Yesterday the plumbers came to the house to find out what needed to be done in the studio bathroom to make the bathroom functional again. If you remember, in this bathroom we had to use an upwash system (ours is Saniflo) that pumps all the water and waste up, through the pipes in the attic, and down through the main sewer line on the other side of the house.
This isn’t an ideal setup, but the reason we had to do it this way is because the foundation in this bathroom as well as the foundation in the room next door (i.e. the pantry and breakfast room) are both concrete foundations, while the rest of the house is a post and beam foundation. When I decided I wanted a bathroom in my studio, it was both easier and much more cost-effective to use this system than having to drill a tunnel through concrete to run the sewer lines.
Anyway, with a flush toilet, all the wastewater goes through this grinder pump, which sits right behind the wall behind the toilet. And this one pump can process wastewater from three different areas – toilet, sink and shower. So this is a great option for adding a bathroom in a basement or for a situation like mine where we didn’t want to go through the extra cost and hassle of breaking up the concrete to run sewer lines.
Our sander pump was working fine over a year ago (maybe two years ago) and we never had it repaired because we had no plans to keep the bathroom in the studio at that time. This was back when I was still planning on converting this room into a walk-in pantry and moving our kitchen into the pantry and breakfast room. But after plans changed, the bathroom remains and will actually be our main guest bathroom for a transitional period.
When the plumbers came by yesterday and I opened the bathroom door, I started to really get excited about working on this room. I still have a few projects in the bedroom until that’s finished, but as soon as I’m done I’ll start on this bathroom. I don’t expect it to be a big project. Aside from repairing the flushing system, everything else is purely cosmetic. I left that bathroom in complete disarray, closed the door, and all but forgot about it. So while it’s messy and obviously needs some work, all the big things (drywall, trim, vanity, etc.) are taken care of.
But when I opened the door, the first thing I saw was an unopened box sitting in the middle of the floor. So I opened it and there were several rolls of wallpaper inside. If you’ve been around for a few years, you’ll recognize them. The first was the wallpaper that I originally designed and had printed for this bathroom.
I designed this wallpaper by taking the colors directly from the floral wallpaper mural in the studio so it coordinates perfectly.
When I was working on my closet, I tried using some small pieces of this wallpaper on the sides of the drawers for my closet island (which didn’t work), but I hadn’t actually unrolled the wallpaper to get a good look. So it had been quite a while since I had seen the wallpaper fully unrolled. All I could imagine of this wallpaper was the mockup I made in the bathroom a while back and the mockup looked kind of overwhelming to me.
When we decided to use this bathroom as our main guest bathroom for the foreseeable future, I decided (based on this model) that I needed to come up with a different idea for the walls because it might be too overwhelming for guests.
But now I’ve changed my mind…again. Now that I’ve seen the actual wallpaper and unrolled a whole roll so I can see it in my studio next to my wallpaper mural, I just want to try it out. I love colors and I can’t get enough of them and I really want this small bathroom to showcase all of those colors. I think my guests can handle it. And I think the original will look much better and maybe a little calmer than the model. Plus, I don’t like the idea of ​​wasting money. Wallpaper isn’t cheap. Even getting enough money for a small bathroom can add up. That’s why I want to use what I have.
This all means I’m back to my original plan for this bathroom. Now that it’s going to be our main guest bathroom for a while, I’m not going to tone things down, but instead embrace my love of color and pattern and fill this tiny bathroom to the brim with color. I no longer plan to hold back.
In the same box I also found this wallpaper that I bought a while ago when I was planning on remodeling the hallway bathroom.
I still love this wallpaper as much as the day I bought it. And look how much orange is in it! I didn’t remember this wallpaper having so much orange in it, but it looks like it was made for our bedroom ensemble. That’s why I want to find a way to use it in the storage cabinet. I don’t necessarily think that the walls in the storage room need to be wallpapered. Since I’ll be moving Matt’s equipment in and out of the room regularly, I think wallpapered walls might not be the best idea.
But what if I hang it on the ceiling? I’ve never wallpapered a ceiling before and it might be fun to have a colorful floral ceiling. Right now I have the dark stained plank ceiling in this room.
This needs to be taken down as it was installed around the built in shelves and bathtub area. As these two areas come out, the ceiling boards and trim in these areas will also need to be removed. So the new ceiling will be flat throughout the room with no ceiling obstructions and I think it would be fun to add this wallpaper to the ceiling and then paint the rest of the room to match this wallpaper and the rest of our bedroom suite. And again, I like the idea of ​​using what I already have. I hate the idea of ​​wasting money on wallpaper and never using it.
So that’s the direction I’m going in now in both areas. It’s funny because I always assumed that as we got older, the more I would want to tone things down in our house, until one day I would have a neutral color palette in all of our rooms. But I find that the opposite is actually true. The older I get, the more I seem to want to be surrounded by color and pattern. I can’t seem to get enough of it.
