The highest compliment? Getting told “don’t you dare touch that time capsule bathroom” by people looking at your instagram account documenting the vintage style remodel!
The instagram account un.flipping documents the work Colin and Dana have done to turn back the clock on their 1963 house. They’ve stripped away much of a bad flip; bringing back a gorgeous wood-grain kitchen, recreating a cozy basement den, unpainting brick details.
And most recently, Dana and Colin turned their attention to the owner’s bathroom. Their bath project is so startlingly gorgeous and time-capsule perfect that people regularly comment on Instagram telling them, “Don’t touch that vintage bathroom!”—not realizing they built it completely from scratch.
I just sat down with Colin and Dana to talk all about how this stunning owner’s suite transformation came to life.
Listen Now On
Initially, Colin and Dana planned to stick to the existing, tiny footprint of the original bathroom—simply swapping out fixtures and tiles. But their hatred for the cramped, non-functional space made planning hard and led to some serious procrastination. Then one of their dogs threw up in the middle of the night and (as it is often wont to do at 3 am) inspiration struck. What if they got creative with storage and took over the closet?
True to their mission, they always try to honor what was originally in the house. The original bathroom layout featured 4×4 white tile and pink fixtures. They are saving a full pink bathroom concept for the guest bath, but they managed to weave elements of that history and heavy inspiration from a stay at a Frank Lloyd Wright house into their new primary bathroom design.
One of the most striking features of the new bathroom is the stunning Sapele wood paneling that runs throughout the space—even in the wet zones. On the advice of a Frank Lloyd Wright house owner they met, they used a specialized marine varnish (the kind used on boats) to seal the wood.
Enjoy the following photos of their thoughtful, period-appropriate touches:
- Instead of a modern, boring plastic vent fan, they hunted down a vintage round exhaust cover (typically found in mid-century kitchens) and engineered new modern internals behind a clever screen effect so it blends right into the vintage aesthetic.
- Colin’s dad gifted them a charming vintage globe push soap dispenser from his old factory.
- They went with a (fully sealed) tile countertop and created a their own mosaic pattern from Modwalls for the floor and shower.
- Exposed piano hinges on the vanity doors and custom sliding-panel medicine cabinets echo classic mid-century designs.
- They stuck to chrome for the metal fixtures, a classic mid-century material.
Episode Resources
- Paneling: https://www.surfacematerials.com/products/sapele-qc
- Mosaic Tile: https://modwalls.com/collections/custom-mosaic-tile
Mid Mod Midwest Resources
- Get Ready to Remodel, my course that teaches you to DIY a great plan for your mid mod remodel.
- Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here to get on my calendar for a Discovery Call!
- Need some targeted home advice? Schedule a 30-minute Zoom consult with me. We’ll dig into an issue or do a comprehensive mid century house audit.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
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- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
00:00
Can you create a mid-century style bathroom more snazzy and sharp than the house had originally, even after a sad, sad flip? Well, yes, you absolutely can, and today I’ve got the proof. Colin and Dana of Unflipping, that’s unperiod flipping at Instagram, have been going on a journey of turning their house around. They’ve stripped their brick and brought back a wood-grain kitchen and recreated a cozy basement den, and now they’ve turned their attention to the owner’s bathroom. Their project is startlingly gorgeous and looks so time capsule perfect that they regularly get people commenting on their Instagram account saying, Don’t touch that vintage bathroom, not realizing that they made it from scratch. Hey there. Welcome back to Midmod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match your mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century enthusiast. And this is episode 2503. If you are looking for more information about them, you’ll find links and some more additional photos on the show notes page for the blog, uh, for the podcast at midmod-midwest.com/slash 2503. Or because it’s such a fun visual episode and I have video of my conversation with Colin and Dana, I decided to process it through for the YouTube page as well. So if you’re watching that, you’re watching that. And if you’re listening, you could go watch that on the Midmod Midwest YouTube channel. Without further ado, here are Colin and Dana. I’m here with Colin and Dana of Unflipping, and we’re gonna talk about their latest project, which I’m so thrilled by, which is the recreation, the creation anew of a great mid-century style bathroom. Um, if you would like to hear more about their house and their projects, I had a great conversation with them. Was it last fall? I think so.
01:51
I want to say that’s it that long ago already. September, October. Oh my god.
01:55
Something like that. Yeah. Um, so I’ll link to that in the show notes. But today we’re talking about how great their bathroom has turned out. So um this has been it’s it’s a bathroom, it’s also an owner suite. You worked on the bedroom as well a little bit, and they kind of very much coordinate. But uh, I guess to start from the beginning, how did you pick this as your next up project? What made it come to the top of your list?
02:20
I think it’s we just finally got fed up with what was in there. It was just a small, unusable space.
02:24
Well, and so this for years now, we thought we were just gonna redo the existing footprint and just like just replace the fixtures, replace the tile. And there was nothing that we really knew what we wanted to do with the space because we hated it because it was so small and not super functional. So we kind of just like procrastinated doing it for a long time until we figured out what we wanted to do. We always knew we wanted to do like a more Usonian woodsy bathroom, and we were like, that’s such a good, like primary bathroom vibe. But we didn’t want to do it in that small space. It that a look like that deserves a bigger bathroom. So it was just this whole thing back and forth. And then literally randomly in the middle of the night, one of our dogs woke up, threw up, and I was just up sitting in bed after that. And literally out of nowhere, it just dawned on me that we can take the closet space surrounding it and just kind of repurpose it into a bigger bathroom. So then we were able to use our dream, our dream uh inspiration and make it bigger, make it more functional. So it all just kind of fell into place. And then we’re like, okay, that’s next.
03:34
Yeah, uh let’s get going.
