I love my bathroom; especially my bathtub. Well, I love my bathroom and my bathtub now, but I didn’t always feel that way. I used to hate my bathroom, tub and all. Now, it’s my favorite room in the house. I do my best thinking in the bathtub.

It’s funny because it’s the absolute greatest (and very last) gift my husband, my late husband, gave me. And he never got to see it completed, at least not with his earthly eyes. I like to think he has seen it though from heaven, and has seen the joy, introspection and clarity it brings me.

While that may seem nice, sweet, and loving, things aren’t always what they seem; not all the time. The story of the bathroom seems to be a metaphor for my marriage, if not my entire life.  It was the last home improvement that needed to be done. Ignored for years, but in desperate need of attention.

We moved into our house in 2007, and it needed “some” work.  Actually, it needed a lot of work. 

It is a 1979 split level “contemporary” home that hadn’t had any updates during its lifetime up to our arrival.  Nothing about it is “contemporary” now in 2024, nor was it in 2007. However, despite looking a multitude of houses before walking through its doors, it was love at first sight for both of us as soon as we pulled into the driveway. 

Tucked into the maritime forest between ocean and sound, it was a 2500 square foot, three bedroom, three bathroom house at the beach in the wood that looked and felt like a home rather than a beach house. 

We were house-hunting at the top of the housing bubble at the time, and what we saw was an old house with great bones, and a great price in a great neighborhood. 

It had sat on the market for over a year, and the price had dropped a hundred grand. No one had lived there for all that time. It was just there. Empty. Like our life, like my life, it definitely needed work, but it had a ton of potential.  But, as they say in real estate: location, location, location. And, it was a steal.

Sold. 

That summer after we moved into the house, the HVAC unit had to be replaced.  The next year, the septic field.  The first thing we needed was a new oven range. It needed a lot of love and attention from the get-go.

Between 2007 and 2021, the latter being the year in which my late husband checked out, we had spent a lot of money put in a lot of work to make it our home. 

We completely revamped the kitchen; “did” new hard wood flooring throughout the house; finished unfinished spaces; and put in ceiling fans up on the exposed beams of the cathedral ceilings. We had an addition built in 2008, when I was pregnant with our second kid to give our older his own space on the same floor as the rest of us. 

Over the years, we added walk-in closets, built new decks, replaced windows, skylights and custom sliding glass doors. We painted the house and replaced the roof.  We even had a custom, permanent loft bed built for one of the boys, because his room was so small it gave him more space.

Looking back,  I think we pretty much improved every single room inside of (and also worked on the exterior of) our house; everything except the master bathroom. The fact that you spend so much time in the bathroom in a lifetime, this always bothered me.  

Why didn’t we do anything all those years? Why did we just leave it the way it was? Why did we ignore it? Why did everything else come before it? Little did I realize at the time that it mirrored our life. It mirrored our marriage. 

I hated this bathroom; but, as with much else in my life, I just lived with it.  It was functional, albeit barely at times, between sink and shower drain issues.  It was what it was, and so I lived with it. I tolerated it. Although my drain was often clogged, I was functional too, albeit barely at times.  

Literally, my master bathroom dating back to 1979, with matte mustard, yellow-gold sink and toilet, and white linoleum flooring, was a sort of tribute to the era I grew up in; or maybe, more appropriately, a memorial. 

And I, like my bathroom, am a product of the 70s: older and outdated, at least that’s how I was feeling. I also needed some attention, some improvement. But so did (and continually does) everything in my life it seems. I digress. 

The cabinets and drawers were small and had layers and layers of paint over them.  Who knew what the original cabinets looked like?

The hardware on the cabinets was black metal and reminiscent of the popular Dutch style of the times. The mirrored medicine cabinet wasn’t deep enough to hold much of anything and was all rusted inside. The small tub’s fill  barely came to my waist; while the shallow sink  wouldn’t ever drain properly and was always covered in white film. It was bad.  It was not a place I wanted to stay in very long. It was not an oasis where I could find solitude or peace. It was barely functional, but it worked. Just like me. Just like us.

Not only was it aesthetically unpleasing and decrepit, it’s probably the smallest bathroom I have ever been inside in the continental United States. (This says a lot since I was a flight attendant in my former life. I’ve seen some bathrooms in my lifetime.) Size doesn’t actually have anything to do with the story, it’s just facts.

This particular master bathroom, especially in comparison with the size of the bedroom (which is ginormous), was an anomaly to the house. It was so small, in fact, that my 6 foot one husband never (or just very rarely) used it; choosing, rather, to use the bathroom down the hall for his personal private-needs headquarters. I am not so sure that it was the size but, rather perhaps, just the sharing of space. Maybe he needed more space. 

He honestly never cared that I hated our master bath; at least not until Covid came. Although, looking back now, I don’t think he cared about much of my needs or the needs of the family until Covid hit. 

While the global Covid crisis loomed over the world and destroyed life as we (society) had known it, it also brought a sense of renewal and hope in our personal space and time. While it destroyed lives, it miraculously helped rebuild ours; and my bathroom.

And so, it is the bathroom that was the last thing in our house to be reconstructed, after we had already begun reconstruction of our relationship only thanks to a global pandemic.

He gave me free rein as far as design, and a generous budget. I told him I wanted a bathroom where I could escape. I wanted a bathroom that would make me feel as if I could easily be in some fancy hotel in New York City, London, Paris, Tokyo or some other amazing place far, far away. It was completed after his death.  Our life together fell short; and who knows what may have been between us had he not died, oddly enough in a fancy hotel bathroom in New York City.

In the end, upon its completion, I ended up with a big, beautiful, deep soaking tub. When I’m in the bath, in my tiny but beautiful little bathroom, I find peace. I find clarity. I find renewal. 

And thus, in these things, this blog: ‘Thoughts From A Widow’s Bath’ was born.