One Room Challenge Week Five: Holding Pattern and Fixtures

Victoria Ford

3 years ago

Hi hi! Welcome back to another week of the One Room Challenge with me, your game show host, Victoria Ford. (Game Show host and Featured Designer are synonymous here). Okay, if you haven’t been here before, welcome and let’s catch you up. One Room Challenge happens twice a year and was created to give designers and guest a place to design and cheer each other on. It’s by no means a competition and the challenge is the race against the clock to finish a space in six weeks (eight this year thanks to our pal COVID). We’re working on both a guest room and it’s adjoining bathroom. This week, we’re talking fixtures! Need more of a catch up?

Check out other weeks of this One Room Challenge

Week 1 / Week 2 / Week 3 / Week 4 / Week 5 / Week 6 / Week 7 / Week 8: Guest Room Reveal / Week 8: Bathroom Reveal

Also before I forget, I would not be able to do these post without the help of amazing ORC Sponsors! This post contains sponsored product from Build with Ferguson and affiliate links. While it costs nothing for you to click the links, they do allow me to keep creating posts you love with the brands that I love.

Oh the fixture delays

Last we spoke, we finally demoed the bathroom (HERE) and put up the wallpaper in the bedroom (HERE). And that’s all she wrote. No additional movement has been made since then. Keep calm. We are not panicking. Yet.

This week has seriously been our first week of delays. Between general shipping delays and the holiday weekend, a few key items just haven’t gotten here as fast as we hoped they would. Obviously, my concern is more for the bathroom than the bedroom. Thankfully, we aren’t getting too too crafty in the bedroom (that didn’t come out the way I hoped it would). But I am not worried about the bedroom. As, long as the chair, we selected for the reading nook comes by reveal day.

As for the bathroom, the item we are waiting for is the first in a row of dominos that will topple the other pieces. We are missing our bath tub and no work can get done without it. We need the tub to tile the floor and the walls, the walls to install the vanity, the vanity to install the sconces. Nothing gets done until it’s here. But don’t worry, when she finally gets here, she’s going to be a stunner and worth the wait.

Fixture Selection with Build with Ferguson

Toilet // Tub // Sink Faucet // Shower head // Sink

Toilet Selection

If we were playing the Newly Wed Game and they asked Marcus what my favorite thing to choose in a renovation is, he would be able to tell you without blinking that it is unequivocally, a toilet. Why? Because a stylish toilet is lowkey how you know that a designer has thought of everything. If you are having trouble picking fixtures, start with the toilet and work your way around and see if it isn’t easier. Stylish toilets are hard to find. But from there all of the other fixtures fall into place.

For our bathroom fixtures, we had the chance to work with one of the ORC sponsors Build with Ferguson. We set up a virtual showroom appointment -because hello, COVID- where we had the chance to speak with one of the consultants about our product selection. She was very knowledgeable about the product and walked us through the landmine that is shipping delays. (My favorite toilet was back ordered for six months. Yikes!)

She also talked us through certain selections that were unique to our home and reno like the 10″ rough in for our toilet. What’s that you say? The rough in of the toilet is the distance from the finished wall behind the toilet to center of the part that mounts it to the floor. Ordinarily that distance is 12″. For us, that distance is 10″. Is that a huge deal? No. But it does mean we had about 1/10th the toilet options we ordinarily would pick from. We’ve dealt with this before and were able to find a satisfactory toilet with a little help from Suzanne, our Build with Ferguson friend.

Tub Selection

Choosing a tub was the easy part. I love Kohler for fixtures. I’ve found them to be dependable over the years with minimal leaks and cracks. When it comes to a bathroom space, that’s important. We selected the Bancroft soaking tub for a ton of reasons. The style of the tub fits early 1900s design which our bathroom leans towards with our home style and tile choose. But we are always function over form here. And this tub is acrylic which means it’s lighter weight than cast iron which was our other option. This means we won’t have to add additional reinforcements to the floor, which would be a concern if we used heavy cast iron in a second floor bathroom.

Sink Selection

As usual, I like to complicate a project with an unnecessarily difficult sink. Marcus fell in love with the Kohler Bannon Sink, yet another of the Kohler’s trough sinks. We had the joy of finding this one on Facebook Marketplace for a whopping $75. Don’t sleep on Facebook Marketplace. After a 9pm run to Greensboro on a school night, it was all ours. Does she need a work? Yes but we are use to the hassle. At least this go round, we won’t have the agony of matching all of the hardware and plumbing.

This time, we are insetting the sink into a dresser which our lovely contractor is going to mount on the wall. Do we know if this is going to work? Heck no. I told you everything is based on what happens with our tub arriving on time. So you and I are just going to have to wait and see. In the mean time, we’ll devote this week to refinishing the sink with an epoxy kit and dry fitting it into the dresser where it will live. Do you know how long I’ve been hoarding this dresser for such a time as this. Should be fun once we get to it.

Interested in others’ fixtures? Go peak in on what the other ORC Featured Designers are up to!