03:35
That is so satisfying. Well, I’m gonna point everyone to the show notes page for images, but also if you are listening and you want to just look along with what’s going on, the Instagram account that you guys curate, unflipping, uh, is a perfect record of what you’re doing in the bathroom. I know you’ve talked about how it’s hard to keep it updated, but you’ve got really, really good documentation of this project. Maybe I’m gonna get so far ahead of myself here, but who cares about the order? Um, do you feel like you’ve learned more about how to document what you’re doing as you go along the process and how to sort of capture the before and after and things like that too?
04:10
Yeah, definitely. It back in you know, earlier days, it was just let me take one photo before and then afterwards I have a bunch of photos, but even then it wasn’t, I don’t know, it just it wasn’t good, it wasn’t good documentation. So then you learn what works and what doesn’t.
04:26
And yeah, I mean, especially just with like the way our page has been going, it’s just kind of one of those things of like we finally got our footing with a lot of the stuff. And so it’s just like that. I mean, the kitchen and kind of like furnishing and stuff like that. So it’s just like we knew what to do, which was you know, get every single little detail, document it. And so everybody wants to know more.
04:46
Yeah, we knew what people would ask about basically. So we were like, let’s let’s prepare these specific topics.
04:52
And honestly, not everyone has an Instagram page with 119,000 followers on it, but everybody wants to be able to say, it looked like this, and I did this. And so, yeah, actually, you have some great visual examples, not just of what to do in your bathroom, but how to capture all of it, which is great. So you decided it’s gonna be the bathroom, and we’re gonna change the footprint and borrow spaces. When you’re going along on it, how much do you feel like you have everything locked in before you start? Or is there some organic development along the way, which is the DIYers privilege, or where do you fall on that spectrum?
05:28
Yeah, so I mean, we definitely had an idea. And so I mean, with all this, it kind of really takes a step back, though, because it’s just like our whole thing is unflipping. So trying to like put back a lot of stuff that was in here um originally, and then the flippers took out. And so, like, we tried finding the original bathroom, like not only layout, but fixtures, color scheme, all that. And we couldn’t find it for the longest time. And then we finally found it, and it was your typical 50-60. So, like a lot of the makers of this house would have, you know, colorful tiles and fixtures and stuff like that. Ours was white four by four and then pink fixtures. So, like, it was a pretty tame example of what you might have got. But I mean, that led us to the next thing of like, okay, great. This can one, we’ll do a full pink bathroom for the guest bathroom, and then we can take the white tile and incorporate that into the main bathroom with like the Usonian vibe that we kind of want to give it. So we’re able to kind of take whatever we want to from that while also originally what was once there.
06:25
Um, I I like to think we pre-planned as much as we possibly could have, but even then, like it was it wasn’t until we were drawing up the plans for the permit to submit to the city that we realized we could move the door and gain so much more vanity space. Like it was things like that that we’re still kind of learn as we go, figure it out. We’ve never done a bathroom before. Yeah. Um, and then there were certain things like we got vintage faucets that my dad had my dad had at his factory that we were gonna use, and then they ended up just kind of crumbling when he went to use them. So we had to pivot, you know, a lot of game time there. But yeah, I I would say probably 80% we had figured out ahead of the month.
07:11
Yeah. And that’s nice too, because I think even when you have a very specific plan, any remodel is gonna have some unexpected things that you turn up when you start to demo or when you’re doing anything with reclaimed materials, sometimes they’re not going to work out. So you need to have some flexibility built in. But it’s better to have a bit of a vision of where you’re headed rather than trying to figure it all out in advance. And you did some okay, I want to talk about the wood panels. You did some pretty unusual, cool things in this bathroom that required seaching searching out materials that aren’t typical and sort of planning backer board and things like that to make sure that you were handling the water in an appropriate way. So maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, but let’s talk about your choice to panel this bathroom, even in some of the wet places and what research you did on that and how that went as you were going along and how you like it now.
08:05
Yeah, it’s something that we always wanted to do. Um, and then I think it was kind of like a final, just like, yeah, let’s definitely do this when we visited a Frank Lloyd Wright House and stayed there. Um obviously seeing it all there was great. And so then we got to talking with the owner. And our biggest thing was like obviously wood in the bathroom. That’s the one thing that’s just like, oh, moisture, all this stuff, it’s just gonna get damaged, mold, that. And so, like talking with the owner, they’re like, I use this specific uh marine varnish on all of the wood, exterior and interior. And that was kind of just another thing of just like, oh, okay, this can be done. Like, what is it? And then we started doing more research, and it’s a type of um marine varnish that is used on boats, obviously, marine varnish, but it’s able to keep out the moisture extremely well. Obviously, you have to do like three plus coats and wait 24 hours for it to cure even longer than that. And so, I mean, that was kind of like the first thing which is like, all right, yeah, let’s do this. And then, at least for like what type of wood that we used, that was kind of just like we went off of what our doors were.
09:04
Yeah, that went for your knowledge of the trim and the doors. You know so much about wood stuff.
09:10
Well, yeah, no, but we had to done your research. Yeah, we did the luon doors though, and so like the closest thing you can get that for trim. I mean, there’s not luan trim out there, but Sapele was the closest that we could get that matched pretty much perfectly, and so we just thought we would continue that further um with the panel. So we just got full Sapele panels, threw them on up, and then yeah, got them finished.
09:33
And it looks so good, it looks so good. And so you finish them first, you put on the the marine grade layers, three coats laid flat, and then installed. Do you worry about seams or or sealing between pieces of wood at all? Or how did that go?
09:50
We actually we finished them after we installed them. Oh, yeah, we ended up not having like it was raining and we didn’t have the room to lay them out and finish them beforehand. How it goes? Yeah, so finishing them when they’re up kind of seals in the seams, right?
10:07
Yeah, it did. It would overlap that, which I mean we didn’t really think of at first, but as we’re doing it, you could see the it curing within those seams, which did block that as well. But they are butt up right now up next to each other. That I mean creates a really good seal. And our concern was like, yeah, like is that gonna be visible? And you know, some spots like you might be able to see it, but I mean, otherwise, like if you’re just like walking in there and you’re not paying attention to it with a lot of other projects, you don’t see it at all, which it came out even better than we thought.
10:33
Yeah, right. It looks so good, it looks so good. Yeah, it’s great. Um, I I’m just gonna say that a million more times during this conversation because I adore it. Now, of course, when you’re thinking about moisture control in the bathroom, you’re also thinking about proper venting. And you guys went with a really fun choice for your exhaust vent. Um, was that always in mind? Did you have that? You so I’ll just describe it for people who aren’t looking right now, but go look. Uh, it’s like a like a vintage car style round exhaust radiator. I’ve seen these in mid-century kitchens. Yeah. It’s definitely time capsule houses before.
11:08
Yeah, it’s definitely from from a kitchen. Um, and we had to add the ventilation.
11:13
There was a lot of mid-century bathrooms don’t have it for reasons, passing understanding. I guess being out of practice. Um or being in the habit of always opening a window, perhaps. Yeah, maybe from a code perspective, it certainly used to be the default that you had to have natural light and vent in a bathroom. You had to have an operable window, and that’s not true anymore because now we can do mechanical venting.
Speaker 1: 11:36
Yeah.
11:37
I think there’s a lot of times when the homeowner is not likely to open a window, even if it does open in the dead of winter or in the hot of summer or in the smoke. So having the ability to flip the switch and get an exhaust fan to run is a really good idea. But you found this one. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. Yeah, oh no.
11:54
Um, I don’t I don’t know. We never really had a plan to do that.
11:58
We yeah, we want to add venting, obviously, because I mean all the moisture. And then I it was just one of those things that’s like, let’s add like you know, a vintage fan in there. But finding a vintage fan, you’re gonna run into two problems. One, they’re just old, gross, don’t work well anymore. And then another one is it’s new in box and people want like a thousand dollars for it. And so it was one of those things that are like, would we be able to just like you know take the cover and just use new internals? And so, like, this is where her like dad and uncle came into play a lot with like this like you know, engineering mindset of just like, yeah, just get it, we can make it work, but not even explaining to us how, but it’s just like, yeah, yeah, we have no idea how they the confidence, yeah. The confidence, and I mean that’s what we’re doing, it’s just using an old front cover and then be able to somehow just make it work. And luckily, yeah, the screw holes lined up. So I mean that’s how we made it work, but it’s just like yeah, we just added it on there, and yeah, and we we got what is it?
12:53
It’s like gutter liner or something. We just got like it’s basically just like plastic, I don’t know, little netting that we just put on the inside just to block the the different internals inside because it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t just a big sort of just kind of as a screen effect, like a theater square. Yeah, it just kind of blurs it and you can’t even tell that there’s a square behind it.
13:17
And it’s become a feature. I mean, it’s up high, so you’re not gonna walk into the room and immediately look at it, but it’s really cool. When it’s not the sort of thing you have to cross your eyes and not notice, it’s like the one modern boring detail in an otherwise vintage space. It’s part of the vintage space, which is so cool. What in your mind are some of the other choices that you made in the bathroom that feel like that? I’ve got a list, but I’m curious what stands out for you.
13:40
Uh the soap dispenser is one of the big things that we just recently added in. Yes. Um, that originally came from, again, her dad’s factory. It had so much old stuff that we tried to reuse and it had one of those old globe push soap dispensers. Um, his came out to be all gunked up and broken, and he couldn’t get it to like work and fixed. Um, and so he felt really bad. So he found another one. I don’t know where he found it, but one that was actually operational.
14:06
Um yeah, so he surprised us with one because he he felt so bad that he couldn’t get it to work because he was gonna 3D print stuff and all and you know, everything that that dads do, but he just could not get it to work. So yeah, he got us a a good one.
14:22
It’s a really fun feature, yeah. And so, and then the the counter is tiled, which is an interesting choice. Not everybody wants a tiled counter these days.
14:31
Controversial for sure.
14:33
I love the aesthetic of it. Um, so were you concerned about it? Are you concerned about it? How does it feel to you as a user?
14:39
Honestly, not at all. I mean, I don’t like do my makeup in the bathroom or anything, so I think that’s a big component of it. It’s not getting dirty, like it doesn’t get schmutzy, yeah. Yeah, there’s not there’s nothing really happening on it that would make it gunky. Like we brush our teeth, we do our hair, and that’s it. That’s that’s all we use the counter for because we have all of our stuff stored inside the wall and inside the vanity, so there’s no like gunk from that building up. I don’t know. There’s just I’m not worried about it at all. It’s been completely fine, especially being properly sealed.
15:12
I mean, the sealer that we put on has been able to eliminate anything that has actually gotten onto the mortar or tile. So I mean it’s it’s working as it should. Yeah. Hopefully, it’s that’s nice.
15:21
Did you treat it the same way that you did the floor and the space inside the bathroom? Sealed all of that to separate the same way? Yeah. And you’ve got tile elsewhere in the space, so you’re gonna need to do grout care one way or another. You might as well have the consistent aesthetic there. Exactly. Yeah, lovely. I love the way you chose the um piano hinges for the vanity doors. Was that I remember seeing something in your Instagram story about that a while ago, or maybe it was in a real, but that wasn’t your original plan, was it?
15:53
I think I mean, I don’t think we thought about it until we started designing the vanity, but it was basically as soon as we started doing it, we’re like, oh yeah, we want to expose the hinges in some way, whether it be just a vintage little hinge or a piano hinge. And then yeah, we were like, Can we make piano hinges work? And my uncle was like, Are you sure you want to do this? It’s going to be visible on the whole thing. We were like, Yeah, that’s what we want. Can you make it work? He’s like, Yeah, I just don’t know why you would do that. But then as soon as he put it in, he’s like, Yeah, no, this is this is the only option.
16:28
Yeah, looks really good. Oh, this is a fun. So you’ve talked about working with your dad before. Is this your first time looping in your uncle as well?
