The first photo is NOT our bathroom; it’s the tile advertisement that inspired me. Before I got very far along in the project, after tearing out the original fixtures, walls, glass block, vinyl flooring, but still working on leveling ceiling and floor, Jeff had to move to Albuquerque for his new job, so it was time for me to focus. Jeff came up to help for weekends about once a month for the 7 months I remained in Portland to get the house and yard ready for sale in a so-so market. We had lots of plans for the house, and materials on hand, but hadn’t gotten around to them yet.

The floor and the walls in the corner alcove are the tile we chose for our master bath, despite how coldly gray they look in some of my photos below.
Looking in from the closet after a frantic all-nighter and minutes before driving away for the last time.
Before starting the project, we had to tear out much of the ceiling and level it. The 3/4″ waves would have been very visible with tile right up to the ceiling. The floor also had a 3/4″ bend that had to be remedied through drastic means before installing electric heating cable and laying tile.
Seeing this brings back memories of never-ending prep, measuring, cutting, laying, cleaning, … Working by myself I could lay about 6 tiles in a session. I couldn’t carry a full bucket of freshly mixed thinset up the outdoor flight of stairs from the driveway, so I mixed half a batch at a time and still sometimes ran up against its workable time.
The floor drain is under the narrow tiles. They are attached to a metal cover than lifts out to access hair filter and drain.
My son Mike came to help for over a week. We did the cutting downstairs on the driveway and laid the tiles out on the newly-coated garage floor. This is part of the wall in the next photo. We were both a mess from working all hours.
With Mike there to carry the bucket of thinset up the stairs and help install the tiles, we were able to lay over a dozen tiles at a time.
LED strip lighting behind top of mirrors done (photo taken at night makes it look terrible); LED sconces not up yet. Invisibly mounting heavy mirrors 1″ off the wall was a project. Closet door on left; bedroom on right. We made the vanities and all the other cabinets while the house was being built in 2004.
I designed the lights for our long-anticipated master bath remodel. Jeff fabbed the fixtures and I printed, fused, and bent the glass. The leaf patterns are from photos I took of a neighborhood birch tree.
I was determined to have no visible hardware for the glass panel. Found a place in Portland that did it. I left slots in the tile at top and bottom. They measured carefully, cut the glass to size, slipped it in, and filled the gaps with clear silicone. It cost less than using brackets or frames, but I had to be accurate getting the framing and tile straight and level.
I don’t remember why that strip of yellow tape is on the wall.
We installed the fixtures the last night we were there, tested without splashing any drops on the glass, but never got to shower in it. Note the marble shelves: I used Bob Heath’s glass lathe and Ann Cavanaugh’s lathe wheel to grind slanted grooves. This was all designed, purchased, and started before we found out we were moving away. We even built an extra-quiet ventilation system in the attic. (hand-made plastic intake grill at upper left)
The bath in the new “second master” that replaced my shop did NOT get custom treatment. I ordered all these pieces on sale from homedepot.com. …ok, the stone backsplash is custom. I had a few tiles left over from the fireplace and my saw was already set up.
This was a wonderful shop for woodworking and glass art when it didn’t have carpet or a closet and bathroom carved out of it. The veranda, which is under the main-floor deck, runs all across the back of the house, with a wooded environmental zone at the edge of the property. We always knew the house wouldn’t sell with two bedrooms and two shops so we had a version of the original house plan drawn up with a suite of two normal-sized bedrooms and a shared bath. However, when I went to do the conversion, I realized that instead of seeing the doors and windows when you looked into the room, the “view” would have been a short hall with doors to the bedrooms. Such a waste, so I decided on one big room, which could be a media room, or even a mother-in-law suite if the adjoining mudroom was made into a galley kitchen.
Another of the many projects I had to finish was the glass backsplashes in the kitchen and dining area. The upper part is sheets of Tekta, back-painted with tinted brush-on primer. The lower part is tack-fused mosaics that match stained glass panels Jeff had made, inspired by FL Wright “Wheat” light screens, for the pantry and office doors (one door is in the reflection above the cooktop). The backsplash that had always been behind the cooktop is a sheet of window glass with black spray primer on the back.
To get the “grout lines”, I used clear glass with gold irid for the bottom layer and placed the mosaic pieces with 1/8″ gaps between them. The backing for the mosaics had to be reflective or the glass looked dead, so I glued the glass to a thin sheet of a specific type of aluminum, brushed grain oriented vertically, with clear silicone, but only at the very edges or you could see the adhesive. If the grain ran horizontal, there were bright reflections.