The Servant's Bathroom

No, we don't have servants, not even a house cleaner or a lawn service for that matter but we do have servant's quarters on the third floor according to old floor plans and blue prints that have been passed down from owner to owner of this 217 year old house.  I can't imagine having live-in help in a house of this size; it's big but not that big, perhaps back when there were eight bedrooms and it was a farm with an apparently large family to take care of it was a necessity.  There are two bedrooms under the eaves on the third floor  that I have blogged about in the past; the Ocean room and the Jungle room.  Now I'll feature the Servant's bathroom.  We could call it the blue bathroom but we already have one of those down on the basement level floor next to the Smoking Room.

One little project I did earlier this week was to repaint the floor of the Servant's bathroom.

I painted it from its dull brown to a lovely nautical blue with a white trim that blends into the base molding and walls back when we bought the house.  I kept the same color for the repaint but used a totally different type of paint this time.

The laundry room, the Servant's bathroom and two stairways are painted in this house.  I had used ALLFLOR paint for these floors and it's not supposed to chip easily but I find that heavy use on the stairs and from guests in the bathroom requires touchups a couple times per year.  When I repainted the bathroom floor earlier this week I used HollandLac by Fine Paints of Europe.  It is oil based and similar to marine paint - super durable and in this case, very shiny.  It dried like a resin.  Gorgeous!  However, this shiny floor might be a bit slippery for a bathroom and someone with wet feet could go flying so I had to find a 4 x 4 rug to protect the innocent.  Here's a tour of that cute bathroom.  I will show you what it looks like now first - we had the shower redone by a professional and then I remodeled the rest of the room myself soon after we bought the house.  You'll see what it looked like too before the remodel.

 To get up to the servant's quarters, you go through this glass paned door at the end of a long hall on the second floor off the laundry room and climb the stairs.  On your left at the landing are the two bedrooms.  To the right is the bathroom.

You can see the bell system on the wall that was used to alert the servants for household assistance.

 The Ocean Room

The Jungle Room

 You have to turn the key to open this medicine cabinet.  I bought this at an antique shop when we first moved to NH in 1998.

 I found this little original painting at an antique shop for 10 dollars about 10 years ago.  It used to hang in my bathroom in the Kingston house.  It is a favorite.  So cheery and cheer.

Those plates on the wall are very old and used to be on a passenger ship like the Titanic.  The blue paint in this room is Blue Ice by Benjamin Moore.  It has a touch of red in it so it is more of a periwinkle than a sky blue. The white is White Dove by BM.

I painted that picture a couple years ago.

Here's the new rug so you won't slip and break your legs.  It's got a non skid pad underneath so that rug isn't going to move.  The white part of the floor is not slippery.

I am surprised that I found a rug in this odd size so easily - 4x4 feet.  It's a perfect match to the blue and it's a heavy cotton weave.  I found it on Overstocks.com.  I plan to repaint the stairs at some point with the HollandLac but I won't use the shiny lacquer - instead I'll use the satin or no one will make it up the stairs alive.

And here's what the bathroom looked like when we were looking at the house to buy.

 Brown floor!

In that closet there is a long storage room under the eaves that also houses the AC and heat vent systems.  The beams in there still have the tree bark on them from over 200 years ago!

On another note, I repotted several plants this month that had outgrown their pots and I bought a couple other house plants to replace ones that had gone out of control.  In a recent blog post I put a picture of a terra cotta person's head with a plant growing out of it that my mom has in her San Diego backyard patio.  I recently found a "head" of my own and put it on the desk in the living room where I drink my hot chocolate every morning.  Here's my mom's and then mine.

Next post:  Color and Structure - hmmmm...