For the Love of Marble Tile

Things are still moving right along at the casa.  I wanted to show you a few new pics now that the bathroom floor is in and finished.  I love this marble tile even more now that it's on the floor!  I know it's not particularly practical, but I love the way it looks and it gives such a great vintage feel to the bathroom.  In the picture above you can see a part of the vanity, which is going to be painted white.  I had found these pictures in the new Restoration Hardware catalog:

I wanted that vanity and cabinet, but painted white and scaled down for my space.  (As a side note: as much as I love Restoration Hardware, all of their new furniture is SO HUGE!  Who has room for furniture that big?  If you do, then my hat is off to you!  But my little teeny tiny hall bathroom requires something more "wee" than that.)  Anyway, I gave the carpenter the picture, and crossed my fingers.  Well, it may be hard to tell from my photo, but this is what he created:

I'll take better pics when they are painted (I think I'll need to stand in the bathtub to get a good shot), but let me tell you -- this totally exceeded my expectations!  It took my breath away.  I am so impressed; I wish that I had the skills to make furniture like this!

In other house news, when we last left the hallway, it looked like this:

And now, ta da!

So, as you can see, things are looking up around here!  I hope you have a great weekend!  I'm going to be busy this weekend dealing with this:

And so It Begins....

Well, we're still wrangling with our insurance company, living in a partially demolished house, and no construction is yet underway.  We've also been told that we'll have to MOVE OUT for several weeks while all of the hardwood floors are ripped out and replaced.  Urghhhhh!

The good news is that the plumbing fixtures that I purchased online arrived yesterday.  I'm kinda excited about them!  Here's the faucet I chose for the bathroom:

It's not the Restoration Hardware faucet that I was drooling over, but it looks about the same and was a lot (LOT) less expensive.  In the laundry room I'm replacing the old utility sink that I had with a large stainless steel sink that is quite basic, but big enough to soak lots and lots of vintage linens.  I chose a kitchen faucet from the same line as the bathroom faucets to use in my laundry room:

The handles on this faucet come with these cute porcelain inserts that say "hot" and "cold":

but the super-cool part is that they come with replacement inserts in French! (Please excuse the blurry photo.)

It's the little details that are making me smile right now.  One last building detail: I picked out the tile for the bathroom floor:

It's a honed marble hexagon tile.  I think it's going to give the bathroom that vintage-European-hotel look that I'm after.  Here's what my bathroom used to look like, right before the demo started:

I think it will be fun to see the transformation.

So, that's my home improvement update for today!  In other news, I've been busy adding lots of antique laces to the shop, as well as supplies for Halloween and Christmas crafting.  So, stop by if you haven't shopped in a while!