The Re-Tiled Bathroom Surprise

I wake up in the morning and start brushing my teeth. My husband appears to have been up for a while and is insistent that he needs to show me a surprise and it can’t wait. I leave my teeth half-brushed and he leads me to the bathroom and opens the door. I look and it takes me a minute to make sense of what I’m seeing. Eventually I realize that my husband has retiled the bathroom floor. The dream bathroom is much bigger than our actual bathroom but not nicer. It reminds me of one of my family’s old apartments in Italy. The bathroom floor used to be square dark green tiles and I see that my husband reused some of those tiles and added some white and dark red tiles as well. They are different shapes and sizes and he did a nice job of creating some order and patterns while also making it feel organic and random. I spend a long time really taking it all in. I know I am looking with the critical eye of someone who cares about craftsmanship and quality and that I’m probably not showing the happy surprise and enthusiastic gratitude that my husband wants. I am trying to figure out how and when he did all this because I know I used the bathroom last night before I went to bed and I didn’t notice anything different. I keep asking him when he did it but he doesn’t give an answer that makes sense. He says he’s been secretly collecting tiles since July 11th. I try looking at my Instagram to see what was happening on July 11th but get distracted by a video of a machine making super realistic edible flowers. As I look around the bathroom I notice unfinished areas such as a place where the stairs to the basement has been removed and now there is just a dirty hole. I try to stay focused on how amazing of a job my husband did considering he’d never laid tiles before, and how much time and consideration he put into creating this special surprise for me, rather than the imperfections. The floor isn’t totally flat or smooth and the grout isn’t flush in certain places but I just note these things silently and don’t say anything. Overall I am really impressed. The bathroom opens into another big tiled room that has a twin bed in the corner but is mostly empty. I think, “Omg! Why haven’t I been using this room for my office? Or considering it as an another bedroom?!” The room has gone totally forgotten and unused. Then my husband and I remember that from this big room there is access to a loft with two more beds in it. We start talking about how my sister and her husband could come live with us and how we have plenty of room if we have another child. We are renting the house and we ask the maintenance man who is there doing something if our rent will dramatically increase if more people are living here and he says, “No, she wanted to cap the rent at $2,000 so it might go up a little but not a lot.” We feel excited that we suddenly have a lot more space to work with and there are new possibilities that weren’t there before.

(If this was your dream what would it be about? Comment below beginning with "If it was my dream..." or "In my imagined version of this dream...")

© Genevieve Camp, Another Incarnation, magazine collage, 5” x 8”