Mid-Century Bathroom Advice Roundup

Planning the right update for a mid-century bathroom is about space planning and the right product picks, sure. But it's also about your lifestyle, your morning routine and your five-year plan. 

So let's talk through some of the most pressing issues you can nail down to create a good mid-century bath update for you and for your house and for your style. 

In Today's Episode You'll Hear:

• Why you should kick-off your mid-century bath design using the master plan framework.
• How to plan a timeless, not trendy, update that’s perfect for your mid-century bath. 
• The seven design essentials of a great mid-century bath update. 

Get the full show notes with all the trimmings at http://www.midmod-midwest.com/2310

Like and subscribe at Apple | Spotify | YouTube. Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here! Or get my course,  Ready to Remodel.

Transcript

Planning the right update for a mid-century bathroom is about space planning and the right product picks, sure, but it's also about your lifestyle, your morning routine and your five year plan. I've had a lot of conversations with Master Plan clients and on consult calls recently that caused me to notice some recurring issues and questions, things that come up again and again for a lot of people, which makes me suspect that if you've got bath questions on the brain, you've had some of the same struggles.

00:27

So let's talk through some of the most pressing issues you can nail down to create a good mid-century bath update for you and for your house and for your style. Hey there. Welcome back to mid bound remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I'm your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You're listening to Episode 2310.

00:52

Okay, before we dive in on bathrooms, fully a couple of items of business. The first one is if you listen to the end of last week's episode. You were expecting to hear a conversation about mid-century landscape design, because I was going to be talking to Jim Drzewiecki of ginkgo leaf studio, getting some more of his expert opinions on what to do outside of your mid-century house. Something came up. We weren't able to talk as planned, and so he will be back with his sage advice a little bit later, and in the meantime, I am pinch hitting with bathroom stuff, bathroom design stuff.

01:25

But the other thing I wanted to say is that I'm going to be talking somewhat about Big Picture priorities, the strategic organization of what you want to do in what order, and how to think about your own taste, your own judgment, not worrying about resale value. But I am still in most of these podcast episodes dealing with problems on a tactical level. Design secrets, the right kind of tile to use, how to think about small spaces in your house.

01:55

This key, the absolute secret to success in overall remodeling, though, is strategic. It is about having your big picture plan in mind. This actually came up for me just earlier this week. I was delivering design options to a master plan client in our great workshop meeting. It's one of my favorite parts of that process, when I get to dive in after they've had their drawing options for a couple of day, usually about a day, and then we sit down and go through what they've liked, what didn't work for them. That's fine, because you can't design it three different ways, and I usually try to Goldilocks them into three options we can discuss.

02:32

And we were in this project; we came to their master plan specifically because they were feeling the weight of, they knew they wanted to do one thing first. They wanted to do a patio, a DIY project, get some friends together, do it as sort of a team building exercise, a little bit of a everybody chips in. But they couldn't make a decision about the patio until they knew the size and general scope of a future owner suite edition, years from now, in the future, but it overshadows, literally and also sort of limits the scope and spacing of where their patio could and should go.

03:09

So they needed to know about the addition first, and they're also probably second going to be coming after a basement remodel. They had some flooding, and they had to go in and do a big sort of tear out and get rid of mold remediation and put in sump pump and drainage tile around the exterior of the basement. A bunch of work has been done to remediate a problem, but now they're about to build it back.

03:29

But it's also important that they think about how to connect the future plumbing for that future Owner's Suite addition on the main floor years from now through the existing basement to existing plumbing drops, the closest one being in the kitchen, several other basement below the kitchen, several rooms away. If they go ahead and do a beautiful perhaps invest some energy, some beautiful, finished materials, remodel job on the basement, and then five years from now, they want to put in that addition, are they going to be tearing up their finished floors to trench in for a new plumbing connection. That is not logical. So in order to do the first project that they could DIY with some friends this fall, a patio, they need to know a bunch of other things about their future plans.

