Bath Crashers- What it Was Really Like

You all are probably getting sick of the Bath Crashers posts, so I promise that this is the last. I've had a lot of questions though about the process, so I thought I would share the good, the bad and the ugly with you.

What We Loved:

First off, the people.  From our producers, film and audio, to the contractors and all our subs, they were not only professional but hilarious. We had so much fun laughing with them and would definitely use and recommend all of the contractors again for future projects. (Let me know if you live in Minnesota and you need a referral!)

The Shower.  The rain shower is not only beautiful looking, but the whole experience with all the jets on is simply luxurious.  I feel like a celebrity every time I step into it.  And not just a trashy reality TV made celebrity, but a real-deal, Julia Roberts type celebrity.  (I heart her.)

The Sink.  Its hard to show in the photos, but the sink is truly beautiful.  I may have thought that I wanted more counter space or double sinks, but I know now what I really wanted all along is this sink.  We plan to use the cabinet just to the left of the sink for all our bathroom stuff, and I think if we organize it right it will make up for the lack of counter top.

The Separate Toilet Room.  I'm a firm believer that there are some things in a marriage that should be left a mystery, and what happens on the toilet is firmly in that category.  Since our closet and bathroom are one integrated space, I'm so glad that we can shut the door to this room and let our spouse to mind their own business in the rest of the space.

The Laundry Shoot.  Again, since our bathroom and our closet are one space, it will be so nice to have a quick and easy way to get the dirty clothes out of the way.   No more piles of clothes on the floor or digging dirty clothes out of the hamper to wear them one more time.  I'm not saying that you do that Hubby, but if hypothetically you did, you won't be able to do that now and you won't smell like dirty socks any more.  (Hypothetically, of course.)

The Fire Place.  Its romantic, its interesting and its unique. I'm not entirely sold on the location of it just yet, but I think that might be because the rest of the room looks like a road side motel.  I'm hoping that once we upgrade the bedroom side, we can make these rooms feel like one cohesive space and the flow feels much better.


What We Would Have Done Differently:

The Tile.  We were pining for beautiful glass mosaics in a big way, and they were definitely the focal point of all the sample images we provided.  I think once we add our frosted glass doors and decorate with small splashes of "bling" we can bring a little more sparkle into the room, but if I'm being honest, I'm sad we didn't get any tile like what's featured in these images that we gave them.

 

The Closet Space.  It's way more than we probably need, (maybe a bit of over kill), but I think in the end this will be incredibly useful space for us now and into the future.  Having a beautiful and organized space to place all our stuff will be much more valuable to us than more room in the bedroom or a bathtub, so in the end I think I'm sold.

No Doors on the Closets.  We definitely want to hide our stuff so that it doesn't feel like you're brushing your teeth in your closet, so we'll get to work on this pretty quickly.  We're thinking frosted glass so that it isn't too dark in there, and the lights from inside the closets can still illuminate through.

The Track Lighting.  It's kind of hilairous that we're currently working to remove all the track lighting from our 1980's house, and they put 13 feet of new track lighting in.

Small Bedroom Space.  They took much more of the bedroom space than we told them they could or they said they would, and really all that will be left is room for our bed and a couple of night stands.  But when I think about it, we definitely won't need any dressers or anything, and we certainly don't need a sitting area with The Loft just 3 steps down and all the other sitting areas in the house.  Even though I wouldn't have picked it this way, I think we'll end up appreciating it, as it certainly maximized the space that we need the most.

The Drawer Hardware.  It's just not my personal style.  We plan to do some work in this area anyway since they left us some drawers, glass shelves and other stuff that they didn't have time to put in, so we'll just swap them out for a cleaner lined option at that time.

What We Could Have Lived Without

I hesitate to include this, because I definitely don't want to give off the impression that we are ungrateful.  If I haven't said it enough, we are so incredibly lucky to have been choosen, and this was truly an amazing experience.  Many of you have been asking though, "What was it really like?" or "Was it as awesome as it sounds?" and I feel like I owe it to you all (the few, the proud, the One Project at a Time readers) to share with you the full experience. 

Our House is a Mess.  Even though the room was done in time for the reveal, the rest of the house definitely wasn't.  There were a lot of spaces where they had to tear out walls for electrical or plumbing (or when they fell through the ceiling in the Dining Room) and those spaces haven't been repaired yet.  There were also a few accidents that caused some big scratches in our new hardwoods (the agony!) and a broken piece of glass in one of our stair railings.  Here's a few photos I took the next day:

Laundry shoot is not yet trimed out and portion of the wall is still missing.

Garage the next day was still a hot mess.

Ground just off the Master Bedroom Deck was still full of debris.

Dining Room ceiling still sports the messy patch.

The Bathroom isn't Quite Done.  Even though the bathroom was "reveal ready" on time, that doesn't mean that it was actually finished.  There are still dozens of little fixes and touch ups that need to be done to the space, which are pretty obvious when you see it in person.  We need to redo the floor grout since it was done, but then walked on too soon and chipped, there are cabinets that weren't finished or done wrong because of the short time line (see the too short drawer fronts in the photo of the cabinet hardware above), all the walls and ceiling still need another coat of paint, the window needs to be replaced with one that meets code, the trim and door need another coat of stain and a couple coats of poly, and on, and on, and on.  Our producers have promised that our contractors will all come back to finish up this work, but we don't have any time line from them on this, and we're crossing our fingers that this all gets done quickly.  (We don't deal with unfinished projects in our house very well.  I get a nervous tick.)  And although we love all our subs, we are a little concerned that now that the cameras are gone that they may not be as quick to come back to our house (non-paid) to finish up work.

There Was A Lot of Downtime.  The Hubs and I both took a lot of time off of work for this little project, but in reality they needed us very rarely, and we spent the majority of our time just trying to stay out of their way.  We maximized our time by diving into a few new projects (which I'll tell you more about in the days to come), but it's kind of a bummer that we had to burn through so much vacation time when they really didn't need us. 


With all that said, would we do it again?  Absolutely.  Even if none of the contractors come back and we end up doing all the remaining work ourselves, we still had all that plumbing and electrical moved, windows put in, and received all that expensive product absolutely free.  We can fix up the house, finish up the bathroom, and even make changes to the bathroom and we'll still come in thousands of dollars less than it would have cost to put in the bathroom ourselves.  Thankfully we're handy and our house was already a construction zone, so in the end, we still feel like we came out ahead.  Although I may change my mind when the show airs and we are remembered forever in time as "The Porn Episode."  Really- how does something like that happen?  Only to us.

UPDATE: Follow our whole Bath Crashers Experience Here:

Bath Crashers- We've Been Ambushed!

Day 1 Part 1- The Demo

Day 1 Part 2- Inside the Walls

Day 2 Part 1-Da Crane! Da Crane!

Day 2 Part 2-Gettin' it Done

Day 3- Master Bathroom Reveal

Master Bathroom Reveal Video

Bath Crashers- What it was Really Like