Miami Vice bathrooms

When we first bought our house, we were convinced it had been built sometime in the 1980s. If it weren't for the property taxes showing otherwise (namely late 2006), we would have never believed otherwise. I mean, had you walked into our house back in the summer of 2008, before husband-dear and I got our contemporary hands on it, you would have seriously remembered what made the 1980s such a failure of a decade. American interior-decorating-wise at least. You see, while the Netherlands was going through an, in my opinion, equally misguided white-gray-minimalist phase, the mid-1980s in the US were characterized by an abundance of flowers, paisley, wallpapers, and lots of curtains. And our house had it all.

First, there were flowered valences on each window. Flowered. Valences. I didn't even know they continued making those things after 1991. But they did, and every single window in our house had some. It was great, if you wanted to feel like you were living inside the Family Ties set, that is. Second, there were the golden knobs on every single kitchen and bathroom cabinet. And not just small, modest little knobs. Oh no, these were quarter-sized, round, shiny golden knobs. These were the cat's pajamas of the golden knobs. They were so hideous, in fact, that husband-dear and I thought we would have to completely redo the kitchen, which with its white cabinets and golden knobs looked like something out a 1986 Florida-based Lifetime movie. That is, until we though to replace the golden uglies with understated brushed nickel knobs, and we were suddenly looking at a brand new kitchen. Oh, and did I mention the wallpaper? I must have, as the kitchen was wallpapered in the most wonderful fruit-patterned motif. Gigantic, larger than life cherries, apples, and oranges adorned every single inch of our poor kitchen, and not only was the wallpaper just incredibly ugly, it also came off in pieces the size of my pinkie nail. Now it didn't happen overnight, but we managed to erase most of the vestiges of the 1980s before we moved into our new house. We spent three days peeling wallpaper, and then painted our kitchen a lovely monsoon-green-summer-white combination. The valences came down and were unceremoniously dumped in the trash, and the golden knobs were donated to Goodwill.

There were two things we didn't touch those first few weeks though: our light fixtures, and the bathrooms. The light fixtures, lovingly nicknamed "the hanging boobies" by our boys were just too expensive to replace, and after struggling with teeny-tiny pieces of wallpaper for over 48 hours, we were just not ready to tackle two bathrooms. So we just told ourselves that we'd get to the light fixtures eventually, and that having golden fixtures and flowered wallpaper in our bathrooms really wasn't that bad.

So, last year, we finally replaced the hanging boobs. The boudoir-look was starting to get old, as was the running commentary from children and visitors alike about our apparent love for tatas. It wasn't cheap, and I'm pretty sure balancing a five-pound glass and bronze metal fixture on top of my head while husband-dear did something important with the wiring took a year off my life, but we now have beautiful, understated, NON-gold lights throughout our house. Hallelujah.

The final thorn was, of course, the bathroom. Now we'd already come the decision that the kids'/guest bathroom wasn't too bad. The wallpaper in there is a light beige, and although the golden fixtures aren't my style, we've managed to make it work using a blue shower curtain, blue decorations, and blue guest towels. The main problem was our bathroom. Somehow the tiny, tiny, bright-colored flowers on the walls combined with the golden fixtures made our bathroom look like the love child of the Golden Girls and Miami Vice, which is, quite honestly, not our style. But our experience with the wallpaper in the kitchen was enough to make us slightly hesitant when it came to redoing our bathroom. Did we really want to spend at least a week dealing with tiny, tiny pieces of wallpaper?

Then came my trip to China. My five-week trip to China. Five weeks in which husband-dear would be home alone. And apparently, that got husband-dear thinking about all the spare time he would suddenly have on his hands. While most of us would ponder lazy Sunday mornings, leaving one's mess all over the house, and hogging the entire bed, he, clearly doesn't think like that. One morning, a few weeks ago, the dear announced that he'd decided to "tackle our bathroom" while I was in China.
"Are you sure?" I asked, uncertain of what I had just heard.
He was sure. So sure, in fact, he wanted to go pick up some sample paints with me that weekend. Not one to pass up on an opportunity to skip out on some really nasty work, I gladly obliged, even though I still found it hard to believe anyone would sacrifice their time to paint the bathroom by themselves. Well, not only was I wrong, I was very wrong. In the weeks since, husband-dear has told me he wants to do "it right", and so we've selected new light fixtures, new faucets, a new counter top, and we will be shopping for tiles this week. My husband, people, is the bees' knees of bathroom-fixer-uppers, and I am beyond excited. We will -finally- be getting ride of our Golden-Miami-Girls-Vice bathroom, and moving on up into the new millennium. And the best part? All I have to do is pick out the stuff.

Can we have a standing ovation for awesome husbands?