04:14

They don't have to have every detail dial in, but it really will do them well, serve them, save money, save time, save them from stopping altogether on a future project. If they have thought through everything, where am I going with this? I've gone off on a ramble. Oh, my point is, I think that this kind of strategic, big picture thinking, gaming out everything you might to do, working backwards to set your first project, budgeting accordingly, so that you know that you know that the project you're doing right now won't prevent you from doing a more important to you later project in a year or two.

04:46

This is all part of the process of Master Plan thinking, and this is exactly what I want to talk to you about in a different context, aside from a fun Google for what top When did della talk about lighting? Last When did della talk about bathroom? How many times as della talked about designs for bathroom details? You can go find all of that on the podcast archives, scrolling through my Instagram.

05:07

But I really want to take some time to talk about the bigger picture strategy, the bigger picture vision that's necessary to really successfully plan a remodel. You love a regret proof remodel. This is what I wish everyone knew, and I, I spent a lot of time individually passing the word along, having conversations one on one, with people trying to make it into this podcast content. But this is what I feel like everyone who's contemplating a remodel project ought to know.

05:32

So I'm going to pack the substance of my entire core beliefs. Everything that I could share with a homeowner who's about to get pushed around by a contractor, who's about to make a decision based on resale value that they will ultimately come to regret, who's about to go too hard on project number one and prevent themselves be able to getting to the bigger project that they kind of had thought they would do in three or four years, but then they threw away too much of the budget on this one, and they never get back to it. Or they had such a poor experience with remodel number one that they never wanted to be going back into that trauma again.

06:03

Everything I believe in, basically, I'm going to jam into a 30 minute live class on Saturday morning, Saturday 11 Central. If you are curious about this at all, please try to show up. If you aren't able to show up live, there will, of course, be a replay recording. There will also be a replay recording of what's going to happen after the 30 minutes, which is Q and A as many questions as people show up with, I will stick around and answer.

06:25

This is going to be a really fun collaborative conversation. Think about it as a bit of an extension of my ready to remodel student only architect office hours. We can talk about your big picture strategy, your timing, what should happen, first, next and last in your house, we can also answer questions about the tile in your bathroom. The granular level is not less important than the big picture, but without a big picture approach, it can't really all go well.

06:54

Anyway, I'm just really excited about Saturday's class, so I'm pulling together some examples, some really great relevant how the process worked for people in different situations, unflipping a 90s house, working to get into a house as quickly as possible after moving in, people who are reimagining their house after years or even decades of being in it. All of these are great opportunities to take a master planned approach to your remodel. So I would love to talk to you about each and every one of those cases and your specific scenario. If you're curious about that, I'll see you live on Saturday. Or if you're listening to this after the fact, you can check out the recording. All of that can be accessed at mid mod-midwest.com/workshop, the workshop being three secrets of a regret proof mid-century remodel.

07:43

Okay, let's talk about bathrooms. The show notes page for this episode, by the way, is going to be mid mod. Dash, midwest.com/ 1310 I believe I've lost my notes. I have too many windows open on my computer. Yes, 1310 and I want to just talk about rethinking one or all of your mid-century bathrooms, because, well, I have given the sort of basics of mid-century bath designs in the past. In fact, if you want to check that out, you can grab the free guide I've put together on the basic design considerations for a mid-century bathroom. Go there to the show notes page, and you'll find it. Or you can also head to mid mod-midwest.com/bath and I've got a bunch of different the free guide and a bunch of different resources put together.

08:30

But here's the short version, so you don't have to click away. You don't have to go do anything if your hands are full of dishwasher. I've got you covered. The first and most important thing on my mind because I was just doing YouTube video about perfect mid-century lighting is that you want to improve the lighting in a mid-century bathroom, good lighting for faces and good general use lighting and a very dim night light option are three different important use cases for your mid-century lighting.

09:01

My personal pet peeve is having one bar light or the Oh God, the Home Depot special with like four sconce lights all on the same unit that hit over the mirror and all shine down on your face and give you like a huge nose shadow. I deeply dislike it. I'm a much bigger fan of light hanging closer to your face, either suspended from the ceiling at a pendant, if you're dealing with a small space, or with sconces on either side of the mirror, or sometimes sconces mounted through the mirror, which, if you're not doing a medicine cabinet, if you're just doing a piece of glass from your local glazing company, you can absolutely have them drill Custom holes for you and mount your vanity lighting right against the mirror itself.

