A steamy hot number

I was watching The Money Pit on TMC today and I laughed out loud several times in the recognition I'm sure lots of us home renovation chumps do. I really laughed at the scene where Shelly Long's character gets an enticing invitation to her ex boyfriend's house for the evening after living up with her own house's renovation quirks for way too many months. She naturally accepts, mainly because she hears the word BATH. I completely identified with her.

Here at my parents finished house I'm basking in the pampering offered up the mundane, everyday features of a normal house. All the luxuries I used to have many, many, many moons ago, but have since learned to live without, like mirrors, carpeting, closets, tile floors, extra bedrooms with doors, a laundry room and of course a completely equipped and dust free kitchen. And I finally have the luxury of not only a bath, but a jacuzzi bathtub that I've been taking liberties with almost every evening since arriving. Long, hot and bubbly little cauldrons, stewing me into a vaporized bliss...ahhh. Just talking about it makes me immediately relax. It also makes me nostalgic.

The hardest thing I've been forced to do without in the two years we've been renovating has been my bath. I used to take a bath every single night. It was always my strict criteria before renting anywhere, "yes the garden is lovely ... but how's the bath?" In one fabulous, cheap rental in Blois I actually asked Seb to reconsider with me because the bathtub was a deep, short little thingy unlike anything I'd ever seen. "The bathtub is horrid, we can't take the house!" These type of short, high rimmed bathtubs seem to be unique to Europe. You actually have to fold your knees up like a frog to bathe. We took the rental anyway and I ended up really liking the bath because it filled so fast I could have a really deep soak in mere minutes. I didn't mind having to fold my legs up in front of me. It was yoga and bath all rolled into one.

The best apartment bath right before the 'froggy' one was a tub with a large opaque window to the rear of it. The tub also had lots of oversized ledges suitable for plants, particularly near the window. I decided to stuff the area as full as possible with plants. Spider plants, philodendron and violets all grew like wildfire. I bathed nightly in my little jungle, pulling out my stock of sensual armory--vanilla bath salts, Caswell Massey sandalwood soap, pillar candles, a large, swirlable glass of bordeaux, and finally some music, usually an opera cd. Seb turned into a real bath junkie too thanks to my evening ritual, and there were times when we'd be in the tub talking and laughing for so long that the water would turn tepid and the dinner hour would just turn into a long aperatif in the kitchen in our bathrobes. I miss those baths. I don't really miss going up those three flights of stairs to that apartment but the bath is something I often think about when the house renovating gets really exhausting like it has been lately.