Mid-Century Modern Shower Curtain with Gray Circles

Kelli wrote in asking, 

Love your shower curtain. Do you mind sharing where you got it? 

I've shared a list full of mid-century modern shower curtains, but I didn't link to my mid-century shower curtain because by the time I had it hung, the store had run out of stock – if I remember correctly it was West Elm, or it might have been CB2.

But I did track down another mid-century modern shower curtain that's pretty close to the look of mine,  the Carnation white shower curtain with gray circles.

The circles might not be as organized, but I think it still achieves the same look.

New Mid-Century Modern Shower Curtain

I spent the weekend adding the new finishing touches on our master bath.

Here's the original realtor photo from when we bought the place, with nobody using it so it looks perfect.

Here's what it looked like for the past few years, after I added a new mirror and mirror-side lights, and figured out a way to hide most of the day-to-day, someone-lives-here-now mess on the shelves.

And here it is with the new mid-century modern shower curtain, new shower hooks that mimic the look of the metal bar on the mirror-side lights and, while you can't see it in the photo, new frosted white trash can that mimics the glass on the sconces.

Sure, they're extremely small details, but after a few years of seeing the same curtain and shower hooks with one missing ring, they really freshen up the room and put those final, final touches on it. (Except for the one or two other ideas that I might follow through on.)

Modern Bathroom Sconces

The next item on our to-do list that I'm planning on tackling is replacing our master bathroom mirror-side lights, so I went on the hunt for modern bathroom sconces. I thought I found the perfect chrome wall sconce right away, at Home Depot.

I bought two of them and started installing them. That's when I remembered it's always good to measure before you buy things. The hole in the wall for the electric box/wiring is 5" wide, and this particular modern bathroom wall sconce is 4.25" wide. In theory, I could patch part of the hole to make it smaller, but that would mean a lot more work and repainting the whole bathroom because we don't have the master bathroom paint color (the old owners painted it).

So the hunt began, and I thought I'd share what I found.

The Essex Bathroom Light

The Maxim Lighting Silo Wall Lamp

The George Kovacs Cubism Collection Wall Sconce

The Kenroy Home Mezzanine Sconce

The Sea Gull Lighting Bliss Light

The Alico Industries Moderno Bathroom Light

The Hinkley Ashley Sconce in Chrome

The Ellery Single Bath Light

The Kichler Lighting Cylinders Bathroom Light

The Murray Feiss Riva Bathroom Light

The Lite Source Wall Lamp

But in the end, the winner was: The Hinkley Midtown Wall Sconce

They're on their way now and I'll be sure to share before and after photos once they're installed.

Midwest Mid-Century Treasures: Vintage Pears Soap Packaging

I found this outstanding example of mid-century package design while looking for a bar of soap at my mom's house.

As reported by wikipedia:
According to Unilever records, Pears Soap was the world's first registered brand and is therefore the world's oldest continuously existing brand.

The back of the package reads:

Pears
The original transparent soap.
Natural, long lasting.

BY APPOINTMENT TO
HER MAJEST THE QUEEN
A & F PEARS LTD.
SOAP MANUFACTURERS
LONDON

Pears soap is the natural way to a lovely complexion, because it is made from simple, purr ingredients – glycerine, natural oils, cedar, thyme. And then it is mellowed and aged for three month until it reaches a pure transparent. This unique aging process also makes Pears soap extremely long lasting.
Pears soap is specially made to take care of the most delicate of fine skins, cleansing thoroughly, gently naturally. Because the formulation includes glycerine, Pears soap is very effective on dry skin and gentle enough for a baby's skin.
Made in England in the traditional way since 1789.

MADE IN ENGLAND. A & F PEARS LTD., LONDON WI ENGLAND
Distributed by DEP Corporation, Los Angeles, CA 90066

Reproduction Mid-Century Bathroom Hardware

I'll be honest, I did not know that Rejuvenation had a blog. But they do, and they recently mentioned their new line of reporduction mid-century bathroom hardware, which is a nice complement to their line of reproduction mid-century door knobs and backplates.

From Rejuvenation's post about their new mid-century bathroom hardware:

This July, we are introducing a new line of bath hardware. The main components of this line — the square backplates and support arms — are modeled after the Hall-Mack Aristochrome bath series. This was a very popular and well-crafted line that saw many style variations over the decades. To the best of our knowledge, this style was introduced in the late 1950s and produced for several years. The dished square shape of the backplate had already been established as a mainstream motif of mid-century hardware in cabinet pulls and fancy door plates (a little foreshadowing here - check back in August). We decided to add a second shape: a star backplate. Our star is loosely translated from a bath product of the 50s and 60s. Since the starburst is the de facto emblem of the era, we thought we would be missing something important by not having that in our bath hardware line).

Our Mid-Century Modern Bathroom Mirror

I received a request for an after photo of our new bathroom mirror. So here it is.

It was pretty easy to install. I followed the old adage: measure twenty times, drill a hole in the wall once. I'm a bit of a perfectionist about things being square and a mirror that I look at every day being off would have driven me nuts.

I'm really happy with how it turned out. It opens up the wall a lot more and gives the bathroom more of that spa look we're going for.

Done: Put in new a bathroom mirror

Another weekend, another weekend project. This time we put up a new bathroom mirror. The best way to describe the old mirror is yellow with floral print, so it had to go. You can see the corner of it in this photo:

We installed this mirror because we're looking to make the main bathroom look more like a spa, and because it goes perfectly with our mid-century modern bathroom accessories.

Back when we first started thinking about replacing the mirror, we were going to use the circle version of this mirror, but after looking at the space some more, the larger oval mirror was a better fit. And we got exactly what we were looking for, a clean looking modern mirror that's going to help the bathroom look and feel like a spa bathroom.

Done: Fix bathroom knob

We have some wonderful mid-century door knobs on all the interior doors, but the bathroom handle was missing the screw that held it on. 20 minutes of wandering around the hardware store looking for the right kind/size and 5 seconds with a hex key, and it's fixed. The bathroom knob will never come off in someone's hand again.

Mastering the b. room

I took care a few small jobs in the master bathroom: I replaced the mirror and put on a new toilet seat. There was nothing wrong with the old toilet seat, it just wasn't our style - it looked like a shell. Same thing with the mirror, there was nothing wrong with it, we just didn't like the look of it.

The toilet seat now looks like your standard, non-shell toilet seat and the mirror looks like this:

Mirror, mirror

Both our bathrooms need new mirrors. The current ones are too eclectic for our plans.

We're thinking one of these for the master bath. It's a more masculine with dark natural stone throughout, so we're thinking of bringing some wood in to play into that.
For the main bath we're going for more of a minimal, uber-clean look.
This one's the front runner.But I like this one because it gives a bit of a spa theme.We'd love to hear your opinion if you have a favorite.

New bath accessories

We had our house warming this weekend. In order to properly host we felt we should put up the common bath accessories in the main bath so we could have toilet paper and towels available to people. We have these hung in our bathroom now.

Towel

Hand Towel

Toilet Paper Holder
I also learned that behind the drywall in our bathroom is a concrete wall. And it's very hard to screw into a concrete wall.

The tile we dislike

In our second bathroom there's tile that we don't like, but that our contractor said was, "too expensive to remove." He went on to explain that it was expensive tile that was put in well and if we took it out, that no matter what we did, there was pretty much no way we'd recoup the costs. This is that tile.

We do realize that most people would love this tile (in real life it's more pink than in the photos), but it's just not us. We're the type of people that told our Realtor, "no granite in the kitchen, no travertine in the bathroom."

Our plans are to cover up as much as we can with teak. So the front ledge, the ceiling and probably the indents.