09:45

I'm going to go off topic immediately and say this is actually a perfect example of a conversation that came up as part of a consult call, I was giving about someone's bathroom recently and watch me go rogue from my outline. So we were talking about, we were going to talk about her bathroom generally. We also talked about the fact that she was afraid she was going to have to replace all the original, vintage, unpainted doors in her mid-century house, particularly the front door, because a little bit of the veneer was de-laminating.

10:14

And she'd had a consult. She'd had someone come out and look at the house with her, and that was someone who worked for a door replacement company. That professional told her it was not possible to replace or repair her existing doors without completely removing them down to the trim and installing a new cased door opening. That's just not true, but it was not possible for that person's company to do that work for her. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt that that's what they meant, although what she took from it was that her existing doors were trash, and she would have to throw them away. And she was very sad about that.

10:38

So as the first thing that we covered in our conversation was just to note that no her existing mid-century doors, if they are well fitted, if they are well insulated, if they are performing well in other ways, but they're della amating slightly. They're not trash. But just like when you ask a window company, the silent part of that name the replacement window company, the replacement is silent. When you ask a window company, can my original mid-century Windows be repaired, they'll tell you, No, they can't, because what they mean is we can't do that.

11:22

But if you go to a glazier, they can talk to you about not only repairing broken glass or reglazing. This is where I fall back on my own lack of DIY knowledge of Windows, but glazing in this context means the actual putty that attaches glass to the wooden frame of an original mid-century window. They can be reglazed, that can be repaired, or you can remove the original glass from mid-century windows and replace it with insulated glass, thicker glass, a glass with a low E coating that prevents heat from getting into the space.

11:53

A glazing company can help you do all of those things and can give you good advice on all of those things, but a window company never will. So I advised her that in the similar case, she didn't need to talk to someone who removed and reinstalled new doors. She needed to talk to someone who specialized in laminate finishes on things, and probably in her area, she'd be able to find someone who restores vintage furniture of any age, and that person would have the techniques and the tools necessary to help her reattach the veneer to her slab doors, and if any cases where it had been removed entirely, match it or patch it or make it look seamless or interesting one way or another. 

12:34

I've just realized that I am in a mood to digress, and I am not going to be able to give you a short pricey of the major design features of a mid-century bath. So I'm going to give you a really quick overview, first, for a bit of organizational structure, and then we're just going to tell anecdotes about each of these. Because I have in my, in my notes for the episode, I have anecdotes about all of these. I'm just going to fit them in an order.

12:57

But all right, here is the short version, really, I promise of the design basics of a mid-century update.

13:05

The first one, which we already covered, is good lighting, good lighting for faces, good general loose use lighting and good dim night lights.

13:12

The second is to choose the fixtures for your bathroom that you will actually use the right number of vanities for your lifestyle preferences, the right combination of a shower or a tub or a combo, shove, Tower, shove tower, combo tub, shower, the classic sort of mid-century compromise. If that works for you, with your other priorities, we'll come back to this.

13:34

Your third necessary design issue in updating a mid-century bathroom is to know your minimums, because mid-century bathrooms are always snug. So if you're planning to rearrange or build a new bathroom from scratch in an add on space or by rearranging the rooms in your house, make sure you've got the right space for your toilet niche, for your vanity, length, for your shower, your tub, your general floor area. You've got room for your doors to swing in. You've got room for code a point space in front of your toilet. Check out the free guide for some sketches there too.

14:10

The next thing you'll want to pay attention to design quality number four is to make the most of a snug space by choosing wall mounted things, wall mounted storage, wall mounted vanities, even wall mount a toilet. If you're really snug on space, you can always add an extra shelf to keep counters clear above the counter and build into the walls, either with shallow niches or more intense storage ideas.

