When last I posted about the bathroom, we'd FINALLY tiled the entire floor and shower walls. We'd had one very nice shower and then, hit a shiny new snag. That night, after the lovely shower the hot water heater fired off it's pressure relief value. This means that something is wrong, and you need to fix it, but it's way better than the old days when exploding hot water heaters were not all that uncommon. So, we clearly had a problem we needed to fix with the pressure in the water heater, but first, a more immediate problem. The hot water heater was so old that the pressure relief valve literally broke off when it shot open to release the excess hot water. Now we had a hot water heater that was gushing water and we couldn't shut it off without turning off all water to the house. Yep, from shower bliss to the inability to even brush our teeth in 30 minutes.

This house must be cursed.

The next day we got very dirty and wet draining the water heater, pulling it out of it's close and trying to clean it up and replace the pressure relief value. Then we purchased an expansion tank so that the hot water would not over pressure the hot water heater again.




This was when we noted a new problem. While purchasing the expansion tank I noticed several very cool looking gauges and meters. They weren't all that expensive, and as I mentioned they were very cool looking, so we got a pressure gauge and put it on the expansion tank. This was when we learned that our house water pressure was 110PSI. The norm is 40PSI -- no wonder our hot water heater nearly exploded, and thank goodness for cool looking pressure gauges. So, we went back to Home Depot (this what something like the 4th trip that day) to purchase a pressure reducer and installed it on the main incoming water line. And voila, now we were up to code and safe and as soon as the glue dried we'd have hot water again.

In the meantime, we turned our attention to yet another necessity in the bathroom -- lighting.

A lot of people really don't give lighting the credit it deserves. I think lighting will make or break a room. You can have a spectacular bathroom, but they ruin it by installing one of those light/fan combo units or a boring old dome light. Not only are those boring, but they provide terrible lighting for putting on makeup, inserting contact lens, or some of the other detail specific tasks common to bathrooms.

With this in mind, we put a lot of thought into our bathroom lighting design. We wanted overall room light as well as task lighting at the sink/mirror.

For the overhead room lighting we decided to go with recessed "can" lights. They would allow us to spread the lighting to every corner of the room. We installed seven mini can lights -- three over the shower and four for the rest of the room.









Perhaps it's overkill, but we installed the lights on a dimmer switch for complete flexibility of brightness.

At the sink, we installed two side mount sconces. It's recommended to mount vanity light at the approximate level of the face in order to avoid overhead shadows that will make tasks like applying makeup more difficult. For the vanity mirrors we had some positive luck. We'd been looking far and wide for a light fixture we both liked and just weren't seeing many. Then one day at Home Depot we saw some figured on extreme clearance -- marked down from $70 to $15 -- and they were the only lights we both liked. They have a nice modern look while still exhibiting the lines and design of yesteryear -- a nice addition to our overall bathroom design.





So there we were with a bathroom that actually functioned (hot water and all) and now featured excellent lighting. Time for a brief respite.