Washing hair and sparkly water

My friends—after nearly nine years living in this house, I finally have a primary bathroom I can actually use. It took me two months of talking with multiple contractors to understand the components and compare pricing, and 10 days of actual labor to rip everything down to the studs, expand the shower footprint from 32”x32” to 32”x44”, move the shower fixtures to the opposite wall, build out, lay tile and install new vanity (with top, sink and hardware), medicine cabinet, toilet and lighting.

And I am verklempt.

We went from this:

And this floor:

Note, in particular, the embedded medicine cabinet that indubitably dates from 1970:

I expect it’s been unusable since at least the 90s.

To this:

Along the way, we had demo:

Note the cinderblock wall on the left. That necessitated the crew building out the space with 2x4s to accommodate the shower plumbing. (I moved the fixtures from the right to the left because—with the expanded shower footprint blocked from the outside by the toilet, I did not want to have to step into the shower to turn it on, and be hit with a blast of cold water.) Also note the parquet flooring on the right at the back; that’s a closet from my back bedroom, which gave me the space for the wider shower.

We had the shower walls (and dry floor, but it’s covered up) tiled, waiting for the accent tiles:

It's a good thing I don't use the primary bedroom, because this is what it's looked like for three weeks:

After a week waiting for Home Depot to pull its finger out, we had accent tiles, and boy, they were worth the wait:

See—here was my inspiration, from a DIY subreddit:

The color scheme is astonishingly butt-ugly, but I was struck by the idea of the accent tiles flowing down past the shower hardware and filling the floor, like a waterfall. I was thinking of something in blue, but it turns out that HGTV is not doing blues this season, so they are not to be found.

What I did find were these beauties:

Once I had them, I wanted everything else in the room to take a backseat. I have to say, it worked out exactly as I had visualized it. The niche on the right echoes the flow, and it’s situated at exactly the height I need to accommodate my Costco haircare products, pumps and all.

Along the way, the crew discovered a crack in the main drain pipe. That was on a Thursday and necessitated making gigantic holes in my kitchen ceiling and down the column where the pipe flowed.

On the Saturday a master plumber showed up and in half a day, he and his assistant replaced the “black pipe” material (which probably also dated to 1970) with PVC.

Last week a guy drywalled, finished and painted the kitchen with exquisite care, and you’d never know it had suffered possibly mortal wounds.

(Oh—another long story, but there was a thing with the main water shutoff valve early in the project. That resulted in my kitchen faucet conking out. Eric—the mainstay of the project—tried fixing it, but no good. As it happens, I’d intended to replace that tap—the arm was stuck in one position and it had started not getting full flow. I showed Eric the new one, and he spent a couple of hours on a Saturday installing it.)

I now have an all-singing-all-dancing 36”x24” medicine cabinet, with about 32 light phases, including a night light; I’m hoping it will do the heavy lifting for my bathroom storage needs.

I got plenty of mirrors and plenty of light.

New toilet, new vanity/hardware/sink. Recessed light over the shower and another light over the medicine cabinet. You could perform surgery in this theatre.

But most of all—I have a lovely shower space, with both a rain shower head and a hand-held, which I can step into without climbing over the edge of a bathtub. This is huge.

And it’s got me thinking about water and things that sparkle in it. So, let’s head over to the old world for today’s Advent music. (We're in Advent, remember?) Specifically, Spain, for “Los peces en el río.”

There’s not a whole lot of substance in this one—just the fairly banal activity of Mary washing and combing her hair, washing her hands and laundering diapers. And the fish; the sparkly fish. 

To tell you the truth, I’m a skosh vague about the connection between the Nativity and Mary washing her hair by the river; rivers don't appear to figure large in Nativity stories. But I’m willing to go with it. Woman's gotta do the needful, after all. And why shouldn’t fishes be excited about the birth of the Savior? The Good News isn't just for mammals, is it?

There’s no peg on when this was written or by whom, but it became popular in the second half of the 20^th Century. Here we’ve got the Mexican trio Pandora singing it.

If you’ll excuse me, now, I’ll just pop into my new bathroom to take another shower. My fifth of the day.

 

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