Since we are getting close to having a complete bathroom, I picked out all of the accessories for the guest bathroom. Here are a few of the things I picked out at Target.com:
Here is the bathroom that above accoutrements will be going into:
I picked out chocolate brown and sky blue towels, mother of pearl soap dispenser, toothbrush holder, waste basket and shower curtain rings, brown bathmat, crinkled cream fabric shower curtain, a fabric shower curtain liner and a bamboo reed diffuser in Bamboo Flower scent.
I love shopping online! I actually bought a few of the items above at the local Target store today, but I’m going to take them back so I don’t have to pack them to ship down to PR. Shipping at Target.com was free, so I figured I’ll save myself the time and hassle and have Target ship everything together, to Puerto Rico.
The final things we need for the guest bathroom now, are a towel bar and permanent shower rod. Woohoo!
The blue DecoLav sink arrived while we were playing poker the other night (The UPS guy showed up after 9pm. Weird.), so Stefan and I were excited to find a vanity so we could get it installed. We went to way too many bath stores, that we have already been to multiple time and still couldn’t find anything that we liked even a little bit. Just so happens that we found the perfect thing at Rooms to Go (which is a furniture store)! Here is a picture of the table we got and the Decolav sink in our bathroom:
Looks good with the walnut travertine, doesn’t it?!
It’s actually a table that is supposed to go behind a couch, but it fits the space in our guest bathroom perfectly. Now we just need to get everything hooked up. Faucet.com forgot to send our drain and mounting ring, but it should be here tomorrow.
As I mentioned before, we’ve picked out a dark brown marble for the walls in the master bathroom and a light brown/cream travertine for the floor. Here is a picture of the tiles and trim we spent a good few days trying to decide on. The trim is small travertine tiles accented with copper:
Well, Stefan just told me that Gino (our tile guy) doesn’t like the trim. He thinks it looks too rustic for the marble. What do you think? I still think it looks good and we’re not trying to be all bling-bling marble with gold trim ;).
Stefan already axed my 1st choice of trim, which you can see here. Why doesn’t anyone trust my design ideas?
I order the DecoLav sink for our guest bathroom! I purchased it from FaucetDirect.com and it should be delivered to our house is Puerto Rico. Which should be interesting, since we’ve never used our physical address for shipments yet, so we’ll see if the UPS guy can find:
Stefan and I are trying to curb our spending a bit, so we went with a cheaper sink for the guest bath. The DecoLav sink was only $178.75…well, that’s without the “accessories” that you need for the sink. After it was all said and done I just spent $451.76 on the sink for the guest bathroom (sink, mounting ring, drain assembly and lavatory faucet). Sigh. So much for trying to be cheap…haha.
Edit: 9/25 - It turns out that FaucetDirect.com is retarded and won’t ship to Puerto Rico, even though they give you the option when you check out. SO I ordered the exact same shit (sink, faucet, accessories) from Faucet.com and it was delivered via UPS 2-day air for $70.
Stefan and I have been searching for a sink for the stupid guest bathroom for at least 2 months now, and it’s getting ridiculous. We just want to finish the bathroom, damn it! The big problem is that everytime we find a sink we like, it only comes in white, which won’t work since the toilet and tub are almond (light beige).
So, I’ve decided that we need to make this decision now. I’ve narrowed it down to three choices and we will let the guest audience (that’s you) decide which sink will be purchase for/installed in our guest bathroom:
Here is a DecoLav brand vessel sink in blue (it is also available in clear, violet, green, cobalt, amber, silver, copper and gold). It’s simple, stylish and only $184. I think this sink would look good since the bold blue will break up all the brown in the guest bathroom (walnut colored tile and almond colored fixtures). Plus, it will compliment the blue paint on the walls, without being too matchy-matchy.
This Porcher “Zen” sink is kind of cool, no? It’s pretty modern without trying to hard to be modern. It’s available in “biscuit”, which I think would match fine with our “almond” fixtures. This Porcher sink is $360, which is getting kind of expensive for the guest bath, but it is a pretty cool vessel sink.
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This American Standard “Morning” sink is available in white, bone, linen, daydream (blue), beige and black. I would consider this sink in linen or daydream for our bathroom. But would a light blue sink be cute? Or ugly? Will the linen color be to much brown with the brown tile and light brown fixtures? The American Standard “Morning” sink is $255.
