The top request I get for posts are not, in fact, travel, but rather progress reports on our house. And while I’m not trying to keep anything from you guys, I’ll just say this: Apparently, when you’re on the road more often than not, your home does not renovate itself.

Go figure! I honestly thought that’s how it worked, guys. Then again, this is how I do yard work, so I’m hardly the most credible source.

However. I do finally have a fun project to share with you. It’s not yet complete—we ran into a few bumps in the road, as seems to be our M.O. in travel, home renovating, life—so this is just part one.

For those of you who follow along on Instagram, you’ll know that amid a summer of travels, my sister getting married and all-around insanity, we’ve also been renovating our master bath. Since we live in an old Victorian built in the late 1800s, the space is, well you could call it…interesting. Don’t believe me? This is what it looked like when we bought the space:

You can say it with me now: UG-LY. That wall color…that faux floor…I can’t even.

And to be honest, because of the odd dimensions of the room itself—and mainly, the inconveniently slanted walls that prevented us from actually being able to use the shower—we’ve been hesitant to tackle it, period. There’s a lot of ingenuity required for this particular project, and ingenuity often translates to cold, hard cash. The bathroom is not actually attached to a bedroom—in fact, there’s an awkwardly shaped hallway that separates the upstairs bath from our room and the Lemon Room—and eventually we plan to knock down some walls and perhaps make it all one big space, with a separate, smaller bedroom attached to the guest room (we have to raise the roof line to do all of that, so it’s no small undertaking).

But for now, we’re working with limited monetary resources, so we’re going to make do.

This project was very much a case of finding a product we wanted to use and then planning the space around it. In this instance, it was the gorgeous Hex Appeal tile from Mission Stone + Tile. You may recall if you’ve been following along for some time that we re-tiled two of our six fireplaces when we first moved in. If you’re new to this space, I’ll give you a peek at the final product here:

At the time, we were new to town and had no idea where to go for resources. Our friend who works in construction told us that Mission had the best, well, stone and tile as the name may suggest, so we headed on over there shortly after moving into our lovely old Queen Anne.

Not only does the showroom have so many gorgeous products, I left wanting to tile my entire house, but the prices are very reasonable and they can get in product quite quickly. At the time, we wanted a very specific safety yellow subway tile. We were told by other tile shops in the area that it could take eight weeks to get it in; Mission Stone + Tile had it to us within a week. We’ve been fans ever since (and they sell everything online for those of you not in the Nashville area!).

But back to the Hex Appeal. Everywhere I went in Nashville, it seemed to pop up. It’s on the bar at Moto. It’s in Jason Aldean’s bathroom. It’s in one of the homes I profiled for the magazine. I loved it from the moment I first laid eyes on it, and seeing it crop up left and right was further indicator that this was my pattern.

The owner, Mary Elizabeth Oropeza, designed this lovely pattern, and when we went to meet with her about our bathroom renovation—Mission Stone + Tile also provides its client with free design consulting services, which we definitely took advantage of—she showed us her new Essentials line, too. I fully intend to use some of these products—they come in 80 skews, seven colors, five textures and are oh-so-lovely—in our kitchen remodel next year or the next, but for the bathroom, I knew the Carrara marble Hex Appeal was our guy.

“Mom, can I have the Essentials line in my room? Pretty please?

Back in April, SVV had torn out the floor, and we spent the following months sanding, patching, ripping out the baseboard, moving the plumbing and all those other things you have to do when you fully gut a bathroom (we did hire a drywall guy to fix the lumpy walls, but other than that, everything was done on our own).

Neither of us were sad to see the floor go. Especially when we ripped it up to find another layer of old linoleum creeping beneath.

Relocating the plumbing turned out to be a bit of a headache, but ultimately, we moved it to the other side of the room with few issues.

SVV was particularly proud of this part of the renovation process, as it was no small feat. I will say, I hit the jackpot when marrying this resourceful dude, who can figure out how to do anything.

We kept the old clawfoot tub, which we have since painted a dazzling shade of yellow, but relocated it to the other side of the room (or rather, it rested on its side in our guest bedroom for three months while we figured things out!) so it can actually be used. Instead of spending money on a pricey, new vanity, we kept the old one and put it where the tub originally was.

Don’t worry: We’ve since painted it a charcoal gray and changed out the knobs, as well as installed a new vessel sink in place of the old in-set one. We’re still trying to figure out what to use for a countertop—we threw out this crap slab of fake marble and currently are using a piece of plywood in the interim—so stay tuned for later updates.

All that to say, I was glad we’d gotten all of the big stuff out of the way, so that when our tile order arrived in the store in August, we were ready to lay it.