14:34

This doesn't necessarily mean a medicine cabinet. This might mean something more like a storage niche to one side and a larger expanse of flat glass. You can also make a small space bigger by adding more glass. This might be glass walls around the shower. This might be mirror across more of the wall, but do remember to plan for privacy, the fifth quality to make sure. Or that you're capturing in a bath update is to keep it clean and cleanable.

15:04

Mid-century design is about simple shapes and materials. So we don't need any fussy fluted faucets, we don't need overly ornate tile. We don't need trim around the windows and doors with extra molding details in them. This dovetails nicely with your desire to keep your bathroom grime free. So you also want simple shapes, because it's just to keep it easier to sort of clean around the floor, wall mounted things also make cleaning easier. The fewer places where finished materials touch a tile floor, the better you are when you're de-griming a bathroom.

15:42

And then the final one is to match your mid mod finishes to your own style. So this really gets to knowing before you begin, whether you're trying to create a time capsule vintage bathroom or something really quite minimalist and modern with one or two material throwbacks to designs in the rest of the house when you know where you're starting. And if you need any help with this at this point, I would point you directly to my style guide, also my style guide workshop, more than a mood board, but start from midmod-midwest.com/styleguide.

16:14

There's a, yeah, there's a prerecorded class that you can walk yourself through to set up a perfect style guide for your entire house or just one bathroom, but choosing the colors the tile, wood stain that matches built ins in the rest of the house, hardware that is simple, sleek and matches or coordinates with other parts of the house are all Part of smooth, trouble free bathroom update.

16:41

Okay, so now that I've rambled on the first point about lighting, I want to go ahead and just ramble around about a couple of these others. So coming back to point number two, choose the finishers and Oh, choose the fixtures, rather that you will actually use this is, this is the ball game for a good remodel, following your own lifestyle preferences. So check your own needs first. And the first question that I ask everybody is, do you need to keep that tub?

17:11

I would love to give you a permission structure to get rid of it if you don't need it. And this, I say this all the time. It feels like I'm never not saying, Hey, do you need to keep that tub? But I continuously encounter people who are really surprised by the notion that they don't need to keep a tub. And so I just want to continuously reiterate this. I gave an example in a podcast episode a couple of weeks ago of a consult call I had done about a mid-century bathroom. And I think the reason I brought it up was that I suggested to that couple that they might not. Did I asked them the question, do you like bathing? Do you like your tub? And they were surprised by their own answer, no, they didn't.

17:49

And maybe they didn't actually need to plan space in their bathroom update for that tub. This might apply to you too. This is something I brought up to them, and I think it's important to consider too, because it's a little bit like the question of how many guest rooms do you need? How much extra space do you need for when you're throwing a party, versus just living your daily life?

18:11

If you're the kind of person who imagines that you might like to soak in a tub, but you just don't regularly do it, then the question to ask yourself before you make a remodeling choice about tub or no tub is, Will that ever change? Is it something that if you had a beautiful, wonderful tub that you could set up for yourself, if you had an ideal baling experience, a nicer tub than a mid-century, 15 inch deep, one that won't keep your knees wet, maybe you would.

18:38

Or maybe it's just more of a concept or third option, a secret third option is, what if you prefer bathing when you're in a completely relaxed mode, when you're not in the throes of a work week, perhaps when you go away to an Airbnb or a hotel? It might actually be far less expensive if the idea of expanding enough space to have a handicapped accessible a future agent place, accessible shower and also a tub and also two vanities in an owner's bathroom, means that we have to change the footprint of your house. We have to expand an addition.

19:14

Weighing the cost of that against having a couple of nights away from home a couple of times a year could be dramatically different cost equations, and you might enjoy being away from home for other reasons. You might be on business, you might be visiting family. You could just choose a place that has a tub rather than a place that doesn't have a tub, and that's your tub problem solved if you are a once or twice a year tub soaker, just a thought.

19:40

Okay, so I'm not saying we should get rid of all the tubs. This is not Shakespeare first. Let's kill all the lawyers. What I'm just saying is, if you're not a tub person, you don't need a tub and if you are a tub person, you also probably don't need a mid-century combination tub shower. This is really the place I'm surprised. Myself by how much I'm like, throw out that original mid-century tub. It sucks. I have original mid-century tub in my bathroom, and I'm not getting rid of it.