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Here is a picture of the bathroom that the sink is going to be installed in. Walnut colored travertine tile, almond colored fixtures and brightish blue paint:
Before Stefan left for Oklahoma, we went shopping for a sink for the guest bathroom. Gino (our tile guy) told us about this somewhat high end bath and kitchen store in San Juan, called Armadietto. He wasn’t kidding when he said it looked like part of the cemetary. It WAS part of the cemetary. Kind of an odd place to have a kitchen and bath store, but okayyyyyy.
We didn’t find anything at Armadietto, but this grave is for sale.
Let us know if you’re interested in some eternal rest in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We’ll put in an offer for you…
Well, it seems nothing is easy the first time you build a house. There are tons of little things that are very simple and intuitive while construction a home…but as a first time ‘contractor’ (i use that term loosely), most of these intuitive thoughts are afterthoughts. For example;
When we were framing in the guest bathroom with the help of brian, I never thought about adding an extra 2×8 in the wall behind where the sink was going to go in case we decided to install a pedestal sink. This extra support is needed for both supporting the weight of the sink as well as providing a stud that is easy to find so installing the sink doesn’t require multiple holes in the Travertine while searching for the studs. Well, now we have the tile completed (including grout and sealer), the toilet installed, the shower is done and now it’s time to move on to the pedestal sink that we bought…but we can’t install it because we don’t know where the studs are and I am not willing to drill multiple holes in the travertine to find it. It’s a pain because Summer and I don’t really want a pedestal sink in there but we are limited by space so we figured we will put this one in there for a year or so until we find exactly what we like…but now that option is out the door. We are probably going to have a custom vanity built to fit the small space and get one of those new sinks that will sit on top of the vanity. Now, the only problem is tracking down a quality product in Puerto Rico.
Old Kohler Sink that we are returning to Home Depot
Not our new sink, but a sink that rests on top of the vanity like we want
The other thing I would do differently in the bathroom is a pretty major headache, but would have save tons of time and money. I would have pulled out the level and made sure all of the walls were level so when we laid tile it would come out perfectly straight without a bunch of bumps and slopes. It causes the tiles to lift up a bit and once all is said and done, the bathroom doesn’t have the same high quality look it would have had if all the tiles were lined up. Don’t get me wrong though, we didn’t put in tile on uneven walls. We filled in the walls with grout/cement to make them all perfectly level and then installed the tiles…so it does have a high quality look to it….but that was expensive.
Here are two teaser pictures of the guest bathroom as it stands right now just to give you an idea of how the tile, the one piece kohler toilet and the cast iron kohler tub look.
Today Stefan ad I went to Rustic Tile in Mayaguez, to check out some tile for the wetroom/shower for our master bedroom. This is what we came up with:
We’re thinking, the light travertine for the floor (since it’s not as slick/slippery as the marble), dark brown marble for the walls and broken marble for the trim. Bueno? Do you like it?
Today, Gino was going to finish up the tile work in the guest bath. Unfortunately, when the drywall was put in around the sink area, instead of moving one of the pipes…the guys just screwed the greenboard in over the pipe causing it to bubble out. If we had done regular tile instead of butt joints, Gino would have been able to lay the tile over the bow and it wouldn’t have been a big deal but since all of the tiles are “butted up tight” against one another…it would have made for a bad tile job..so Gino spent a couple of hours chipping away at the greenboard and evening out the area with grout and didn’t have time to finish. So…still no toilet for us to use and no pictures for you to see. Once it is done, I’ll post the pictures so you can see how rad the travertine looks.
We bought all of our appliances at Sears today (summer is going to post pictures later) and met with our cabinet maker to tie him down to a price and time frame. More to come….
Gino is coming tomorrow to finish the guest bath with the walnut/Tuscany colored travertine. We ended up needing 190 tiles instead of 160…but Paradise Ceramics in Aguada had us covered when we went to buy more…so no worries. Once the tile is all set, we are going to run a champagne unsanded grout over it all to seal the holes and cracks. We are hoping it doesn’t get rid of the crystals that you can see at certain angles. That stuff is neat.
Joche also showed up today and installed our shower valves…Gino is going to hang the concrete board and make sure all the walls are level…unlike the guest bath.
We will post pictures tomorrow night…Guest Bathroom…Start to finish
I order the DecoLav sink for our guest bathroom! I purchased it from FaucetDirect.com and it should be delivered to our house is Puerto Rico. Which should be interesting, since we’ve never used our physical address for shipments yet, so we’ll see if the UPS guy can find:
