Friday, January 23, 2009

TGBR Pt. 4 - Fixtures!




January 15-20, 2009. Now we're getting somewhere! With this post, you'll be all caught up on our bathroom renovation. Here's what the shower wall looks like grouted, but without the haze wiped off. It actually has a nice satin finish now that we've rubbed it down. Here's a photo of the floor post-grouting. And for the grand step forward...FIXTURES!!! That's right. We have a toilet, a sink and a showerhead now. Wheee!

Okay. Enough blogging for now. I'm off to add some molding, paint or paper the walls above the beaded board, hang a new (old) door, sew a window treatment, hang a shower curtain, and design a storage unit for the old bathroom closet. I'm thinking something with nice pullout shelves.

See you in six months to a year...

Who knew a ceiling fan could be exciting?


Live with a bare bulb hanging from your ceiling for a year, and you'd be excited about a ceiling fan, too. Funny what you can learn to live with. Our living room is officially finished. Unless you count needing a new front door and new windows. Let's not. Sounds better to say it's finished!

TGBR Pt. 3 - Take it all back out




December 31, 2008 - January 9, 2009. Next step: Remove all the tile so meticulously fitted on the bathroom floor and lay it all out on the dining room floor in the same pattern to keep stupidity at bay. Apply Redgard to floor and shower walls. Redgard is a really cool waterproofing/crack-preventing membrane that's kinda like liquid plastic you brush on (hot pink), wait to dry (red), then apply tile. Next photo shows the tile actually affixed to the floor and the painting started. The paint is "oops" paint and cost $10 for two gallons. Third photo shows the beginning of the shower tiling.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

The Great Bathroom Remo Pt. 2



Otherwise known as "The Tetris Challenge". I'll save you the boring photos of the new sub-floor installation, mostly because I was too bored to take them. (I would like to take this time to thank my employers at The Plein Air neighborhood for giving me all the scrap travertine tile being thrown away post-construction. Without you, our floors would not look nearly as nice.) Anyway...here was our process: completely lay out the floor design using randomly sized tiles, with the greatest effort being placed on minimizing tile saw cuts. (Now I have to thank my dear friend Deirdre for loaning us the tile saw and thus saving us the purchase price, or astronomical rental fees, due to the length of time it has taken us to complete this project.) Pt. 2 here was completed December 25-30, 2008. We think this step turned out nicely, especially since we are tiling virgins, and I don't even remember ever playing Tetris. To be continued...

The Great Bathroom Remo Pt.1


Remember the dim, dingy photo of the bathroom in the post (bottom photo) from November 12, 2007? Well here's what it looked like after the initial removal of fixtures, but pre-replacement of rotten floorboards or anything else new. By the way, this photo was taken September 15, 2007. See, I'm not just behind in my posting, I'm also WAY behind in my remodeling! Stay tuned...it gets better...I promise.