Fiberglass had not been invented as a solid material when my house was built in 1928. Brick, stucco, stained glass, ceramic tile, porcelain, wood: My modest 1928 Dutch colonial has these holistic materials in abundance, and I'm incorporating them all into the renovation. It's feels noble to say I'm doing a "period renovation."
Then why did Home Depot deliver a four-foot fiberglass shower to my yard on Saturday morning?
According to "Small Houses of the Twenties," which is a terrific reference book, houses like mine didn't even have showers let alone a one-piece unit made from the material used in Jet Skis. People bathed in footed, porcelain tubs ... on Sundays ... in shared, luke-warm bathwater. Most mail-order kit houses had only one bathroom; mine has a full bath upstairs and a 5x3-foot "half-bath" on the first floor (which strangely is the only room not being expanded, shrunk or otherwise tweaked by our renovation).
We're adding a master bathroom to the 2nd floor and expanding the kids' bathroom to include two vanities and a linen closet. As with the kitchen, I'm going for a 1920s look, with inset painted cabinets, glass knobs and hexagon tiles surrounding porcelain tubs. Real 1920s kit-house bathrooms didn't have vanities or linen closets or even laundry chutes--they had pedestal sinks and hooks on the wall. So you could say I'm veering off the "period" trajectory with the vanities and closets. But at least I'm sticking with materials from that era---marble counters in the master bathroom and (if we can afford it) Enviroglas for the girls' counters (more on this material later).
So about that fiberglass shower:
Since we have a lot of friends 800 miles away in New Jersey and Pennsylvania but no guest room in which to house said friends when they (must) visit, we decided to put a third full bath in the finished basement. And no offense to our wonderful future guests, but the fiberglass shower cost $2,500 less than a tiled shower. And it's really big! All our kids and dogs can fit in it at one time. Imagine what we can save on the water bill...
Besides, fiberglass isn't too far afield. When renovating an older home that many people would've torn down, you get to fudge a little on the historic-preservation thing. My house is many things--charming, old, small, functional, oozing with potential. But above all else, it's practical. If fiberglass had been a shower option in 1928, I bet the original builders would've used it!
Where are the pics for your bathroom? Do you have any ideas already?
Posted by: Filipe | June 13, 2011 at 05:22 PM