A room of one’s own

For some time I had an image of my perfect bathroom: it was bright, roomy, with a long clawfoot tub.  So when we bought our house and it had a 1970s era bathroom, we remodeled it immediately.

The bathroom was poorly shaped (it made an L), and the door was in the middle of the keeping room—one of the original rooms of the house (the one with the beehive oven and large fireplace). Placing furniture in this heavily used room was extremely difficult because there wasn’t a single long wall. And it meant that wherever you sat, the bathroom was highly visible.

We gutted the old bathroom, a challenging task with its tile floor and built-in bathtub, and we took out a linen closet, which also opened into the keeping room. The closet became the door to the bathroom and we ended up with a large, symmetrical room, and a straight wall in the keeping room we could put a couch against. When Cherisse rebuilt the walls to the bathroom, she framed in an opening for a stained glass window, a gift from our friend Manette. This beautiful glass picture depicts Cherisse rowing on the lake at the house in which we had lived happily for many years; the house itself is in the background of the stained glass. It is perfect, and is now in a perfect location.

I got my giant bathtub, and the sink and toilet I wanted. We chose a cheerful linoleum for the floor, and a warm yellow for the window trim and row of Shaker pegs Cherisse made to hang towels from. It is my vision realized.