Plans for the first floor guest bathroom

May 29, 2023

Last week I told you how excited we are that a) our bathroom isn’t quite as scary as we thought, and b) we’re sooooo happy to be getting a new one! Today I wanted to give you a little idea about what we’re doing in there. It’s a teeny tiny room. I know I say that about every room, but this one is the smallest of them all, as you can probably tell in the photos. Here’s a little diagram I made that isn’t in any sort of scale, but will give you an idea of the layout.

This room is right next to the kitchen, in the hallway between the kitchen and what should be the dining room but what we use as a living room (the pink room), so it’s the bathroom that is most likely to be seen and used by guests. Currently it has the only bathtub in the house, which we think is kind of weird. While Andy and I are both not really bath people (I don’t have the patience to sit still that long!!), we think it’s really important for our house to have a bathtub… just not one right next to the kitchen, right? It would also be nice to have a place for guests that isn’t quite so hard to operate. So the bathtub is out and in its place will be a stand up shower with glass doors. ((We’re installing a clawfoot tub upstairs.))

I always knew I wanted glass shower doors in this room. Since it’s such a small space, I figured the glass would visually open it up, at least as much as possible, and give it a more airy feel. Plus this window brings in a ton of natural light that I love to let in. We did not at all want those pebbled glass and metal sliding doors that were in every apartment I ever rented, that never seem to slide right and are always rusty around the edges. No. What we wanted was THIS. Beautiful, frameless clear glass doors. But, those things are spendy. So very spendy. Because they’re awesome.

And then we got lucky. REALLY lucky. When we first started talking to our contractor about what we wanted, and before we’d even told him our plans for glass doors (and how it probably wasn’t going to happen because they are so goshdarn expensive), he casually mentioned that someone had returned some shower doors that were glass AND frameless AND the same size as our shower AND absolutely perfect in every way, plus, oh, he’d give them to us for about 30% of the original price just to get rid of them. Um. Sign us up. So we’re getting this beautiful door from Kohler — yay!

The layout in the room will stay exactly the same. The shower floor and walls will be cultured marble in white and light grey, which, sadly, I forgot to take a picture of. We picked out a black and grey marble floor tile from The Tile Shop (love that place) which will add an appropriate vintage feeling to contrast the super modern glass doors. We felt ok with the slight splurge on tile because we need so little (and it was on sale when we bought it!).

Here’s some of the other things we’ve already picked out for this bathroom…

We’re still trying to decide on vanity lights. It’s hard because I think they’re all pretty blah, so I kind of just don’t care. We also can’t decide what color to paint the walls when we’re done. Let me know if you have any suggestions!!!

… as long as you don’t say purple!

Plans for the first floor guest bathroom