A chill in the air

So I spent two hours this afternoon at Brock-McVey (a fixture supply warehouse in town) talking with their lighting specialist, Nancy. My mission was to decide on all lights for the master bathroom, including obtaining their cut sheets so that Wagner could start the wiring process. (Again, more terminology I wasn't familiar with: A "cut sheet" is a printout showing a product description and, most important for Wagner, including detailed enough specifications, e.g. measurements, amp requirements, etc., that one can use it for building purposes.)

I went into my meeting with Nancy with a clear idea of what I wanted. I left with a vague feeling of disappointment, frustration, and not at all sure of how to proceed.

Here's the issue: I mentioned in an early installment of this blog that our current master bath shower has glass doors, which is quite fashionable and looks terrific but exacts a high price in maintenance: Because our local water system has extremely hard water, it is important that we squeegee down the shower doors each and every time we use the shower; otherwise, unsightly water deposit spots can form on the glass doors that are impossible to clean off.

I don't mind the squeegeeing duties that much, or at least I think the hassle is worth having a terrific looking shower. I truly despise the floppy shower curtain look and the mildew that inevitably ensues. But my hubby, Jonathan, hates squeegeeing. He'll do it, but only under duress, and he's been vocal about not wanting glass doors in our new bathroom.

Since I don't want a floppy shower curtain, and Jon doesn't want glass doors, that doesn't leave us a whole lot of options. Then one day I attended an open house where the master bath had a serpentine-shaped shower that didn't have a door at all. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, and my jaw dropped open over the sheer ingeniousness of such a design. I knew, at that point, that I wanted a shower like that--one that would not require a shower door.

So when we were drafting the initial plans, I sketched it out for Wagner and shared our desire for a shower design that would have no doors, and hence no squeegee responsibilities. Quite gratifyingly, he bought into our vision and pointed out that such a design was compatible with our broader goal of designing the renovation to be universally accessible and wheelchair compatible if and when that became necessary in our old age.

There was only one teeny-tiny snag. The winters in Kentucky can get darned cold, down to zero degrees F (or lower), and we are the miserly kind of people who turn the thermostat way down (62 degrees) at night. This means in the morning it can be positively chilly when we wake up to shower. We were both worried that, without a shower door to trap in all the nice hot steam, we could be freezing our fannies off in our new shower.

We mulled this over for a while, and then I had the brilliant (to me) idea of installing one of those bathroom fan/heaters you find in hotels where you can turn it on for a short while and keep toasty warm as you're showering and/or drying off. I even found a nice Panasonic "whisper warm" fan that seemed to accomplish all that, PLUS being very quiet to boot.

The only snag is that when I printed out the specs, I noticed the fine print which said "not listed for shower tub/enclosures." I didn't want the heater to be in the shower part per se, near or under the water stream, but I was hoping to put it in the drying-off portion of the shower so that when we turned the water off we would still be warm.

So that was the main question on my mind when I went to talk with the lighting specialist. She seemed a little out of her depth when I asked her about it (I got the impression that very few people asked for a "walk-behind" or "doorless" shower, and even fewer asked for a shower fan/heater), but she called several of the shower fan/light companies while I was there and asked them about it. All of them said the same thing: There are no bathroom shower fan/heater combinations that are approved for use in the shower. I can get fans; I can get shower lights; but I can't get anything that includes a heating element. I'm not exactly sure why, but it has something to do with the danger posed by moisture getting into the heating elements. If I want a heater, it has to be outside the shower enclosure.

Shucks.

So now I'm a bit at a loss of what to do. Nancy suggested that we go ahead and put a fan/heater combo outside the shower, where it could do double-duty with the toilet. But I'm worried that won't get the heat where we need it, which is right when we turn the shower off and are drying off and freezing our fannies off. Wagner says we should revisit the idea of installing a heated floor. I'm not wild about THAT idea, as it's my fanny that gets cold, not my tootsies.

Worst case scenario, I suppose, is that we try the heater fan right outside the shower, and if it turns out to be too cold, we go ahead and put in a shower door and drag out our squeegee. Sigh.