and tiled. Lots of that sort of thing. Slowly it came to fit our dream, some parts more slowly than other parts, and in all honesty, we still have a few rooms to go.  In all of this, the largest and slowest endeavor both physically and emotionally was our master bathroom.  This bathroom is a symbol of patience and not giving up, no matter how hopeless something seems.

I wish I’d gotten a picture before I destroyed the old wallpaper.

A few nights ago, we slept in our master bedroom for the first time in the nine years we’ve been in the house.  Being able to do this was contingent upon completing the bathroom because of the mess renovation can cause.  We figured any mess going on in the bathroom would come out into the bedroom and decided we would wait until the bathroom was complete.

Why yes, the tile is a peachy-pink!

First I stripped the peachy and flowery wallpaper (I despise wallpaper!) almost as soon as we moved in.  We picked colors and I painted the bedroom and bathroom to match.  Then we realize the bathroom needed more than just a new color. For an example of why we needed to pretty much gut the whole thing and start fresh, we had a seven foot countertop with just one sink.  About six years ago we ripped out the old tile, the bathtub, and the countertop with single sink.  Then we realized we needed to replace the walls around the bathtub because they had become moldy.  A few years later, because we only had limited time together to work on such a major project, we reframed an enormous bathtub and retiled the room.  Somewhere in that time I had found an amazing deal on the most beautiful red glass vessel sinks (two of them) with antiqued bronze fixtures.  Then not long after that, Robert suddenly found himself with more time to work on the bathroom, but that was because he had lost his job, so we had no money to work on the bathroom, leading to a two year hiatus from the project.

We seriously ripped the room to bare bones and started over.

At the start of June, we had an entire week together and a renewed bathroom fund and completed another huge part of the project- placing bamboo flooring on part of the walls and the ceiling. After that week we built our own vanity for the sinks over whatever days Robert had off from work.  Last week, the project came to fully ripened fruition, and it looks like a spa resort according to some of our friends’ comments.

But all the time, those six years, that we struggled just to get tiny parts of the whole project completed were trying times.  We would get one project done and see a need to do something we had not thought of before.  Sometimes it felt like we would never get it done and I thought we might just have to cut corners in order to finish.  Fortunately, we never did that.  We held on to our vision and through massive amounts of patience and diligence, we got it done, finally.  So, the old adage is true- good things do come to those who wait, and wait, and wait…

Our serene spa bathroom