Neon Pink Tigers in a 150-Year-Old House (yes, really)

CHAPTER 5

I found the wallpaper before I had a plan, which is exactly backwards and exactly right.

Deep teal and black, an ikat pattern that ripples like heat coming off a road, thin orange lines running through the whole thing. Prowling through all of it... NEON PINK TIGERS. I saw it and laughed out loud, alone, like a crazy person. And then I did the thing I tell my clients to do and almost never let myself do: I didn't talk myself out of it. I just knew. This was going in the Gold House bathroom.

Can we talk about bathrooms for a minute? Because I have a whole design philosophy here. A bath or powder room is the single best place in any home to be BRAVE. It's a small room. You're in it for minutes at a time. If a bold choice was ever going to be low-risk, it's here. And yet it's the room people play safest in... white subway tile, gray vanity, beige everything. BOOORING.

Every home should have at least one room that makes you stupidly smile when you walk in. Not "oh that's nice." I mean actually stupidly smile. That's what this bathroom is going to be. Unmistakably, ridiculously me.

And the pairing is what makes it sing. Because this isn't a wild wallpaper in a new build (fine, expected, whatever). This is neon pink tigers sharing a room with an original clawfoot tub in a house that's been standing since Leadville's mining days. A century and a half of history, meeting the loudest thing I've ever put on a wall. The contrast is the whole point. The tub keeps the tigers honest. The tigers keep the tub from taking itself too seriously. Old and new, holding hands, cracking each other up.

Now, before you go picturing some gleaming magazine clawfoot: mine is not that. The finish is chipped. It's stained a shade I'd describe as antique regret. There's a builder-grade chrome faucet stuck on it that somebody thought was a good idea in approximately 1994, and the feet have rust on them. It is not beautiful. It is original, and it is staying, and all of that gets dealt with when the room finally gets dealt with. I'm telling you because I'd rather you see it now than be surprised later.

So here's my progress report, and I have to be honest with you: this room is on pause. On purpose.

Let me back up to the demo. One of my running buddies was staying with me for race camp, and instead of doing anything reasonable with his rest day, he helped me pull the old sink off the wall. Which is exactly the kind of friend to have. And behind it, once everything was off, we found what this house had been hiding: the original valves, broken. Not tired. Broken. There was a leak.

That's where I stopped. I take on a LOT in this house with my own two hands and I'm willing to take on more than most people would, but broken original valves and a leak in 150-year-old plumbing is genuinely outside my scope. So I brought in a licensed contractor. He's going to sort the plumbing and help me make the exposed lines something I actually want to look at, and all of it happens during the big haul, which is the floors.

Because somewhere in the middle of all this I decided I want in-floor heating in here. Which is the right call in a house at 10,200 feet where a bathroom floor in February could double as a walk-in freezer. It is also the decision that sent my wallpaper straight to the back of the line. You do the floor before you do the walls. Every single time. So the tigers wait until the flooring is figured out and, more to the point, until the BUDGET for the flooring is figured out. I'm not going to give you a timeline, because I don't have one that's true.

Here's what IS in there. The curtains are hung around the clawfoot tub, the exact ones I picked, and they make even the mess look intentional (a designer party trick I fully endorse). The walls are patched. The new vanity is in, black with warm brass knobs, sitting exactly where it will live, temporarily installed and deliberately NOT caulked in so it can come right back out when the floor happens. And there's a sconce, finally, after I ordered SIX different ones and lined them up and stared at them like they were going to confess. I settled on one. I'm pretty sure it's the one. Ask me again in a month.

And then there's the faucet.

I hunted for this faucet. Not browsed. Hunted. I went through everything the usual places had and none of it was right, and then I found a private seller with a high end antique style piece and I knew before I got to the bottom of the listing. Aged brass, curved spout, two separate handles. The kind of thing you picture in the room before you own the room. I bought it.

It's a widespread faucet. My vanity top is drilled for a center-set. Four inches of holes, eight inches of faucet.

It did not fit, and that is a mistake I know better than to make. There's a stand-in on there right now, perfectly nice, entirely temporary, and every time I wash my hands I think about the good one sitting in a box in pieces. I'll find one I love that actually fits. It's not the end of the world.

If there's a takeaway here beyond "count your holes before you fall in love," it's this: pausing a room is a design decision. It isn't failure and it isn't laziness. Every time I've rushed a phase just to feel productive, I've paid for it twice. And knowing where your own hands stop is the same skill. Calling a licensed plumber isn't giving up on doing it yourself. It's the part of doing it yourself that keeps the house standing.

So right now it's a room of patched walls and big promises, and nobody is working in it. The wallpaper sample is propped up on the vanity where I see it every single day. It isn't getting me anywhere at the moment. It's just sitting there being a promise, and honestly, that's allowed.

A home shouldn't just be beautiful. It should have personality. YOUR personality, turned all the way up in at least one small room. Save the restraint for the living room. In here, we roar.

Eventually.