16:35
Yeah, yeah, the bathroom, yeah. I think so.
16:38
So are you converting him to liking the aesthetic of mid-century as you go?
16:42
We are, yeah.
16:44
Same exact route your dad took on it.
16:46
Well, yeah. So my dad, my dad was converted just in our house in general, but we took him to that Frank Lloyd Wright House we visited last year. And the second he walked in the door, he was like, Oh my god, like this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. And now he’s like, he wants to take his brother, my uncle, to a he’s like, we gotta take you to a Frank Lloyd Wright House. Like, you gotta see this in person, it’s unbelievable, like all this stuff. So we watched the the show that the new build Frank Lloyd Wright showed.
17:15
Yeah, The Last Wright, I think it’s called.
17:17
I’ve been hearing about this, I haven’t seen it yet. So, okay, now this is my second strong recommendation. I guess I should put it on the list. Yeah, what’s the streaming service? HBO? Is it? I think it’s HBO. Yeah, okay. I have HBO. All right, all right. Well, recommendation for everyone. Um, do you want to tell us a little bit more about that? Do you know the name of it? I’ll put it in the show notes, everybody.
17:36
It’s The Last Right.
17:37
I think it’s called The Last Right. I I forget it’s the from the Penfield House uh property. Um it was built, I think it’s for the Penfield family again, but obviously it never got built. Yeah, it never got built because it was the last design on his desk right before he died. Um when he died, whoever was taking care of his estate was able to grab the plans, ship it to the Penfield family. So the Penfield family has had it for the longest time. And then when the new people brought the property, they were just given it. And I guess they had a crazy idea, let’s build it now.
18:11
So imagine just being, I mean, I’m sure they paid well for the rest of it, but imagine just like accidentally coming across a set of original Franklin Wright floor plans.
18:21
Yeah, the ones that were on his desk when he died. Like that’s crazy.
18:25
That’s really cool. Well, and that show must have been a perfect inspiration for you because it’s about creating something in an old way from entirely new materials and kind of learning rebuilding advantage aesthetic.
Speaker 1: 18:37
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
18:39
All the details matter, especially like the lines and all that type of stuff. And I mean, that’s even like her uncle was just kind of the same way when he was watching that. He’s like, Yeah, the lines matter. And it was something he would commonly say over and over again as we’re doing the bathroom. He’s like, the lines matter. It’s like, yeah, that’s what I’m telling you. Like, line up the line, line up the lines.
18:57
That’s great. Um, sorry, my camera just went low battery and whined at me. So that was what that was. This is so yeah, this is such an interesting project, and I can see the writing influence all over this. It’s simple. I mean, you do have what’s the status of the pink bathroom? Is it underway?
19:18
It’s it’s underway. We officially got this is Colin just got it for me for my birthday, so I’m very excited about it. The exact elder sink that was in that bathroom originally. Oh, that’s so fun. Yeah, as soon as we found out that there were elder because we the fo the photos are horrible, but we finally found out that they were elder products in our house. I’ve been on the hunt for this literally since we found out. And this was the only one we found in almost a year. And Colin got it from Utah, got it shipped from Utah to us.
19:52
Face book markets. As the secrets of that’s very sneaky. I love it. Um, so the pink bathroom is coming, but in this bathroom, I mean, I I hear you on the like if the original bathroom was white with pink fixtures, that’s not the most it wasn’t exciting. Intense vibe of a mid-century bathroom. So it kind of gives you permission. And I always think this is actually one of the best parts of remodeling a flipped house, is that you have this, you can go back to what it was, or you can make a new choice, you can kind of pull from anywhere else in the mid-century era idea palette. And of course, a person can make that no matter how much time capsule preservation they have in their house, but it hurts more to take out something that is broken but original and just go with a different vibe than it does to sort of you’ve got you’ve got a little bit more freedom of movement.
unknown: 20:39
Yeah.
20:39
So you’ve got to make some really cool choices in here. And yet I think you did pull back to some of the original finished fixture choices. Like I see that you went with chrome for all the metal in the space. Was that ever up for debate? Is that something you’ve traced back to the original house?
20:56
I I mean, yeah, that was just kind of more of an MCM thing of just like, you know, chrome was used everywhere. Is it’s the safest bet for a metal. I mean, it looks the best in there. And I mean, mixing metals with like because we all the hardware on the vanity is brass. I mean, mixing metals is completely fine. And so, like, it’s just one of those things of like, yeah, the expertise and kind of like knowing what was in there. It was an easy choice going with that. Going with anything else would just fell wrong, honestly.
21:19
You’re singing my song. Absolutely. Um, and yeah, and I think people, when you look in a store, the Chrome always feels like the most boring option. But when you see it in a room like this one, it feels clean and atomic and sort of correct. Anything else would feel I don’t know. To me, anything else would ring as a modernization. And maybe to someone who’s seen too many like hashtag mid-century search term things, they’d be like, shouldn’t it be brushed gold? But probably that would look more updated even to someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at. Yeah. Let’s see. Um, what else what else feels like a big success for you in this project? Any lessons that you learned on the fly and accommodated to that you will carry forward into your next project here?
22:08
There definitely were.
22:09
I know. And now we have to think about it.
22:13
I mean, we’ll treat them as successes, right? Like you’ve incorporated this into your lexicon of good good decisions.
22:20
Yeah. I I mean all of it was like the store solution that we had to come up with and be creative with, because we were taking away three closets, and those closets didn’t really provide much space anyway. And so with the new space, we were able to get more than we ever had before, even with the three closets combined. And so I think trying to like figure out how to properly put that all in there almost was on the fly a little bit. Because we were new, like, yeah, closet here, space up top, and then let’s try to build in some little cubbies by the sink. Which is kind of like one of those things, like let’s do it. But it was one of those things going back to the game time decision of just like how we actually go and do that. And I remember there was like probably two, three days to where me and Dana were going back and forth about at least the little cubbies about the vanity of just like not understand what you guys the way they were describing it was not making sense in my brain at all.
