Talk is cheap...or is it.

Tonight was yet another night where we planned on framing and ended up talking. One would think a rehab is just about the work itself, but so much of our time goes into talking, thinking, and researching. We've been having problems with our 2nd floor bathroom and materials. The original plan was to have this curved, translucent wall, and a round soaking tub next to the shower. While I was never a fan of the circular tub because I can sometimes be visually challenged--a week ago we spent an entire night building our "sink" (two buckets and a piece of plywood on top), our tub (a stenographers chair with 2x6's stacked on the cusion), and our shower (2x4's attached to one of the already framed walls), so that I could visualize what our bathroom would look like. It still didn't do it for me. Anyway, we decided we would do the tub in tile and concrete, and were really excited about the whole thing. Then we called Jonah the family mathmetician and had him do the math. Our tub was going to take up 36" and weigh almost 1800 pounds. Not bad for a floor reinforced with steel beams. Too bad our floor is supported by 110 year old wood beams. We will not be using concrete. The next idea was to tile the tub and have concrete tops, but we have learned that an all tile bathtub (soaking tub if you will), is not all that water-proof. I still don't understand this since I look in books and see tiled soaking tubs, but oh well...I give up.

While at Home Depot to pick up framing lumber, we decided to look through a few magazines and books there. We found an article about a tub that was made from plaster then coated with a water-proof wax for a top coat. We quickly copied down the caption for the picture and we decided to ditch HD (Home Depot) alltogher and head to Borders. We spend the next few hours looking through books on bathrooms, materials, design, and the like, and we found exactly what we were looking for!! We not only found the name of the material used for that tub, but we found the architect's phone number and a description of how he built the tub!! Not only did we find that, but Nathan and I agreed on EVERYTHNG for the bathroom!!! (insert sound of gods chanting "allehluia") Not that we disargree a lot, but it is a rare occasion that we agree on using both industrial materials (more Nathan's forte) and simple lines for my particluar love for "zen" bathrooms. Things we agreed on: using translucent walls instead of a curved wall; a rectangluar tub instead of a circular one; using plaster instead of fiberglass (this one is a personal favorite since the thought of using fiberglass was giving me panic attacks with thoughts of bathing in an apple-red automoible bumper); the color of the plaster; moving the vanity to the other side (means we can put a mirror up!! YEAH!); using the plaster for not only the tub, but the shower, too! Do you know how successful of a day this was? Assuming things don't change (snicker, snicker), we have finalized the bathroom. And it only took six months!!!