February 2006: Decorating the Bath Room

February 7th, 2006

Mid-Winter

It has been rather too long in com­ing that I update this site. Lisa and I have had our hands full for many months now and for­ward progress on our var­i­ous ini­tia­tives around here has been slow to neg­li­gi­ble. Nevertheless, things have hap­pened (as they will…) and from my store of pho­tographs I will briefly go over what has been going on hereabouts.

At this time, we have a ful­ly func­tion­al if still unfin­ished bath­room we are most hap­py with. Our friend Aleister Couper vis­it­ed from Maui and was a tremen­dous help putting in the dry­wall and I am most thank­ful for that as it is, as many of you will know, not par­tic­u­lar­ly pleas­ant work. It is very nice to have that done and at this point it is all fin­ished and paint­ed, although Lisa and I are in the process of dec­o­rat­ing it as we can’t help doing some­thing cre­ative when­ev­er pos­si­ble. That this con­sid­er­ably increas­es the time to com­ple­tion is secondary.

Those who have seen this bath­room in it’s orig­i­nal state will rec­og­nize the vast improve­ment all this rep­re­sents. We rebuilt the intru­sive clos­et and gave the room a lit­tle more space. There will be shelves for linens here eventually.

I have a thing about check­ing the oops mix paint at our local build­ing sup­ply stores. I like vivid col­ors but they can be hard to get right so a lot of over-intense paint shows up there. I found a 5‑gallon buck­et of this green for $20— an irre­sistible bar­gain con­sid­er­ing it was top qual­i­ty. Only prob­lem was, it was too dark to paint the whole room with, so we had to go back and actu­al­ly buy some cus­tom mix paint to match it! I think the effect rather nice, although it will get toned down a bit when we apply an ochre glaze.

The funky-look­ing van­i­ty coun­ter­top is a tem­po­rary so we can brush our teeth until the real one gets put in— a flow­ing curve that will fill the cor­ner. That will wait until we do the floor; and what a floor it will be! Thanks to Jonathan’s eye for sal­vage, we scored a truck­load of Brazilian Cherry off-cuts from a con­struc­tion site his firm did the design for. Installing that will fol­low the wall decorating.

Decorating of the bath house is mov­ing for­ward as well. Contemplative imagery sur­rounds the bath­tub cre­at­ing a sanc­tu­ary of relax­ation and insight. “A good place to get some think­ing done…” as the song goes.

By now, we’ve exhaus­tive­ly cov­ered the devel­op­ments to one room of the house. As to the rest of the house, well, noth­ing’s real­ly changed. The liv­ing arrange­ments are dif­fer­ent these days— we now have Patrick, head chef at the Blossoming Lotus liv­ing here along with Joanna, who teach­es Yoga and waits tables at the Lotus. It’s real­ly love­ly hav­ing them here and boy, do we enjoy those gourmet feasts at Patrick’s capa­ble hands!