23:08
So I was just like, you know what? I’m gonna trust you guys. I trust Colin’s vision, just do it. And it came out really nice.
23:16
I mean how we both thought though. Yeah, yeah.
23:18
Okay.
23:18
So by the cubbies, do you mean these little slider panel pieces that are right above the vanity underneath the mirror? Okay, everybody go look at these, they’re super cool. But I’ve seen I actually was just talking, I had a consult call with someone, just a 30-minute meeting with someone I’ll maybe never meet again. Um, and she was describing in her vintage bathroom that were a product that like stuck out six inches from the wall and was about that tall and had little slider doors. So it used to be a style of medicine cabinet you could purchase. Yeah. Did you have a vintage example in mind when you came up with these?
23:52
Yeah. Yeah. We’ve always like knew that little like medicine cabinet thing stuck stuck out. And so it was just one of those things of like we couldn’t find an actual vintage medicine cabinet. I don’t think anything would have been big enough to begin with.
24:05
They and they just sell they sell like metal ones with mirrors on the front. We didn’t want to do mirrored fronts. Yeah.
24:12
I don’t know. It was a whole thing, but like we we knew like we could at least recreate it.
24:16
Yeah.
24:16
Um, if we couldn’t find it, and that’s ended up what we had had to do.
24:19
Yeah, and it looks great. What sort of things do you keep in there?
24:23
Pretty much everything I own. I don’t own much, but it all goes in one.
24:28
There, I keep all my stuff behind the mirror.
24:30
Yeah. But it’s just kind of like the quick, quick and easy stuff. So like deodorant, hair care products, floss, like stuff that you’re like, I’m at my sink. Let me go open it, grab it, take it out, rather than bending down, having to do it, or even reaching up to the mirror and going over.
24:44
Or leaving it on the counter surface and creating a bunch of clutter. Yeah.
Speaker 1: 24:48
Yeah.
24:49
That’s it’s so fun. Yeah, it’s really, it’s a lovely detail, and it really just came together so nicely. And as I’m looking uh at your active Instagram page, the other thing I’m noticing that’s striking me as so particularly lovely right now is the is the floor tile combination and how well it complements the wood. Did you have to hunt pretty hard to find that, or did you have that in mind from the beginning?
25:11
That was actually hard. Yeah, it wasn’t super hard, but it was a almost last-minute decision. Oh, really? We wanted a mosaic.
25:18
Um it’s a one-inch square grid, right? Yeah, one by one.
25:23
Yeah. It trying to find something that was, you know, not too busy or crazy because there’s some examples out there that you type in one by one mosaic, and it’s just like way out there, and you’re just like, uh, like that might be too much.
25:38
Um not for the Usonian bathroom.
25:41
Yeah. And so like combining Usoni with like, you know, 60s suburban is is easy, but it’s also kind of hard in that regard. Um, but we were able to, we had one choice selected, and then the company we got it from, Modwalls, came out not like a week later, of like, oh, you can make your own custom mosaic.
26:00
It was right when we were submit the order for one of their pre-made mosaics. We were like days away from submitting. Lot line.
unknown: 26:08
Yeah.
26:08
So did you specifically place each one of these tiles, or did you like pop out the tiles from a grid and sub in the color tiles into a white pattern?
26:16
They came as the sheets with just because yeah, we chose the percentages of each color. They’re three different browns. Okay, got it. 4%, 2%, whatever. Um, so yeah, they’re just randomly placed on the the 12 the 12-inch sheet.
26:31
That’s lovely. Okay, because this is the kind of decision that would actually break my brain is how to like place them semi-randomly, but not actually, oh my gosh, it would it would kill me. But if you can just be like, I want them every 2% and they give it to you, that’ll work. I would probably be in there like popping out tiles and switching them around the last minute before I set them to. But it looks so good. It just, yeah, it’s all all of the warm tones flatter each other so nicely, and all of the whites look so good together. And the whole thing, it just came together so beautifully.
27:00
Nothing.
27:01
It’s yeah.
27:02
It was a stressful time.
27:04
So start to finish, how long did the whole process how long did you think about it? And then once you demoed the existing bathroom, how long did it take to get a new bathroom up and running?
27:14
I want to say almost I think it was about a year of planning. Like once from from the moment I had the revelation that we could design it that way to actually planning it sourcing materials. I think that was roughly a year.
27:29
Yeah.
27:29
Because then we demoed in November.
27:33
And it was about like a week or two of that.
27:35
Yeah. And then the so the problem is our construction crew lives in Pennsylvania. So they had to keep going back and forth, and they were only here for finite amounts of time each time. So it definitely took longer than it needed to. And then they were like, okay, we’ll come back in January and finish everything. And then they ended up not coming in January. They came like end of February, I think. They didn’t end up coming back till end of February, and they got everything mostly finished.
28:04
Yeah.
28:05
And then they just came back.
28:06
Well, they came back for like the skylight they had to put in. Yeah. But otherwise, the time in between then was a lot of like work that we had to do, which was you know, like finishing some tile, finishing the walls, putting in all the grout, you know, hooking up some plumbing or something here and there. It was just kind of like, you know, stuff that we actually could actually do compared to you know, some of the precise construction that they were doing. Um, after we got we it took us about a couple weeks, two, three weeks to finish it all up at that point. So almost like I think all in all.
28:35
Roughly six-ish months. Because they came back in May, I think.
28:39
Honestly, that sounds fast to me for a DIY project.
28:42
I mean, yeah, especially considering our help was 800 miles away.
28:48
And for installing all this wood and sealing it on site and then all of the tile and the grouting and every yeah. I mean very nicely done. You kept the other, you had the um secondary bathroom sort of as you’re still in use. And that’s a really nice feature. A lot of mid-century houses only have one bathroom. And for myself, that was my that’s the case in my house. And so we built a bathroom in the basement before we made any changes. I have not made the changes I mean to to my upstairs bathroom because I completely ran out of steam. But um I envy your teamwork on this. It’s really nice to have. Not not even every couple has this, so I should just note that. Not every and every couple is both involved in the we want to do this, we’re excited about it togetherness of it all. But but yeah, I had to build a second bathroom before I could decommission this one.
