Baby and Bath Water

Two years passed with some simple projects and the adjustments to sleep schedules. My travel ramped up, but Lígia couldn’t come to Brussels or Singapore anymore, and her work travel was getting stressful with an active baby. A second pregnancy meant that the situation was not sustainable. Lígia would move to become a full-time mom, and I would start looking for jobs that could keep me local (or at least domestic travel only).

Lígia transformed what once was our home office into our baby boy’s bedroom. She again hand-painted accents in the room, hung the same light fixture his sister’s room had received two years prior, hung the same white linen curtains, and our final closet got a “built-in” organization system. Just like his sister, baby boy outgrew his crib fairly quickly and was sleeping in a daybed in the second iteration of this bedroom.

(Parenthesis from Lígia: When switching our son from a crib to a daybed, I took his curtains to dry clean… and they shrunk a good 2 inches! Clearly this picture was taken before I had a chance to re-hem them skimming the floor. Eeeek!)

The former office was streamlined and moved to a nook of our living room, which in turn, ended up getting a facelift in order to accommodate the changes in layout.

True to our history, this felt like the right time to give our main bedroom a “neutral facelift” and renovate the en-suite bathroom. It was monochrome beige – from the tile to the vanity, to the sinks to the toilet.

Because of the demands of work and kids, this was the first job we hired out. In discussion with our contractor, he asked about the second full bath – why not follow on the same project? Why not indeed!

Lígia set to designing the bathroom oasis we wanted and fit the style of the townhome. The second bathroom would mirror the main bath, on a smaller scale. Warm walnut cabinets, large plank ceramic floors, gray subway tile halfway up every wall, and polished stainless fixtures. 

The en-suite bathroom had double doors that swung into the main bedroom, but they ate so much floor space we added in a pocket door and were able to add another foot to our frameless glass shower. The budget was bigger than expected, and mixing the second bath into the schedule created risks of having zero functioning showers at some points… 

Unfortunately, Lígia’s pregnancy was making her very ill (and on bed rest for a while) and she had trouble caring for herself and for our toddler daughter. Because of other family commitments, we couldn’t just call in the parents again, but Lígia and our talkative little princess could stay with them for a while. 

I stayed home to keep working and monitoring the project of The Double Bath Do-Over, and fortunately, could rely on the full bathrooms at my work gym on those “zero functioning showers” days.

The work got done (eventually) and when Lígia was feeling well enough to come home, we had a beautiful en-suite bathroom done.

In another week, with Lígia’s meticulous directions and my heavy lifting, we finished the main bedroom facelift as well!

A few more weeks, and our second full bath, now our kids’ bathroom, was also done.

Our perfect baby boy was born no long after – great timing again! We were happy and content with the home that had nearly realized the full vision we had upon purchase.

We only noticed that we were starting to outgrow our townhome as the kids got a bit older – there just wasn’t enough decent indoor space for them to play in, even though our spaces kept getting increasingly more organized with Lígia using her engineering skills at home full-time. We even extended and refinished the patio to make for a better outdoor experience, but the utility was limited during the many months of cold winters of the Northeast. It was time to move on.

During the eight years we were there, we had remodeled every square inch of our townhome and had polished that hidden gem into a beautiful Amethyst that sold within 28 hours of being listed.