Eleven Years and a Bathroom

Eleven years ago today, my husband passed away from Pancreatic Cancer. Instead of the usual post where I talk about him, his personality, and how much I miss him, I decided to take a different approach this year, since so much time has passed. I will talk about our bathroom, instead! LOL! The bathroom was an important room for several reasons and had some really cool features.

One of the coolest of those features was the laundry chute which my husband constructed, himself. He carefully cut a rectangular hole in the wall, nailed a few pieces of wood to the back side of it, added a handle, and mounted it back with hinges. Then he went downstairs into the basement (where the washing machine and clothes dryer were located) and carefully positioned a table underneath with a laundry basket on top. When dirty clothes were dropped into the chute and the door closed, the clothes landed neatly into the basket without having to carry them down the stairs! It was genius!

^{Please excuse the crappy cellphone pics from many years ago...}

Another cool feature was the lighting in the bathroom. There were three switches mounted on the wall just inside the door. One switch turned on an overhead light in a ceiling fixture and the switch beneath it operated an exhaust fan that was also mounted in the fixture. The third switch operated a set of bright lights over the sink. So, one could choose between bright light for personal grooming at the sink, or more subdued (but completely adequate) illumination for regular bathroom ablutions and potty-time.

The bathroom sink, toilet, and tub were all installed long ago when it was fashionable to have bathroom fixtures made with a little color to them. Some houses had seafoam green, aqua blue, or the delightful buttery yellow that we had! I so loved the vintage bathroom fixtures and thought this color was especially pretty and cheerful!

I loved the Formica™ sheets that covered the bathroom walls. Not only did they make cleaning the walls very easy when needed, but they were also pretty. The design was a gold-colored pattern of mica in a pale-yellow matrix that coordinated with the bathroom fixtures very nicely. The patterns of mica were endlessly fascinating to look at, similar to cloud-watching on a lazy summer day, with so many shapes and fanciful figures emerging if one used one's imagination just a bit.

The house where we lived was an older structure, built sometime in the 1940s. My husband spent part of his childhood in the house, and then bought it later from his father. State laws did not allow someone to transfer property to another individual at no charge, so my husband paid his father $1 for it to satisfy that legal requirement. LOL! Then, my husband raised his own family there and maintained it as his residence even after he and his first wife divorced.

One of the cool things, being an older home, were the glass doorknobs on the interior doors of the house (see photo below-left). They were shaped similar to how a diamond would be cut, with facets all around that caught the light nicely and were so pretty! I love vintage things!

Below-right is a small ceramic plaque which I bought in a Thrift Shop for $0.50 or $1, featuring the Goddess Aphrodite (ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗ, in the original Greek), who is often equated to the Roman Goddess Venus. I'd had that little plaque for years when I met my husband, and it fit nicely on an unused nail in the bathroom wall.

One of my husband's favorite activities was what he called water therapy. He would run a tub full of hot water and slip into it. He'd stay there for a very long time, reading a book or magazine. When the water started getting cold, he was adept at turning the tap on with his toes, adding enough hot water to warm the bath again, then turn it off. He could do this so easily, moving nothing but one leg and foot.

Eventually, he would fall asleep in there and only wake up when the water started getting cold. Then, he'd heat it up again with his foot and go back to sleep. He spent many hours (yes, hours!) in there at a time, only getting out when he became hungry and needed something to eat! To be honest, he even asked me a time or two to bring him a sandwich while he was in there, which I happily did, of course! 😂 When we first met, I was a little embarrassed when I needed to use the toilet while he was in the tub, but I eventually overcame that shyness. 😜

A very dear friend of mine told me about a set of "washable markers" that she found in a store. One could write on a wall, then wash it off later with a little soap-and-water. I got a set of those, too, and used them to leave little messages for my husband on the bathtub wall sometimes, which was great fun! 😁

There was a really cool mirror over the counter where the sink was located. It featured one big pane in the center, right over the sink. Then, on each side was a hinged mirror with a small cabinet behind it, sort of a "His and Hers" arrangement and each of us had our own side for storage of medicines, tweezers, and other small items. One could also open both side-mirrors at once so they were facing each other, and then lean slightly over the sink to see the back of one's head! It was a very helpful thing!

I had fun with those mirrors one day. I took my neon "Blue Moon" lamp in there, opened both side mirrors and had a three-way view of the lamp! The result is shown below, with the lamp "OFF" in the left-hand view and turned "ON" in the right-hand view! 🌛

So, there are some pleasant memories and a tour of our old bathroom! And a nod to my dear, late-husband, whom I still miss every day... 💗