The One That Got Away

When we bought our first house I very assuredly knew that that home was my forever home.  I was NEVER moving again.  I loved the house, I hated moving, it was a no brainer.  The hubs was not as confident since he thought the house was on the smaller side at 1350 square feet.  I had grown up in a 1000 square foot house and lived in several very small apartments, one a 400 square foot converted garage, and really felt the size would not be an issue.  It helped that the bloggers I was reading lived in smaller homes as well and felt they would be there forever too.  I totally remember Sherry thinking their first house would be their forever house.  Then the market crashed and moving became a moot point, we had lost so much value that the idea of being able to sell the house and pay off the mortgage was laughable.

It didn't really matter anyway because the house was perfect for the two of us.  It got a little cramped when we had our first baby but it just meant staying on top of purging.  Then in early 2013 we had our second baby and the house drastically decreased in size.  Toys started taking over the house and neither my husband or I had anywhere to go to be alone.

The summer of 2013 is when we started seriously thinking about moving.  Several of the blogs I read had bought new homes and were doing big time renovations on them.  We had wrapped up our big renovations and knew there wasn't going to be a lot more we could do without really over improving for our neighborhood.  And then I started noticing that one of the neighborhoods we had liked but couldn't afford when we were looking for our first house had some options that would be within our reach.  A realtor that we know very graciously agreed to show us a few in there one Sunday afternoon even though we weren't sure our house was really ready to be sold and I fell in love with one of them.

It did turn out that it wasn't a good time to sell our house and the one I fell in love with wasn't really a great choice for that moment in our lives, it was going to need a ton of work, but that didn't stop me from dreaming about it and making plans for what I would do with it.  The plan that I came up with for the master bathroom there still has me thinking about it at times and I will probably recycle some elements from it when we redo our bath sometime in the future.

We loved the frameless glass shower enclosure in our first house so I planned on doing one like that, the bathroom was very small and narrow so there wasn't room for both bath and shower or even a combo.  White subway tiles on the walls would be accented with the glass mosaic and I wanted the penny tile for the floor of the shower with Merola's Sonaba Beige on the floor in the rest of the bath.  It has a very subtle, textural pattern with sparkly specks that matched the glam vibe I was going for.  The open vanity was to keep the space feeling as light and open as possible with the feminine scalloped sink and a bamboo style faucet.  A wood framed medicine cabinet to reference the vanity and help warm up the space with some shiny sconces finishing it off.

That would have been such a fun space to redo but maybe I will be able to recycle some of these ideas somewhere else someday.