Hello beautiful people.  I remember promising some more before and after pictures from the house, so now I’m going to give them to you.  Welcome to my 1949 original pink bathroom.  Originally, we wanted to wallpaper the bathrooms; we had some wonderful paper picked out for this one.  Then I wallpapered the back-splash of my kitchen and we decided that sometime in the future we are going to hire someone to wallpaper the bathrooms.

I was left with a conundrum:  what color to paint.  The white was too plain; it emphasized how faded the blue tiles had become (my first impression was that they were grey).  I made a mock-up to test colors by splicing some pictures we took around the time we moved.  The mock-up also helped us shop for needed accessories, like a cabinet over the toilet.

I’m quite pleased with the final product.  The bathroom cabinet is a 1952 cream with gold accents ebay find.  And I splurged on a little chalkware cat head and mermaid wall hanging.  Unfortunately, 1/2 of the light fixture stopped functioning, but getting it fixed will give us the opportunity to refinish the chrome.  There is a crack in the sink from where someone dropped something hard and heavy into the bowl which, thankfully, does not leak.  I can live with this, because I can’t stand the thought of replacing such a handsome fixture.  The glazing on some of the tiles has been damaged by product bottles over the years and the grout is varying shades of grey, because it’s not really grout, it’s concrete.

After trying different cleaners (some of which the previous owners left behind) and researching house construction methods, I realized that the tile in my pink bathroom was applied by mudding.  Mudding is the process of setting tiles into a slurry of cement and it predated wall board (which wasn’t around until 1946).  It made sense since every original wall in my house is concrete (yes, all the interiors as well), and is probably the reason why the bathroom held up so well to obvious abuse.  I have made peace with the idea that I will not have bright white grout.