29:39
Oh, yeah.
29:39
No, I mean that’s smart though.
29:41
Yeah, it was hard enough just having to walk down the hallway like in the middle of the night. So I can’t imagine.
29:47
That though, I feel like if you have the right attitude toward it, you can give yourself this really Goldilocks effect of you had a bathroom that was eh, and then you have no bathroom, so you’re living in the like, this is not nice. And when the new bathroom comes online, you love it even more because you’ve been through this like bottleneck point of construction.
30:05
So yeah, exactly. Yeah.
30:08
Hopefully that’s the best bit of it. Yeah, for sure. Well, this is this is just really one of the many great projects you’ve taken on in your house, but to my mind, just uh the most custom, the most specific vision you’ve tackled so far, it’s really satisfying to see you sort of prove a point of how much you can do wood in a bathroom and have it feel gorgeous and in no way not safe. And you’re right, for anyone who’s visited a Franklin Wright house, they’re not all they’re not constructed out of the most luxurious materials, and they’re not even always maintained the way they should be. And they’re usually doing just fine after 70 some years or more, 100 some case in some cases. And they’re all wood. They’re all plywood, they’re all plywood and tile, and they’re fine.
30:57
Um I think that’s what got us too was like they were putting wood in bathrooms back then. I mean, not necessarily the entire bathroom, like it wasn’t super common, but it was common enough. And even, I mean, the vanities themselves have always been wood, never, never been. There’s always been wood in a bathroom.
31:17
There’s always been wood in the bathroom, and it’s gonna do better if it’s actually real wood than it will if it’s you know particle board.
31:22
Yeah, our area don’t get me started on the one in the guest bathroom. It’s been disintegrating since day one trash. Yes, exactly.
31:31
Those are always in a stage of like on their way to the landfill, which is a frustrating thing to watch happen. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, well, this is really exciting. What’s your pattern? So after you you are dreaming for a year planning and organizing and sourcing and locking things down, and then you take a project on. Are you thinking of the next project while you’re working on one, or do you get all your attention onto one thing before you definitely you’re probably more uh straight straight at the the current goal, but I’m always thinking about the next one.
32:02
Yeah, I mean, after this bathroom, I really want to just take a break, and then she walks downstairs and starts stripping all the paint off the brick.
32:09
And then it’s just like the brick stripping has been looking so good though.
32:13
I mean yeah, it’s it’s coming along.
32:16
I I recognize the desire for a break, but also as a completely neutral third party in this, I just love seeing the brick reappear. So that’s really exciting. Um, yeah, that’s so fun. Well, do you think after a break, what’s the next project? Are you gonna go after the other bathroom now or take a break from bathrooms and do something else?
32:34
Well, after the brick, I mean there is something with there. We got um after the brick break. No, but we got we gotta redo the flooring in the base or basement, but it’s just the first floor.
32:45
There’s a reason I ran to do the brick, and it’s because we got a crazy opportunity to get new old stock 70s carpeting. Uh vintage seller in New York reached out to us and was like, hey, we just bought a warehouse of new old stock carpeting from the 70s that’s never been touched. Like, would you be interested in and we weren’t even thinking of putting carpeting anywhere in the house, really? But I mean, how can you say no to that? Yeah, like you can. So we have a roll of that downstairs that we need to put in. So we’re like, well, we gotta get this paint and goop off the brick before we put carpeting down there. So it kind of fast tracked it. But so that’ll be the next, like it won’t be a huge project just for playing.
33:26
No, I mean it’ll be a big difference. It’ll make a big difference, yeah. Yeah, from bad laminate flooring down there to VCT with carpet. I mean, it’s gonna look unreal.
33:34
Yeah, it’ll be really have you put down carpet before yourself?
33:38
No.
33:39
No, we’ll we’ll probably hire that out.
33:40
Yeah, that one seems a little too scary.
33:43
I mean, it’s yeah, it’s gonna be an interesting one. This is funny. I just had a great conversation this spring with someone in the Greater Chicago area who loves vintage homes. He’s got an Instagram account, uh, Homes with Max. And we had a huge deep dive into how fun it is to do carpet in mid-century houses and how creative the carpet can feel, especially with new old stock, because modern wall-to-wall carpet doesn’t really scratch the same itch. It’s not as colorful, it’s not as interesting, it doesn’t have patterns and textures in it. So tell me a little bit about this carpet that you’ve got your hands on.
34:16
What’s it it’s what color is it?
34:18
What’s it like?
34:19
Let me see if a picture will it’s it’s a mixture though.
34:22
It’s got like copper and then white and some orange, but it’s primarily like a green.
34:28
I lovingly call it puke. I mean, yeah, anyone who sees it, I don’t it really just looks like puke.
34:34
But in the leaning into the vibe of your house, and I totally support that.
34:37
Okay, yeah, this is definitely not gonna show on there, but it’s like green and orange and white, and it’s like different, like some of it’s shaggy, some of it’s like really low pile. Like, so it’s definitely we haven’t fully rolled it out yet because we don’t have the space, but I think it’s gonna have like kind of a sculptural feel to it because it’s like a uh sort of a shaven moan pattern in it.
35:00
Yeah, that’s so much fun. Yeah, and you’re not you’re not gonna find that in a store today.
35:04
Um and it literally smells like brand new. Like I I couldn’t believe that it smells like brand new carpet after I think it’s been stored well.
35:12
That’s amazing, yeah. So very I mean, honestly, my personal biggest quibble with carpet is just how much it contains the dust mite of ages, you know, it’s got everybody else’s whatever in it. Um, but this is new to you, it should work great, and it’s gonna be it’s the perfect den vibe. That’s so fun. That’s a really fun find.
