The Bathroom My Son Wouldn't Let Me Renovate

For approximately two years, I wanted to redo my son's bathroom.

For approximately two years, my son said no.

This was particularly irritating because the bathroom was aggressively builder-grade. Oak vanity. Beige walls. Basic mirror. Small scratched-up tub. There was nothing technically wrong with it, which is apparently a sufficient reason for some people to leave a room alone.

I am not one of those people.

About a year before the full renovation, I had already done what I could without actually ripping anything out. I painted the vanity, added wallpaper, framed the builder mirror, and tried to make the bathtub area feel a little more intentional.

I even cut and upholstered a cornice and suspended it from the ceiling so I could hang a 96-inch curtain around the end of the tub.

Was this an excessive amount of effort to avoid renovating the bathroom my child would not let me renovate?

Possibly.

But it looked better.

We also invented a fake hotel for him. He wanted his gaming name worked into it, so Hotel Nyrduxi0 was born, and I made a sign for it on my xTool S1.

At that point, the bathroom was passable.

Not finished in my mind. But passable.

Then his sister's bathroom was done.

Suddenly, the child who had spent two years protecting his perfectly adequate builder bathroom discovered that perhaps bathroom renovations were not such a terrible idea after all.

He told me he wanted his bathroom to feel like a boutique hotel.

How an elementary-school-aged boy arrived at the phrase "boutique hotel" remains unclear, although I am willing to acknowledge that he may have heard his mother say it approximately 400 times.

Either way, I finally had permission.

And this time, I was doing it properly.

The little tub came out. The temporary curtain treatment came down. We addressed the closet and doors so they actually felt like part of the room, and I started pulling together the darker, more tailored hotel look he wanted.

The hardest part was the tile because I knew exactly what I wanted and had absolutely no ability to describe it.

This happens to me often.

I can see an entire room in my head with incredible specificity, but ask me to describe the one missing material and suddenly I am standing in a tile store saying things like, "No. Not that. It needs to be...more."

Fortunately, Derrick at The Tile Shop in Columbia somehow understood this language. We walked around until he found the tile I had apparently been trying and failing to describe.

Then the room finally started coming together.

The funny part is that I had wanted to renovate this bathroom forever, but once T finally agreed to it, the room became much more interesting because it was not just the bathroom I wanted to make.

It had to feel like him.

A little dark. A little grown-up. Clean and tailored without being boring. Something that could still work as he got older.

And, obviously, it needed its own hotel.

So the moral of this renovation is fairly simple:

Beige still kills my soul.

My son apparently has surprisingly specific hospitality-design opinions.

And if you tell your mother you want a boutique hotel bathroom after making her wait two years to renovate it, you should be prepared for her to take that request very seriously.

Welcome to Hotel Nyrduxi0.