20:06

Because here's why you might not want to. It fits into the space plan of your existing layout. If you're planning a replace in place remodel where you're not changing up the footprint, it might be more practical to keep your mid-century tub in place. Also, if you're doing any kind of a DIY renovation, removing a cast iron mid-century tub is no small feat. They often have to be sawed into pieces to be removed from the house. Sometimes they are built into the structure of the house, so it's not something to take lightly. Also, in my case, I don't have this. I've got a boring white tub and a tile in a bathroom that was once all blue tile. I don't know why that's the case.

20:47

I'd feel better about it if it was a robin's egg blue tub, too. But if you have mid-century color features left in your bathroom, and you're interested in keeping them, if you're going for more of a time capsule look, you might want to keep an original tub, or even source a vintage, original tub to be installed in your house for the first time. But I think this is it's not the default choice. And probably one of the areas where I'm most eager to tell people you don't have to preserve that exactly as it is, is in the question of a smooth, accessible bathroom arrangement that is going to make every morning getting ready and out of the house go better and really live with you through this phase and every other phase of your life in the house.

21:31

Now, the other thing to bear in mind is, if you've got one time capsule bathroom somewhere in the house, you're not obligated to preserve every single time capsule bathroom, so you can kind of weigh your priorities of I've had this come up in several recent client projects, being able to keep one maybe the cutest or maybe the least used, maybe the powder room bathroom is also in Time Capsule tile and finishes and fixtures, being able to preserve that. Being able to preserve a shared family bath, a guest bath, in a more time capsule way, and then making a choice to remove a tub and put in a modern, sized, accessibility friendly shower in your own personal bathroom is a nice way to have the best of both worlds in this case.

22:17

Okay, that's my rant about tubs over but I also want to have the same conversation about double vanity or single vanity. This is a question I ask every single one of my clients. It's a super important question to ask, and you could probably answer it for yourself, off the top of your head, although I would challenge you to check that your spouse or partner agrees with you and has the same off the top of their head answer, knowing that you do want to invest the space into double vanity versus that that is a very silly thing to do. Is really important information to give a designer that you work with to factor into your own plans if you're doing a little bit of space planning and layout changes in your bathroom space.

22:55

So make a decision that works for you and then don't second guess it the right choice for you is the right choice for you. I'm not gonna have too much to say in today's episode about planning minimums. This is where I'm really going to point you to the bath guide. It's got some diagrams that will be very helpful for you. But and you know, and also, your local inspector will come and enforce the code if you haven't thought it through, although you definitely want to do it right the first time, rather than be forced to change the bathroom layout after the plumbing has been roughed in but it is important when you're thinking about feasibility options, when you're weighing an add on bathroom versus working in existing spaces, to think about those mandatory minimum clearance areas.

23:33

Thinking about snug spaces and mandatory minimums in mid-century bathrooms brings me back to several distant, distinctly different conversations I've had with different clients that have come down to the same question of, how much of an improvement can we get by solving a very irritating, but single problem with the layout of maybe one bathroom at the cost of a domino effect, to solve one tight corner, or to remove one tub and turn it into a shower, to expand one vanity area means changing an interlinked puzzle piece connection of probably two bathrooms back to back against each other that share a little bit of space without a straight wall, and the sacrifice that is involved in that is basically the complete destruction of all the mid-century features in both spaces.

24:31

There are times when that is the correct decision, when it's so unfunctional to keep the existing bathroom as it is, that that change just has to be made. And there are other times when that is a question that is worth exploring, but the answer is no, this is one of the benefits of the design process, is that it really lets you game out the overall costs and tradeoffs of various decisions.

24:59

And without having to go to the bother of getting a contractor into price it out, without even taking yourself down the rabbit hole of material sourcing, certainly without going to actually demolishing two bathrooms, putting it all back together in a different way, and realizing that you're not in love with the result. If you've thought it through properly in design, you can pre imagine all of the consequences of a layout change that in one bathroom would have ramifications for another.

