Nostalgic homeowners drove across the country and paid thousands of dollars to repair or rebuild old-fashioned bathrooms or kitchens.

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Many people may see a retro lavender and green bathroom, and see a space begging to be gutted. But those people are not Emily Carver. She is a lawyer in Cleveland. She flew to Boston in May last year and retrieved 600 tiles from the bathroom under renovation.

The 40-year-old Ms. Carver almost gave up her dream of rebuilding the bathroom in the 1930s with lavender. About a month later, she tried to find a taxi in Boston. The trunk was large enough to drag her trophies back to her home in Cleveland. This was the revival of the Tudor dynasty in the 1930s.

"I thought,'Those are my tiles, those are my tiles, this is what I want,'" Ms. Carver said of her initial reaction to the listing. Now that a $1 tile is in her garage, Ms. Carver must figure out how to scrape off the old mortar from the back so that she can rebuild a dressing room suitable for the era in a space updated by previous people. owner.

"I am very happy to finish it, but I am also a little nervous because I have been thinking about it for so long," she said when talking about the room. The room will feature lavender and green. This is the tropical print she chose. The unique ability of tile colors to combine together. "Of course, it will become tacky, because it is like that."

Kitsch is the point. In the noisy corner of this home improvement world, there live a group of homeowners dedicated to preserving or rebuilding old-fashioned bathrooms and kitchens. Models in the middle of the century were dominant, with distinct shades of pink, blue, yellow, and green. But there are also bathrooms from the 1920s and 1930s, which use a spectacular combination of cobalt blue, burgundy and turquoise, which often have ornate decorative details.

In Facebook groups like Vintage Bathrooms and Mid Century Bathrooms (vintage), members stared at the pink toilets, tried to sell sinks with green or blue bases, and offered repair suggestions and encouragement. On Instagram, hashtags such as #vintagebathroom and #vintagekitchen celebrated orange bathtubs and checkerboard tiles, and the account @vintagebathroomlove posted photos of past original tile works to its 158,000 fans.

“Some people really like sports, some people really like literature. Some people really like their historic houses,” said Pam ​​Kueber, founder of Retro Renovation, of the site It has become a communication center for people who want to restore steel kitchen cabinets or mid-century dressing tables. "Whatever your ship."

Ms. Kueber, 62, lives in a medieval ranch-style house in Lenox, Massachusetts. The kitchen contains the steel aquamarine cabinets she found on eBay. She has become the godmother of the kitchen and bathroom in the middle of this century. , Leading a new generation of homeowners have been dominating the four-inch square tiles of the home for decades.

Retro lovers believe that recycling old materials can save homeowners money and maintain the integrity of the house. Design trends come and go, but the bathroom of 1949 will still be the bathroom of 1949, long after the stacked walls disappeared from fashion.

Talk to a homeowner like Ms. Carver, and her garage is filled with vintage tiles of various colors, and you will soon discover that itching is more than just money or nostalgia. This is about hunting.

Finding the exact bright green shade in the shower in 1924 to repair a place, or the pink bathtub is the ideal partner for the console sink, which will bring a certain pleasure. Sometimes the fun is in the chase, find an item on eBay or the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore, or drive hundreds of miles to pick up the item before it goes to the junkyard.

Ms. Carver’s garage now has not only lavender tiles (which she describes as "purple decorative art"), but other vintage materials she has collected, including 500 bright green tiles, 50 yellow tiles, and about 100 pink tiles . There are also some randomly sorted classic sinks, including two 1928 purple bases, which she found before buying her current home, but were too big for a 15-square-foot powder room.

How will she handle all these materials? She might sell them at some point because the other two original bathrooms in her 2,400 square foot house are still in good condition. But does it really matter? "For the past summer, friends have been cleaning their bathrooms, and I thought,'Just take the sinks. I know someone will need them,'" Ms. Carver said. She has become no longer needed by others. The caretaker of the bathroom. "My family, not my immediate family members, but my other family members, think I am crazy," she said. "For my parents, they grew up in a bathroom like this. It's not cool for them."

But for those who find nothing cooler than certain medieval steel cabinets, the distance to travel is too far. Molly Evans, an anesthesia nurse from Quincy, Illinois, was so excited about the two sets of cabinets she found online that she drove them from Quincy to Palm Springs, California in a Penske truck. Holiday home, drove 1,800 miles. The style of the road house was built in 1958, and the kitchen was updated sometime in the 1990s, and Ms. Evans wanted to incorporate her mid-century bones.

Off-road driving is a difficult process. "Crossing through the mountains of Arizona is boring," said Ms. Evans, 55, who was hiking with a work friend. She didn't want her to travel so far in such a car alone. "You keep going. You say,'Well, I have a vision.'"

This is not the first time she has travelled long distances in a truck with these cabinets. A few months ago, she bought them in Missouri and drove the U-Haul slowly southward from her Quincy home for six hours, where she found a set of gold valued at $900 on Craigslist And white St. Charles cabinets.

Because one person will never have too many cabinets, Ms. Evans decided to buy a second set of steel cabinets, Kelvinators for $400, which she found on Craigslist and found in St. Louis. At the time she still had U- Haul.

After she took the cabinets home, she sent them to be coated with white powder, a process she learned from Retro Renovations, and then used Penske trucks to transport the finished products to California for installation.

"I don't know how it will turn out," Ms. Evans said. "I told my contractor,'I'm going to take out 35 cabinets. They are all mixed and matched.'"

Once the cabinets arrive in California, the contractor must figure out how to assemble them in the kitchen. Once he did this, Ms. Evans installed an electric blue Formica countertop with boomerangs and retro-style appliances, which she bought from Home Depot, and used a set of rotating benches with wooden laminate backrests. Finished the appearance. Ms. Evans said that the final product is not for everyone, but that's the point. "This is the desire not to own what other people have," she said.

When she rents out the house as a short-term vacation rental, she often gets unwelcome praise from guests. "I don't know everyone likes it," she said. "They said,'This is so cool.'" But when she listed the property for sale in May 2020, it sold within three days—$5,000 above the asking price.

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