Design State of Mind: Plumbing
I’ll be honest: I’ve never really thought all that much about bathroom design. They say (they being the people on HGTV and other house people) that people choose their home based on the kitchen and the bathroom and I can see why that’s true — they’re the most annoying to design and the most disruptive to renovate. (I just watched my cousin go through a kitchen AND bathroom renovation and…no thanks, that was terrible.) Also, something I didn’t really think much about until this process: plumbing is not just for bathrooms? It’s actually for like…a lot of places? Like the kitchen and the garage and the outdoor kitchen and the yard???
testing out the guest bathtub
But if I don’t design bathrooms, my house won’t have any — and while I don’t know a lot about houses I do know that they should have bathrooms. And a kitchen. Otherwise you’re just living in a poorly run hotel. (Especially because I know for a fact the cleaning staff will be lazy as hell.) So off I went, on the great hunt for bathroom fixtures and discovering just how much stuff requires plumbing.
Get ready for me to sound REALLY fancy: my house has 3.5 bathrooms and 2 kitchens (technically.) This was exciting on paper and then “oh no” when the frame started going up. “Oh no” because 1) that’s a lot of bathrooms to design and 2) I’m literally one person why do I need a second kitchen? and because 3) that’s not even all the places I need water to go. My idiot self decided instead of an outdoor fireplace (like a NORMAL PERSON) I wanted a New Orleans style water feature. Guess what a water feature needs? PLUMBING.
You see where I’m going here.
Some of the decisions were easy - I knew I wanted one of my guest bathrooms to have a walk in shower and one to have a shower/tub combo (see photo above for the latter tub.) I knew I wanted a farmhouse0-style single basin kitchen sink. I knew I wanted my clawfoot freestanding tub in my own bathroom. (I have wanted this tub since I first signed up for a pinterest account.)
The rest, well, the rest was an exercise in patience.
Other things about plumbing I found to be sort of annoying:
What type of water heater to get. Tanked vs Tankless water heaters — the jury of me declared a mistrial on which is better because literally everyone I talked to felt very strongly about one or the other and talked shit about the other. I think I ended up with a tank but honestly we’ll just see when I get the keys.
Where should my emergency water shut off go? Louisiana has a lot of weather. Before this past winter I’d say “hot weather” but now I know it can snow, too. Having to go outside to turn off the water in case of a break/leak in the middle of a hurricane or dig it out of 10” of snow sucks. If you get the option to choose where your shut off is, you should choose inside. Where there isn’t snow…or flying debris.
Do I need water filtration? Personal choice, and largely dependent on how good your city water filters are. When I lived in Oakland and San Leandro, California - my tap water was delicious. When I moved to Pleasanton, California on the other side of the foothills, tap water was big yuck. In Louisiana, I filtered everything, and so we put a water softener and filters on drinkable lines. Look, it’s best not to trust the government these days, anyway.
Bet you didn’t think that my longest post would be about plumbing, did you? Here, have some in progress / somewhat related photos as a salve for this influx of a bunch of information you didn’t ask for. Also I still don’t know what my water feature is going to look like so feel free to send me ideas, lol.
The next post is teased a bit in the photos below. Could it be that we’re finally on to the fun part?! You decide.