25:26

And so I think that this comes up a lot in the kind of snug mid-century ranch house where there's maybe a proto owner's bathroom. The proto owner's bathroom has, sometimes it's just a powder room. Sometimes it is a very small vanity, a tub that only has 15 inches on center from the from the, sorry, a toilet that's 15 inches on center from the wall into the vanity, and then a very, very, very small shower.

25:55

These are often showers that, if they're not too small on the inside, they're kind of too snug to even be able to get into. Or you can't really, like, get your elbows up to wash your hair inside of the shower compartment. Or people have taken off the glass door and just put in an awkward curtain that they bump out in order to be able to use the shower properly.

26:14

I don't know what quality it was in the mind of mid-century bathroom designers, but they had this sense that if you were going to be so extreme and dramatic as to have an owner's bathroom, it had better be the world's smallest bathroom, at least, and often at the same time, from the logic of having things gathered around a plumbing core, it would be nestled in, not back to back with but interlinked with the shared bathroom for the house, for the hallway, for the other bedrooms.

26:46

And this there are times when we can just scrape out everything that's happening inside the footprint of both bathrooms and come up with a better layout solution, one that's more balanced for the lifestyles and use cases of the people that live in the house. And there are other times, when as annoying as it is, there's not a whole heck of a lot we can do usually, though, I will say if the if the original tile is not in pristine condition in that tiny owner's bathroom, there are usually some changes we can make that even without changing the overall footprint. We can make that shower more effective, and we can make the whole space a little brighter and more functional.

27:21

All right, another really common challenge that comes up for people who have a pretty original mid-century bathroom, that is to say, a fairly original mid-century bathroom with a truly heinous vanity dropped in that's clearly from the 1990s and that is probably taking up more of the floor area than is functional or convenient inside that room. I had a consult with someone in this exact scenario recently, but I encounter this all of the time.

27:50

You can tell at a glance, maybe the mirror and the light fixtures on the other side of the mirror have also been swapped out in the 90s, what they thought of as an update back at the time, but basically just committing horrors on the original mid-century intention of the bathroom and its sleekness of style. There's often some room to just without having to take a hammer to the whole bathroom to just undo the 90s choices.

28:14

But this is typically a little bit of a roll the dice scenario. It depends how destructive the person who was putting in the remodel has been in some cases, actually, in a number of cases, I've had clients in this scenario where they've got a really ugly sort of Home Depot vanity dropped into a bathroom that's otherwise really cute.

28:33

Think what was there before? Why replace a nice vanity with this one? And the answer is usually that in that case, particularly in a small, snug hall bathroom. There probably was not a vanity. There was just a wall mounted sink. Or if the sink was supported down to the floor, it was probably just supported on some stainless steel metal tubing. There's a lot of visual examples for this. I'll find a couple and put them into the show notes page for this episode.

28:55

And people who are thinking, Oh, it would be nice to have some storage, or if there was any of our plumbing problem with that sink, and they need to sink and they need to replace it, they just drop in your standard 24 inch or 30 inch big box store vanity. It's usually a really poor fit. I actually have this in my own bathroom. It's usually deeper than the original sink was, so it makes the walking space of the room smaller, and it's blocky and stub your toe y, and it's not actually very nice storage anyway.

29:24

So my favorite suggestion in a bathroom, particularly one that's not getting a lot of daily use, is just remove that replacement vanity and put back a wall mounted mid-century style sink. Now you could go vintage. You could source something antique and have a creative plumber reinstall it for you. Or there are companies Kohler definitely makes a couple of historicist mid-century options that can do in this case.

29:50

So the real question is, what damage was done to the tile behind and underneath the vanity in the meantime, best case scenario, there. Just a differential in cleaning. You've got a D grime de caulk line, you've got to just sort of scrub it up, and hopefully the tile won't have faded or decolored or anything too differentially in the different intervening years. But if there is a problem, this is where I always shout out to B and W tile, which is one of my favorite mid-century tile companies to recommend. They actually have been a source of tile since before the mid-century years. They've been in continuous production. I think they're a small, family owned business. Their website, BW tile.com has a bunch of amazing options within their sort of existing color palette for vintage colorway tiles, and also, they will custom match a color for you.

