Interpretation

As a mom, there are times when you are a translator, picking through what your child is telling you to determine what they’re really trying to say.  Thus it has been putting together the Darling Girl’s bathroom.

A couple of thoughts to orient you:

1. The original bathroom adjoining her room was the most heavily fire-damaged part of the house.
2. It was minuscule (actually in violation of code in certain aspects).
3. The child has been living with the notion of “when we finish The Big House” for almost half of her life. And certainly all of her life that she can remember!

The original bath post-fire from Darling Girl’s room

While it still gives me the willies to look at this, it’s been a long time since I’ve shown you anything from that little lightning-borne event.  So here you have it.  Months later, it looked just as bad as the morning after.  Note the position of the window frame in the very right edge of the picture.

Throughout the as-yet

New footprint inside the framing on the floor

endless construction process, Darling Girl has maintained that she wants “a mermaid bathroom.”  I’ve maintained that she was getting a bigger bathroom.  You can see the new footprint in framing on the floor, everything this side of the chimney is now bath space.  The bathroom used to end by the window near the sawhorse leg.  She’s getting a serious space upgrade ~ more than 125%.

Let’s be clear: there’s no way this maman’s going to be putting Ariel and Sebastian on the walls (unless as removable decals) since the girl is going to be

Mermaid mosaic?

living with this bath at 8 and 18.  All of this makes the execution all about interpreting “mermaid” the right way ~ and a way that can be enhanced with other decor as she grows up (too fast). At the same time, it’s important to involve her in making at least some choices about the space so she can feel ownership of it.  So I showed her a series of smaller mosaic tiles to see which best captured what was in

Pearl of the sea?

her head for “mermaid.”  With her very creative mind, I had no clear idea whether she was seeing ocean waves or rainbows or seashells or starfish.

Like her mother, Darling Girl is rather decisive and had no problem letting me know which ones missed the mark entirely.  She couldn’t tell me what she DID want, but she knew what she did NOT want.

Closer – but not quite …

Of course!  How could I be so dense ~ it had to have rainbows! She wanted something with some iridescence but didn’t know the words to express that.

“OH!  I can do THAT,” said Mommy, who bounded off to the tile store with fresh intelligence and the knowledge that this time, she was on to something.

And … the winner!

Which became this iridescent glass mosaic that settles a pretty seafoam green when it is set.  Beyond that, all I told her her was that it was going to be used with two other white tiles and she would have to see what we did with it when it was done.

In truth, the other grown-ups on the project are responsible for the rest of the good ideas for this, not me.  Once you get into using a wet saw and having to cut perfectly good tile up, I start getting jumpy.

As easy as 1-2-3

The octagon tile with the white dot is a pretty traditional and inexpensive choice for a floor.  You see it more often with a black or colored dot than the white.  There is enough subway going on in the house that I wanted to give DG something a bit different with some pattern on the floor.  Then we needed to get a larger plain white tile to to provide a neutral border around it.  What you see here is a color sample of a 12″ x 12″ that had to be cut piece by piece to do its job.

Ungrouted view from the hall doorway

The only real idea I had was to use the mosaic in a stripe in the shower that would include the built-in niche.  The other grown-ups were far more clever, with something entirely different in mind.  In a perfect world, it would have been so nice if three squares would have provided the right proportion for the accent.  Sigh.  But nothing

Shimmering mermaid tile in the shower

involving co$t can be easy.  Using a stripe four squares wide made for easier cuts and fitting of the octagon.  It just cost a third more in glass tile.

When it came to grout, in spite of my dislike of light grout, I looked at several colors under natural and incandescent light before settling on Sterling.  In this

Grouted ceiling to floor

bath, we wanted the grout to melt away and not be a design feature, as the tile itself is the story.  I think it manages to do that pretty well. We’ll see whether the claims about PowerGrout not needing the care of other white grouts hold up to be true. If not, I am well-acquainted with the Magic Eraser …

One other trick we used here: off-setting the very inexpensive 4 x 4 tiles on the ceiling in a diamond pattern.  This helps hide any imperfections you might have in a ceiling when you have so many other straight lines and not much margin for error.

The space beyond the tub wall is all new

Taking the view slightly wider, you can see the second doorway from the main hall at one end of the tub.  Essentially, the original bathroom only extended as far as this divider wall.  If you scroll back up to the charred photo at the top, you will see the tub was   perpendicular to its new location.  The whole area

Long view from Darling Girl’s doorway

where the nice deep tub now stands and opposite it, where the large vanity will flank the wall is new to this room.  The window was carefully relocated slightly down the wall, too. (Size and location were complicated because it is on the front elevation of the house and had to work in proportion with  windows on both sides as well as below.)  We were able to achieve all this having “found” space by moving the laundry room across the hall to the one-time maid’s room.

There will be plenty of ways to add mermaid touches to this room that are easily erased in the future.  In the meantime, Darling Girl isn’t the only one who wins.  On the other side of the far bath wall, there are new built-in linen closets, an upgrade a house like Owl Manor certainly needed to have, and where I don’t have to pick out a single tile.