35:32
With that that wood paneling and the brick, yeah. It’s how do you not do that in a in a little basement area?
35:39
Yeah. You have to. You have to. And as much time as I spend helping people discover that they’ve got hardwood underneath their carpet. If you’ve if you can put down carpet over not hardwood, then I’m all for it. I think it’s a wonderful mid-century choice. That’s great.
unknown: 35:54
Yeah.
35:54
Oh, that’s so much fun.
35:56
Yeah, I think most of our house was hardwood. Like upstairs was hardwood.
36:00
That’s original upstairs. Downstairs.
36:02
Downstairs, I think, used to be like an asbestos tile. And that’s where we were gonna go with like a VCT type of tile down there to create that. Um, but now we split with VCT at the bar area, carpet everywhere else going up the stairs. But like, yeah, even here, carpet was you know the upgrade.
36:17
Yeah, carpet was the upgrade, hardwood was the standard in our house.
36:20
Right. I know, and that again, it’s sort of like how we feel about Chrome today as being like the okay, well, that’s just the builder default. But yeah, that that script has really been flipped. And if you’re building a if you want to build the vintage vibe, you gotta go with the vintage materials. That’s so much fun. Well, this has been perfect. I was I was just tracking along your bathroom progress, and you were kind of working on it just after we were we talked last time, it started to come together, and I was following it along and thinking, oh my gosh, it’s so gorgeous. And then I realized we’re about to do a season talking about bathrooms and had to get your input on this and point everybody’s attention to what you’ve been doing. I’m gonna see if I can talk somebody into specifying wood paneling in their bathroom in one of my master plans next and just use your house as an absolute example. Look, look, look, it’s so pretty.
37:11
Um like the room when the sun comes in, the room literally glows. Like it is so warm in there. It’s it’s amazing.
37:20
Yeah. So lovely.
37:23
So nice.
37:25
Yeah. And it does. Oh, I did meant to talk dig into this just a little bit more before we wrap up. It does connect. You put more paneling into your bedroom area as well, right? Yeah, yeah. Sitting for now you’ve got yeah. You’ve got that visual connection. Can you walk straight from one to the other, or do you go out into the hallway to come into the bedroom?
37:41
No, they’re connected. Yeah.
37:43
Perfect. Yeah. Well, this is such a good project. You guys continue to just make such lovely choices for this house. And as we talked about the first time, you know, there are people out there who’ll say, Oh, why are you doing that? And then there’s a whole horde of other people who are like, Can you come and do it at my house, please? This isn’t gorgeous. So yeah.
38:03
I mean, I was gonna say, I think the biggest compliment that we’ve gotten is not people saying this looks great, it’s people being like, Don’t touch that bathroom, thinking that it is original. It’s like it’s that’s a huge compliment.
38:15
Wow, that’s so well maintained.
38:17
Yeah, and it’s not even just like a few people, it’s it’s yeah, dozens of people that were just like, Don’t touch it, and like that’s such great shape, blah blah blah. We’re like, don’t worry, like we put it in.
38:26
We don’t worry, we love it, we’ll leave it alone. Um, well, that’s so funny because I know uh in your specific case, I know what you’re doing, but that’s always my reaction when I see something looking like that on Insta. I’m afraid that the next slide is gonna be someone just did the whole thing over in Home Depot Gray, and I’m like, leave it alone. So they just commented too soon. But I agree when you look at these images, you assume this is something that should be left alone, not something that just got assembled carefully and uh with so much loving care. So that’s yeah, that’s kind of the dream, isn’t it? To make it feel like it might be a time castle.
39:02
Yeah, definitely time castle, but like it still feels up to date.
39:06
I I feel like I mean, yeah, there’s definitely still modern elements. I mean, like the shower, it just being a shower, I feel like standalone showers weren’t super big, and like we’ve got half ponywall, half frameless glass. So it’s definitely there’s still newer things to it. Um, yeah, and yeah. I mean, actually, thinking about the shower, that was the learning point that we oh that was what shifted there. Um, so we originally wanted textured glass above the ponywall, like that kind of like modeled texture that was super common with like sliding glass doors and stuff back then. Yeah, a little bit of pressing. Yeah, every glass company has it as an option, um, but they don’t say that you can’t get it at all, basically, at least for a shower. Um it only comes super thin, it’s too thin to temper. Um and they only have it in the like pre-fab doors and stuff, they couldn’t custom cut it. Yeah, so we had to get just frosted, and we don’t love the look of how it turned out. I mean, it’s fine, we’re gonna live with it, but but yeah, it was one thing that was like we went to order it and they were like, Yeah, we can’t do that. And we contacted dozens of places to manufacture specifically, yeah.
40:21
They’re like, why can’t you do this? And not a single, it was over, I think, 10 companies and manufacturers that we’ve contacted, and they’re like, Yeah, we can’t do that. Yeah, it’s like what the hell?
40:31
Yeah, so interesting because they do. I mean, they someone’s making it tempered because they’re installing it indoors, but it’s just not commercially available in other sizes.
40:41
Yeah, that’s what I want to do. You could walk into Home Depot right now and get a sliding glass door that’s that texture. Right. Well, yeah, so we’re like, we’ll do it framed. Like, we’re we don’t care about we’ll frame it. Like it’s fine. Can we literally whatever you can do to make it work, we’ll take. And they’re like, nah, no. Can’t do it.
41:01
So yeah, that was I’ve had clients with not in a bathroom scenario, but I have had clients who have the sort of readed glass side light by a front door that gets broken and they try to replace that glass and they can’t get it in the same style. And I wasn’t thinking about that as being a universal problem, but I wonder if a lot of those interesting vintage textures were they never tempered? Or have we maybe they were never tempered? That might be the problem. Um, or they’re not popular enough to be. I don’t know how glass is tempered.
41:36
I don’t actually know the one of the mysteries that you don’t think of.
