old world meets New MAster Bath

ORC Week 1: New MAster BAth Remodel Begins

First off, I am so excited about this Fall's One Room Challenge because drumroll.... we finally bought our own house! 

As many of you know, I have indulged my love for interior design through our L.A. apartment and fixer upper properties that we purchased in Kentucky, all the while saving up for the day when we would be home owners out here in Los Angeles. Over the years, we prioritized investing in rental properties, prior to purchasing our first real home. If some of you are interested in hearing more about our strategy, I plan to write a separate post about this type of investing,  All of this meant that we delayed getting a home of our own for a over a decade, while renting in L.A.

Luckily for us, our dream home found us through a synchronicity and events. We feel like we are living in a home that we visualized long before moving in and making it our own. For example, my best friend pointed out there are banana trees in the backyard where I host my natural dye workshops that look identical to the banana trees outside of our former apartment master bedroom window. 

Our house is a California Spanish style home in an historic neighborhood called Miracle Mile. This area is about mid-way between the ocean and downtown. We had a ton of renovations to tackle upon moving in and I can't wait to show you more, one of which is the main bath. This bathroom is the largest in the house, although we have a small en-suite bath in our master bedroom. This main bath is actually the family and guest bathroom, so it serves the whole house. 

Here is the bath prior to the renovation. Although, it is charming, we knew there were small changes that we wanted to make such as swapping out the vanity. The bathroom feels a little squished and did I mention there is a black toilet? Not my fave toilet color(: As it turns out, the tiles too were not original to the home. They were done later, influenced by the art deco period and you will find many similarly tiled bathrooms all around the area. 

When we bought the house a few months ago, we had only planned little changes to the bathroom because we wanted to save money. Here is a short video that I took of the bathroom before, you can see the shower is on the right and outside of the bathroom there is a little linen closet off of the hallway. The black toilet, not pictured is just behind the door.  

You can see from the video how packed the space feels although it is ample size. I will share the full measurements, inspiration and floor plans next week.

We decided to open up the space by removing the hall linen closet and including that closet space within the bathroom as a shower next to the tub. Then, we plan to wall off the existing shower making the bathroom more of an open square shape, whereas originally it was a shaped like a "Z". 

This week, we jumped right into the demo with our contractor, who is busy working on multiple things around the house. To see all of the house projects, along with sneak peaks, you can check them out over on my Instagram stories. I decided to focus on the bath because the timing of it lined up perfectly with this challenge!
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My husband really wants to go with a freestanding bath-tub, so I will be searching for a small freestanding tub that fits within the nook below. I want the bathroom to have a spa-like feel so looking forward to sharing that in the inspiration photos, next week. 

I will share our vision for the space, along with a floor-plan and basic measurements to provide some more context to the project. Until then, I look forward to checking out the other ORC designers and guests participants. This is my 3rd time participating in the challenge and I'm excited there are quite a few of the featured designers that I regularly follow who are participating in this round. I also can't wait to see all the new talent. Heading on over to check out their projects! 

Up until now, I have only tackled bedrooms in this challenge, to see my past projects follow the links:

• Boy's Nature Bedroom (Fall 2017)
• California Master Bedroom (Spring 2018)

So I am looking forward to sharing a bathroom design for a change. 

See you next week!