Though she now owns and operates the interior design company Staging With Style LLC, Sharon Sheets never expected to become an interior designer. She majored in chemistry and biology in college and spent many years working for a chemical company before having children.
When she offered to help out a friend who owned her own design business, Sheets discovered that she had a passion for the work. Now, she does it full-time.
“Because this job was plopped in my lap, I call it my little gift from God, because I love my job so much,” Sheets says. “I love my clients, I love working with people and I love my projects. Going from being a chemist to doing this is as much of a 180 as you could possibly have, but I love it because of the freedom I have. I can control how much I put on my platter and have time to spend with my family, which is the most important thing to me.”
While her primary focus used to be staging houses so they could be sold, Sheets now primarily works on renovations. Recently, she took on the challenge of updating a large bathroom owned by a pair of regular clients. The end result was a luxurious, spa-inspired space with more than enough room for the couple and their children to go about their daily routines.
Warming Up the Space
One of the clients often complained of being cold in the bathroom, a problem that Sheets solved using a feature that would be both convenient and unobtrusive: heated floors. Both the floor tiles in the larger bathroom and in the shower are heated. This warms up the room without the use of a large heater and ensures that the heat rises to fill the space.
Sheets further customized the bathroom’s heating system to fit in with the clients’ daily routines, so that they would not waste energy while the bathroom was not in use.
“I have everything on timers,” Sheets explains. “The heated floors come on about half an hour before they come into the bathroom to get ready for the day, and they go off about two hours later. Then, at night, it comes on again, because [the clients] work a lot of night shifts. I had the thermostats working so the floors and everything are heated when they come in to take showers.”
Let There Be Light
While the original bathroom was not lacking in natural light, there were very few light fixtures, and this made it difficult to use during the night. Sheets incorporated recessed lighting, which is installed into the ceiling and the walls around the bathroom’s vanity mirrors.
The room’s natural light was not left by the wayside, though. Rather, Sheets worked to maximize it. The bathroom originally had a large soaking tub with a window, but this meant that bathers could be seen from outside. The new design preserves the natural light from the original window, but uses waved glass blocks to create a privacy window.
This was actually one of the biggest challenges of this particular build. The window had to be reshaped so the glass cubes could fit properly, and additional ventilation had to be added. Now that the hard work is over, though, Sheets feels that the privacy window helps tie the whole room together.
“You push out the problems after a project is over,” she adds. “When you look at the end product, you go ‘Wow,’ and forget the parts that gave you a hard time.”