30:43

So if you find yourself not wanting to have to replace the entirety of a nicely tiled bathroom because you're trying to put back an original wall mounted sink, they are probably your go to for that kind of custom replacement project. That said that leads me to talking about tile in general, and I have done podcast episodes on choosing tile for mid-century bathrooms in the past.

31:11

You want to go check out episode 801 from way back in 2022 for my list of mid-century tile companies that I particularly love, I've also there was a time when I had an Instagram guide for this, but I think that the technology of Instagram guides has gone away. So the best place to grab that checklist of some of my favorite mid-century tile companies is that I've embedded it into my general mid-century house resources list. I'm giving you a lot of free resource recommendations in this episode, but as I should, there are a lot of moving parts in a bathroom.

31:37

So you can grab that by going to mid mod dash, midwest.com/resources, and it'll have books and websites and magazines, bloggers and Instagram people you should follow. And it also has some of my favorite sources for mid-century furniture, mid-century tile. It also has a list of mid-century hazards like asbestos and lead paint and things like that to keep your eye on. But if you're looking for some things to google or Go follow on Instagram right now, I would point you towards Mercury mosaics. I would point you towards mod walls tile to check out clay house, H, A, U, S, for some really lovely 60s mod options with texture in them. Fire clay, of course, has the sort of market cornered on gorgeous color schemes and a bunch of different custom shapes.

32:26

And there are some modern options out there that some do some really nice modernist concrete tile Popham Design is a favorite of mine, and Concrete Collaborative has done some really lovely things. And then, of course, Heath Ceramics, like B and W, has been in the business since forever, and they actually have some original, textured and molded tiles that go back to the mid-century era itself. I would be absolutely remiss not to recommend my good friends over at Make It Mid-Century, who are often a great place to source mid-century tile, and often tiles with mid-century patterns upon them. So that'll just get you started.

33:05

But you can go on, go on over and check out the episode on mid-century tile. That was, again, 801. The other thing, though, almost as important as what tile you choose is making sure that you're getting your mid-century details right in the bathroom. And this is actually, again, to point you towards the style guide concept. Choosing where you fall on the spectrum of retro restoration towards modern update is going to give you so much specificity in the choices that you make.

33:37

Whether you're going with a color block four by four classic colorway bathroom. Or you're going to do something a little bit more clean and modern with a stack bond pattern in horizontally laid three by six tiles, or vertical soldier course tiles. I kind of think of those as the spectrum of vintage up to modern is square four by four, horizontal stack bond up to vertical stack bond feeling the most today, but not trendy choices, but even so, the details that you choose can really make all the difference.

34:12

I have a lovely client who'd gone through the Master Plan process with us, but after she had already done one mid-century update on a bathroom, and I think every single choice she made in that bathroom was totally inarguably good, but when it was done, she did have a couple of concerns. She felt like it was a little more modern in its esthetic than she meant it to be, and she kind of asked for my eye in troubleshooting it. And honestly, the only thing I could really identify that was different than what have been would have been done.

34:41

What could have been done in the mid-century era was the tile edge. In a mid-century install of tile, it would always be a bull nose edge piece of tile. And this is a little bit fussy modern tile installers prefer to get just field tile. That's this game that has the same sort of cut edge all the way around it. Um. So they don't have to fuss with ordering exactly the right number of bull nose tiles and then not breaking any of them. So what they prefer to do is use a little metal ledge, it's often called a shulter, to sort of cap off and create the end point of the grout at the edge of the tile. And that detail just reads a little contemporary.

35:19

It's not a crime. It's not wrong. If you're looking for a modern, mid-century approach, that's maybe even the choice I would recommend. But if you're looking for something to be more vintage, the bull nose edge, the tiles that come specifically with that slightly rounded edge on just one of their four sides, are really important.

