Great chicken article! :) Thanks so much everyone for taking a look a the pics and the wonderful comments! Yesterday and today I finished up a lot of the outside. I still need to add two fake grid on the windows and clean up a little paint over spray, but for the most part I'm done. I'm sure I'll still fuss out here adding stuff, but I need to get all the inside painting done first. CB .. the rest of the inside of the cottage needs to be redone before it could be used for anything but storage. Oceanna .. the cereal dispensers were off of e-bay. I bought them to go in the kitchen, then decided to use them for dog food and now have swiped them for the chicks and bunny .. they are really, really handy! The window boxes are full of herbs for the most part, I relocted a little of my herb garden up here. Two types of tyme, two oreganos, sweet and boxleaf basil, parsley, rosemary. The reason for the side shots is we have a huge weeping willow and I can't get back far enough to get the whole thing head on. This areas come a long way, it looks a lot better! Just the cottage part .. I used some extra brick pavers and made myself a little step/porch.

You bring up a good point about Europe, but there are some key differences between Europe and the US and the way things are handled in Europe vs. the US and you touched on this in your second sentence. And this also applies to antique houses in America, too. Then there is the concept of what is a "natural progression" and I think this concept is something that has not been well followed in the US and that's why there is a problem with "dated". Many people live in houses that are hundreds of years old in Europe. There was no such thing as a "bathroom" in many of these houses for the first couple hundred years of their existence. So, whatever is the first "modern" (~20th c.) bathroom that would have been put in a particular house is always appropriate. And then any subsequent bathroom style up to about 1980. (And not much beyond 1980 or so, imo, which I will get into in a bit). In America, most houses probably got bathrooms in the Edwardian Era up to the Depression, and new houses built after 1900 probably had bathrooms, although I've seen plans without. However, for example, I lived in a building that had no kitchen until 1965, and it had several toilet compartments and probably a room with a sink and bathtub in it somewhere, but not a modern bathroom until 1965. So what's proper in this house? And is a bathroom that was redone in 1955 improper in a Victorian house? Probably not. Really any bathroom that is "newer" than the house (again up to about 1980 or so, imo) is appropriate to the house. Why? because innovations were taking place, and most houses aren't house museums. What happened after 1980 and what is still happening that's problematic in America today? (And maybe not so much in the rest of the world). First, in general, it's one thing to see a very slick contemporary bathroom and kitchen in a 300 year old house, but it's another thing to see a slick contemporary bathroom in a 50 year old colonial revival house. There is much more contrast in the 300 yo house. And what happened after 1980? Up until about 1980, new styles were --new--. the end of the Late modern period was in the 1980s or so and was followed by Post-Modernism which was more or less a statement about reaching an end point in modernism. There is not much left after the white box to pare down. So in the 1980s they started with the fake "Victorian" style bath fixtures and this was followed by revivals of other historic fixtures and elements, and now a prevailing style for kitchen and bathrooms contains a lot of Edwardian and VIctorian inspired elements. It's hard to find a bathroom faucet that is not either a basic style but exceedingly cheaply made; or extremely modern, or faux -Victorian. And that's the crux of the problem: natural progression of bathrooms was always moving forward with technology and new fashions, but now the new fashion is in retrograde, so people are putting in bathrooms that have many elements that are taking stylistic cues from 1910 -1930 more or less in contemporary houses from 1980. It doesn't make stylistic sense. People argue that this is the "current" style going into new construction so it's appropriate but I am not sure. If the current style going into new construction was a bathroom taking design cues from 1955, I think people would see that that looked goofy in a 1980 house. And then there are decorative styles in America that are displaced by geography or are version of something that doesn't really exist. To go back to the OP, there really isn't any such thing as a "Tuscan" bathroom, even in Tuscany. Not how it would be interpreted in America. And while much about the building style may make a bathroom in the Southwest look very appropriate: adobe and or adobe style plaster, wood ceilings, saltillo and talavera tile---that, isolated in a bathroom in New Jersey, when the rest of the house is not that style--again, was never really right, so when that's out of fashion, it looks really wrong. Finally, in new construction, kitchens and baths have gotten larger, more expensive, and higher quality material-wise, than before, and somtimes this is just too elaborate for a house from the middle of the century. There is nothing the matter with improving on quality, there is no need to replace a plastic tub surround with another. But a marble bathroom with detailed nickel fixtures and a crystal chandelier in a modest Cape Cod or rancher just looks displaced. It's the fashion now, so it's what people will do, but it's going to look more dated than something that fit in with the rest of the house better.

I would paint all the wall tile white, then the wall above the tile and the ceiling all the same color - I think a light blue/green color would have a nice spa feel. We painted our kids bathtub and tile surround with marine paint (made for painting boats) and it has held up really nice so far.

I would… paint the walls a cool dark green maybe vintage vogue Benjamin Moore, easy off the wood vanity and refinish with a matte clear-coat (pls don’t paint, wood cabinets aren’t built the same anymore and are something to show off!), try to find a countertop remnant for the vanity(countertop smart& habitat are my fav’s but I’m not sure how available they are everywhere) wood plank the ceiling running long ways for warmth and sass aaaannd new hardware voila ! Keep the tile I think it would work well! For some reason dark looks good in windowless bathrooms, especially 1/2 dark 1/2 light.