the spa, day 11 and 12... we're getting closer!

Craig's been super busy cutting tile and stone the past two days, drawing in the stone design we want on the shower walls, and getting the travertine tile and river rock glued into place.  The grout will come later, towards the end, so it still isn't exactly how it will look at the end. But these photos give a good idea of what is going where so far.

Here's Craig hard at work today.

The granite guys came to measure the vanities today.  The counters and shower thresholds will be installed next Thursday.  Once those are in, the glass company can come measure the shower for the frameless door and glass walls and start working on that for us.  It might take another two weeks once they measure for the glass to come in and be installed.  You can't even believe how expensive frameless glass is.   I'll be cringing when I write that check.  It will be well, well worth it.

I shared my blog with Craig so he can be watching the progress of the fruits of his labor.  He's doing such a fantastic job and there is no question in our minds we chose the right guy for the job.  He's had such great input on ideas, and such talent and skills.  Not only that, he's about the nicest guy you could ever meet.  We're very happy we found him.   We're also happy with Mosaic Tile, in Chantilly (they have other locations in MD and VA as well).  Their designer Anna did a great job showing us tile/stone options and drawing it all up for us.  

Once we knew we wanted river rock in the shower, we talked to her about wanting to extend it to a couple of other places in the bathroom.   Its so pretty, we didn't want it to just be the floor of the shower. So she, together with Craig, brought it up onto the new shower bench seat, onto the deck of our tub, and onto two framed design areas on each shower wall.  You can see the beginnings of the shower wall design Craig started today. That was Anna's idea, and I think its going to add a really nice touch.

He put in a few corner shelves to hold stuff.

Here is the shower floor, all the stones are there but will now need to be grouted and sealed.

here's the bench seat in the shower

In this photo you can see that Craig's got tile on the bathtub step, it all had to be at specific angles.  I'll get a better photo of that soon.

Gosh, when I think back on this project its really taken some brain power and legwork to make it happen.  From getting estimates and meeting with contractors in January, to picking out every single fixture and piece of tile and to go in there... from the big things to the small things... its been a lot of decisions.  Thus far, Andrew and I have agreed on almost every element of what we wanted the bathroom to be and how we wanted it to look.  What can I say, he has exceptional taste.  Ha!

Here's proof.  We've been trying to decide what we'll want to go on the walls once its all done.  We wanted something natural, related to water and rocks.  Check out this artwork by an artist named George Dombek.  He's an artist Andrew used to know in college when he worked in an art shop cutting matte board.

We'll probably go with these, there are a series of them.  I just love the colors and they tie in nicely with the whole natural theme of the bathroom.

You can see more on George Dombek's work here.  Its really beautiful.

So... stay tuned Monday or Tuesday for the next update on the latrine.  Its clearly been exciting for us, and the boys are pretty excited about it too.  Now that we'll have a luxurious bathroom, they'll surely never use their own bathrooms again.