35:36

So getting it right down to the last detail makes a difference. I'm going to be talking about this specifically. I'll have some image examples of that kind of detail in my upcoming YouTube videos. I'm talking over on YouTube right now about sort of the little details that make the difference. I just did an episode on cabinet style decisions echoing a past podcast episode, and then I've done one on lighting choices. Similarly, adding imagery to a past podcast episode, I'm going to do one on metal. I'm going to do one on wood, grain and stain, and I'm going to do one on tile. So keep your eyes peeled for that in the next couple of weeks, over on the Mid Mod Midwest YouTube.

36:19

All right, what else do I need to make sure you know, in order to feel well prepared and have a full download of everything that's been coming across my desk in terms of tile, I think ultimately, oh, here's the end of the episode. I could not possibly finish talking about mid-century bathroom choices without shouting out the fabulous success of my friends over at unflipping and what they've been doing for their mid-century bathroom.

36:46

Recently, I talked with Dana and Colin, who run the unflipping Instagram account, which just documents them unflipping Their mid-century house back in October of last year. If you want to go back and listen to that episode, it is 2211 and they are just absolutely role models of making great choices for a quite aggressively flipped house and carrying through on it. So they have recently finally turned their attention to the bathroom. When we talked on our podcast interview, they were telling me that this was their next up project, and they have finally gotten some reveals of the project and process, and it is so gorgeous.

37:26

Now, this bathroom that they have chosen to put together is not for everyone. It's got a lot of gorgeous wood paneling, wood paneling on the walls, wood slider hidden shelving behind the two sinks in the vanity. But so I think for someone who was more worried about water splashing around, someone who had little kids in the house, might not make these exact choices.

37:51

But again, resale value, schme-sale value. They are making these choices for themselves, and it is stunning. It is so beautiful. Their choice of one by one tile on the floor that's mostly white and has these slightly mottled brown elements that pick up the wood is absolutely beautiful. They've also made the, in my opinion, absolutely baller choice to do a tiled counter with white grout. And they are probably tidier people than I am, but it looks so good, they've also thinking about the details that really pull it all together. They went with stainless for the metal in the space.

38:29

The pendant lights may have stainless posts on them, or they might be just white, but there is a vent fan, a traditional looks like it came off the sort of Chevy dealer lot, mid-century, old fashioned vent fan going into the wall, and the faucets and the hardware and the exposed hinges of the bathroom vanity are all stainless and it is. It's so gorgeous, so you just have to go over and check it out. Their Instagram handle is un flipping, with a period between the UN and the flipping. You've got to see this. You've got to see this. It's so pretty, which is totally in character for them and totally in line with the rest of their house.

39:17

And I think it's such a stunning choice. It's just so beautiful. This is a perfect example of a couple who are really thinking about what works for them and making choice for themselves, the choices for themselves that are really going to work out. And it's just, it's, it's, I can't even describe it, so you just have to go over and look at it. I'll link to it in the show notes for this episode. But also you can just go straight to Instagram right now. If you're not following them already, follow them. If you have not been paying attention to them, Go pay attention to them.

39:44

And if you already know all about their bathroom, update well, then you and I are both equally excited about it. So yeah, I think that's where I'm going to leave us with the choices that you make in a bathroom, just like the choices you make in the rest of your house are intensely personal. I. Based on your own priorities and can never be better set up than by interrogating what it is that gives you joy.

40:09

What are the conveniences that make your life work really well and prioritizing those things along with your budget and the reality of the space and sort of base details and design of your house, so that, not to put too fine a point on it, all is derived from the master plan method. And if you are in any way thinking about how you fit bath improvements into the bigger picture of your life right now, into a set of combined remodels, into a series of updates that you're going to do one at a time over time. 

40:46

I would love to talk to you about the bigger picture strategy of how to make that happen at the live class I'm giving on Saturday, you can go and find out more about that class and save your seat. So we send you an email zoom invite to it at mid maid, midwest.com/workshop, meanwhile, I'm going to be thinking about updating the slide deck for that workshop and how I can possibly say everything that I believe in in just 30 minutes. Why did I promise I would do that? But I can do it. I can do it. Okay. I'll see you there. Have a great week until Saturday. Bye.