The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Our master bath has been occupying a bit of my time as of late. As I mentioned in a previous post, this bathroom was a major negative for me when deciding to buy this house. The layout of the bathroom wasn't my favorite for starters. I mean, the bathtub is encased in what can only be described as a stage. The tile work is a good 3 feet tall and stretches wall to wall. To me, that is a huge waste of space in an already moderately sized bathroom. Since we don't plan to be in this house for more than about 3 years, we were not willing to spend the money or deal with the mess of a complete bathroom remodel. So instead I focused on changing my second major hang up. The decor. 

Here is the best "before" pic I can offer you. 

 

Since the bathroom isn't all that large, it's impossible to take a picture that includes everything. But this corner of the bathroom was the corner that I was most disturbed by so we will focus our attention here. Ahem. 

The massive tub taking up too much space is not my favorite, but it is nothing compared to the decor chosen by the previous owners. I am not really sure what this lady was thinking, but due to her efforts I will, for the remainder of this post, refer to her as Hildi.  Can you see the purple flower print design on the front of the tile and along the back by the windows? That, my friends is wallpaper. Wallpapr on walls is bad enough in my book, but on tile? Who does that?!?!

Now lets discuss the walls for a moment shall we? They were painted a bright sky blue. Not my cup of tea, but paint isn't a big deal. That can be painted over. Unless of course you have super glued wall paper, yarn and marbles to the walls. Oh yes, I said marbles. Check it out.

This little pattern was repeated around the entire ceiling-to-wall boarder in the bathroom. It even extended down over parts of the mirror above our sinks. Have you ever tried to scrape super glued yarn and marbles off of walls? How about on mirrors? If you haven't consider yourself blessed. I had more than a few choice words for Hildi as I did my best to deconstruct all that she had constructed. 

We couldn't simply pull the yarn off the walls because (as anyone who has worked with yarn can tell you) yarn is quite fuzzy. So I would get hand fulls of little fuzz balls with a large majority of the yarn left on the walls. We finally resorted to using a power sander. And you know what? That didn't take it all off either. By the time we chipped the marbles off and had several large holes to patch, I knew my only option was to re-texture the walls. So I did. 

When I removed the wallpaper from the tile around the bathtub, I found patterned tile.

Apparently it wasn't Hildi's taste. Thus the wallpaper I suppose. The pattern isn't horrible, but is certainly not my taste either. So I decided to try  my hand at painting over the light pinks and greens with a dark chocolate brown  so that it would better coordinate with the new wall color.

So after much sweat and a tad bit of frustration aimed at Hildi, we have newly textured and painted walls. New roman shades and newly painted tile. And while it is still not my ideal layout for a bathroom, I now can stomach this space. So again, here is the before:

And the after:

One thing I do like is that it is surrounded on all sides by windows. We basically live in a forest so privacy isn't an issue. In this place, I can totally see why you'd want to be surrounded by windows while soaking in the tub. I mean, check out the view I have from each of my four windows.

Who wouldn't want to soak in a relaxing tub while enjoying all that scenery, right? Wrong. At least for me. As nice as it would be to soak and relax, I will never, EVER be taking a bath in this tub. Sad, I know. The reason? Our water. Where we live, there is a very high iron content to the water. And as it turns out, iron turns water brownish-orange. You don't really notice it all that much in the shower or sink. But bunch it all together in a tub and you get this:

We've had our water tested and have been assured that the water is clean and safe. The color is simply from the high iron content. The only other "problem" with our water is that it has traces of Arsenic. My first thought when I heard this was, "Isn't that the stuff that NASA gives to astronauts to ingest if they need to commit suicide in space?" And now it's in our water?! YIKES!  Apparently the government has acceptable levels of arsenic content for water and we fall well below those, but to me any Aresnic at all is alarming.

So for now my children are drinking bottled water and I am refusing to soak in my tub. Seems a little silly to do all that work for a tub I won't even use, but at least I don't have to look at those blue walls, wallpaper and marbles any longer!