Have any of you out there embarked on more serious home renovation projects since becoming a widowed person?

You always here the jokes with married couples of how they get into a renovation project and somehow don’t get divorced! Well, we all don’t have to deal with that problem …

It’s funny because Mario and I did have slightly different tastes when it came to certain decor. He was really one of those antiseptic modernists who loved Danish style, but easy-going enough to acquiesce and let me go with my very eclectic aesthetic. I can basically pull in a complete mishmash and somehow make it all work. I love interior design and I love changing decor. I was never afraid of color or painting walls.

So a couple weeks ago, an opportunity presented itself for me to redo my master bath. Basically, I’m trading a complete website (design, programming, content) for all the labor to demo and tile. It was something I could not pass up. I’d been wanting to redo that bathroom for years. It was the last space in the house that really hadn’t been touched except for a little paint on the walls, a cool mirror we scored when Pier 1 was going out of business and a bathroom light fixture both Mario and I picked out. It was our proverbial “lipstick on a pig” because that’s all we could afford to do. There was crappy early 2000s linoleum, a ginormous “garden” tub with crappy white tile squares around it, and to complete the crappy trifecta … a fiberglass shower insert that was starting to crack and chip. The only decent thing in the bathroom is the vanity (and there’s a slight problem with that now).

I’m usually pretty good with selecting materials, but last week it hit me that I’m probably never doing this again. No pressure! Seriously though, tile is way more permanent than a gallon of paint on the wall. Of course the tile that I had earmarked years ago when I was first fantasizing about a redone bathroom had been discontinued. I wanted to use the same floor tile that we did in the kitchen as it would have gone perfectly with the granite countertop on the sink cabinet but that was also discontinued. So I’ve spent the last couple weeks going through tile sample after tile sample trying to decide on what I could live with forever (because at the moment, I have no future plans to sell this place).

There are a lot of very cool tiles out there. I could have gone really crazy. But, I reeled my imagination in and settled on a 10″x20″ white shower tile with soft colored lines, a 1″ blue hexagonal tile on the shower floor, a thin teal colored glass tile as an accent, 2″ hexagon tile as wainscoting around the new (free standing) soaking tub, and black slate-look 12″ x 24″ porcelain tile on the floor. I used Adobe Firefly to render this up for my tile guy. The teal glass tile is a little lighter than the render, but close enough to show him what I wanted.

So I’ve spent the last week yolo-buying tile and trying not to think about how much my credit card is melting this year.

While I’m at it, I’m also replacing the old ceiling exhaust fan and light and I just bought the replacement which I know for a fact Mario would have dug because it is weird in all the right ways. Hoping the install of that is trouble free.

And about that bathroom sink cabinet … the old garden tub butted right up against the one side. When my guy tore out that tub, we found that the original builders of the house didn’t even bother putting the wood veneer on the bottom half (that was being covered up by the tub deck). So I’m left with this mess …

I’m brainstorming some ideas now for that.

Next week a plumber should be by to install a new shower valve and then route the lines to the free-standing tub faucet. After that, the tiling can commence.

Hopefully everything else goes smoothly and I can be enjoying my new bathroom before Thanksgiving!