Speaker 1: 41:40
Yeah.
41:40
I feel like this probably came up in a structures or materials class I took in grad school, and I ought to still have it in my head, but I don’t. That has not stuck. Well, that’s an interesting challenge. As you say though, it’s funny because you said showers weren’t big back then. Probably meaning they weren’t popular, but what they actually also were was if there was a shower, it was 30 inches by 30 inches with a two-foot door uh swing on the front of it, and nobody, like no human adult, can stand up in them today and use them. So you have a functional shower that looks vintage.
Speaker 1: 42:14
Yeah.
42:14
It’s it’s really the win-win.
Speaker 1: 42:18
Yeah.
unknown: 42:19
Yeah.
Speaker 2: 42:19
Yeah.
42:21
Well, that’s excellent. I’ve just been so enjoying watching this project come along, and you’ve done such a lovely job of documenting it for everybody that else that is getting inspired by it. So hopefully we’re gonna see. Do people ever get in touch with you and say, hey, look what I did? And they’ve oh yeah, that’s followed your examples. Oh, that’s so good. All the time. Um you really get to see.
42:42
Yeah, probably not from the bathroom.
42:44
But like the paneling specifically, oh, yeah, is like a big thing.
42:47
We we’ve like we think about this all the time. Like, I wonder how many sales that company has gotten. Not not just sales from us, but like just the visibility of their products exists.
42:58
People who want to do this know to go to them for this. Yeah, yeah.
43:01
Because they’re not local, right?
43:02
You source that from a far shipping place, right? Yeah. Yeah.
43:06
All of it has to have been just from like a random company um somewhere. There, there are there are places near us, but I mean, when you work out just like shipping costs and like what they would do it here compared over there, and we we go through the whole process, and for some reason, getting it somewhere else and even shipped in is cheaper and easier um than some other places.
43:26
Well, I mean, it’s lovely to buy local, but when you’re being specific, it’s also really important to get the right product from the one or two places in the US that are still making them that way.
43:37
Exactly. Yeah.
43:38
And I feel like having heard all your about your research process in our first conversation, I really there might be a few stones left unturned out there, but you have done your homework about what’s possible and what’s plausible and where you can get it from.
Speaker 2: 43:51
So Yeah.
43:54
It’s so kind and helpful of you to share that research with everybody else so that it can be more for more than just yourself. A friend, I have my own obsessive rabbit holes, and I had a friend ask if they if they would if I would be offended if I shared some obsessive little thing I’d packaged and put together in a very complicated way with them. And I was like, no, it makes me feel like I wasted my time less if more than one person is using this. I mean, I did do it just for me, but yes, please, please take a copy. Um it’s a part of the fun of being obsessed with mid-century is really going down the rabbit holes on it.
44:27
Yeah. And I it’s it’s just those things of like, yeah, if you can get new old stock or vintage furniture or anything that you need to, do it. It’s going to make the space feel so much better. But like it’s not always easy, right? So it’s just like, how do you recreate that with newer stuff? And we’re trying to do that.
44:42
And I think you’ve you’ve hit on something here in this bathroom, and it’s another thing if people are looking for a takeaway here, is if you can incorporate a few vintage pieces in with a lot of modern materials handled in a vintage way, it adds such a layer of authenticity and resonance to it. Whereas if the entire thing is new materials constructed in an old style, it’s harder to hit that don’t touch that bathroom moment. Um so yeah, even but even just a few vintage pieces can really tie it together. And like the paneling is always gonna be new, and you’re going to build a vanity from scratch for a custom space, and those pieces are gonna come together. So thinking about what appliances, what hardware, what old fan covers. Um was that new in the box, or did what did you take it off of something else?
45:32
It was used, I think.
45:33
It was used, yeah. Someone had like I think three of them, and they’re like it was like the best condition one that I could tell.
45:39
Um they come and go, like, five available, and then you’ll go a month, and they’re that’s that was our problem. Was like this one was the first one that came up after a a dry spell of nothing online for a while. So we’re like, get it right now. Yeah. Just get it, don’t worry about it.
45:57
Absolutely. Yeah, and when you’ve been looking around for a while, you start to notice like the prices go up and down too. So you’re like, this is a deal, or like, oh my god, I haven’t seen it in a year. Buy that one, I don’t care. Yeah, exactly. But that’s the the weight of experience as well when you’re looking at these things. Sometimes you just strike it lucky the first time you get excited about something and buy a good one.
Speaker 1: 46:15
Yeah.
46:16
Sometimes you look back and you think, I ever paid for that, but there’s been a couple things like that. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, you’re getting to reap the benefits the most of your gorgeous bathroom by getting to use it every day. But thanks for sharing it with everybody else. We all appreciate seeing it happen. And I think I’m not the only person who was really excited watching it come together with your sort of progress videos and updates. So thanks for making those as well.
46:42
Yeah, thank you for having us and talking about it. And it it’s been a pleasure, honestly, kind of going through all of it. It’s the biggest learning experience we’ve had for any project. And so, I mean, that’s almost priceless in its own right.
46:54
So bathrooms are, I mean, as much as they’re almost as complicated as kitchens, in some ways, more so. And they have all the same they’ve got plumbing, they’ve got tile work, they’ve got electrical work, they’ve got custom and vanity pieces, and they’re so satisfying to get right, though. It’s really, really fun to see how they come together. So this has been a pleasure. Um, everyone who’s listening, if you don’t follow Unflipping already, go follow them. If you haven’t been on their site for a minute, because Instagram doesn’t serve us our own followed accounts anymore, go to look it up. It’s all gorgeous, and I’ll put some pictures on the show notes page for easy reference. So that was Colin and Dana of Unflipping. You can find information about them below this video or on the show notes page for the podcast at midmods.com slash twenty-five oh three. And uh, if you’re interested in our previous conversation about everything they’ve done on their house, you’ll also find links to that here and on the show notes page. Enjoy.