It’s finally ready to show off- our brand new bathroom! Actually, it’s a shower room. This would probably just be a half-bath in a different home, but we need this room to take care of all of our hygiene needs for an unknown period of time, so we made it a wet room with a drain in the floor and a shower on the wall (and ceiling!).

The surface of ceiling, walls, and floor is Skimstone, a kind of concrete skim coat that has been waterproofed and sealed. One disappointment in the process was that the various literature on how to seal it was contradictory and the stuff we ended up using started peeling off the floor almost immediately. It’s fine on all the other surfaces but not rugged enough for the floor. It’s my job to try to sand up those bubbles and peel up what wants to peel up and I put in a bit of time here and there but we might live with a mottled floor for awhile. Which is a shame because Morgan took that first week of quarantine to lay in fiber optic threads and then the Skimstone around them so we could have a floor that twinkles like the night sky. Suuuuuper fun. Still super fun even with mottling. (See video.)

We found the lockers and mirror on the Second Use website and were able to arrange curbside pickup. Then I sanded and he painted the lockers and those are our new bathroom cabinets, keeping stuff dry in the wet room. The mirror is a bit scuffed but it will do for a bit.

But the toilet paper, you want to know about the toilet paper, don’t you? Well, first of all we have a bidet seat on this new toilet of ours, which given the toilet paper shortages of the COVID-19 quarantine was well-timed. You do still need a bit to dry off with, however, since we went cheap and opted out of a bootie blow-dryer, so Morgan fabricated this little number right here:

We are still fine-tuning the details; we need a surface mount soap dispenser and somewhere to hang a hand towel, got some bottles showing up for shampoo and conditioner, etc. But check it out- we are showering and toileting behind a closed door (and not just a curtain) for the first time in years! So deluxe!

This also means we were able to remove the temporary external plumbing from our ceiling yesterday. Getting closer and closer to the norms of middle class American housing every day.