Bathroom complete

We were almost done nearly a month ago and officially done a week ago. I really lost all will to finish once we got through tiling which is why these last bits have dragged out so long. Hanging the shower curtain involved a masonry drill bit which was obstacle enough to keep me from completing indefinitely.  Luckily, Travis wasn't nearly as wiped out as I was so he managed to push through.

I've been meaning to take some pictures but I realized today why I've been foiled so many times. We installed CFLs in the bathroom as many people do nowadays. They take a little time to warm up to full brightness. But in addition, thanks to Title 24, we were required to install auto-off light switches in the bathroom. As I've been walking by, I switch the light on with an intention to come back in a few minutes once it's nice and bright to take pictures. The auto-off switch has been kindly turning them off after 5 minutes. Thus every time I've attempted it, the light has shut off by the time I come back and my memory has lost all traces of my intentions.

Today, I actually just stood around in the bathroom waiting for the lights to come up full to snap these.  It's a small space so the pictures are decidedly fish-eyed.

And some panoramas as well.

Tile Day When Is This Going to End?!

In real time, it's only day 5. But I'm living in weird, dilated remodel time where I'm nearing the point of losing all hope. I always hit something of a wall during these projects where I just think we're never going to finish. Travis claims he's not afflicted with this syndrome. Lucky for me, we're passed the tiling gauntlet.

We grouted this weekend. We picked up some fancy new pre-mixed, no-seal grout. What they didn't tell us was that it seems to be have been mixed with some kind of epoxy or other VOC-containing compound that off-gassed as we applied it to the wall. Not having to mix it saved us a lot of time but some of my brain cells may have been sacrificed in the process. All in all, it made for another somewhat delirious episode of home remodeling.

The grout really starts to change the appearance. It smooths out any waves in the wall from our failure to get the tile perfectly flat relative to each other. It also hides all the cut edges on the tiles we had to trim. If it looks hazy on close inspection that's because it is. After I sponged all the sand off the surface of the tile, the murky water left a haze as it dried. In the moment, scrubbing with even the cleanest water isn't really effective. For one thing, the grout is still damp and can easily be dislodged with any scrubbing. Secondly, the cleanest water dirties quickly and hauling gallons of water back and forth from the garage is a big pain. I didn't participate in grouting our last bathroom but Travis swore that the tile was similarly hazy and we could simply wait until the next day to scrub it. So, against every instinct to panic, I left it alone.

The next day, Travis used a little bit of Mr. Clean Magic Scrubber and a lot of elbow grease and, sure enough, no more haze.

You can see the difference the scrubbing has made. The top has been scrubbed and the bottom is still carrying the haze.

Travis scrubbed the tub clean too. It's all so shiny!

Look at that beautiful red glass! So worth it!

The grout really sets off the copper tiles. Despite what a PITA putting in this floor was, I am so happy with the results and pretty proud that we had the guts to run with this idea.

If this were all we did this weekend, I would already be pretty happy. But in other news, we ordered our elfa closet organizers and got them installed.

We ordered so much elfa we got entire shipping boxes of some items -- like these "decor drawer frames".

The office floor was our staging area.

Here's the master plan I drew up when planning out the shelving and figuring out what items we needed and how many. I have one of these for when we did my closet too.

Travis being a (reluctant) elfa model.

Travis is making up for not taking enough photos of me again.

I love organization. This just looks downright sexy to me.

I am very jealous of this closet. Look at all the pretty baskets and shoe racks. I could use those shoe racks. (I am using those shoe racks. I moved some of my shoes in already.)

The first items we loaded into the closet. Since we don't have a hall closet, this one is pulling double duty.

And there's more! As if grouting and closets weren't enough, we also got our countertop installed. The fabricator stopped by last weekend to make the template and came by Saturday morning to install it and the sink.

Squeeee! Look how pretty!

I love the big chunks of red glass. The picture can't nearly capture how pretty the glass looks. I might have to break out the proper camera.

I love that you can see the glass throughout the slab. The little profiles make the edges look really interesting.

Tile Days 3 & 4

It's a tile two-fer!

We finally got the reorder of tile mid-last week. To make up for the lost time, Travis and I decided to start in on the tiling Friday night after work. We worked on the simpler of the two remaining walls which didn't have any valves or obstacles to cut around. So after dinner last night, we got to it. Fueled by my Spotify playlists, it was 2 am before we finally got cleaned up enough for bed.

This morning, after we'd slept off some of last night and had our Peet's, we started in on the final wall. We have 3 shutoffs, 3 supply pipes, and a thermostatic valve to work around. The thermostatic valve was one of the easier items to work around since it at least had straight edges. The only tricky part was supporting the narrow tile edge above the valve box so it didn't sag as more tile was placed on top. I jerry-rigged a tower of tile spacers to do this job and we also took a break after tiling around the box to let the thinset set up.

The real fun came when we were tiling around the hand shower pipe and shutoff. The way the pattern worked out, these had to be cut out of the center of the tile instead of just being notched out of one edge. The escutcheons we have wouldn't be big enough to cover the lost tile if we took the cutout all the way to any edge.

Travis cooked up a strategy for cutting out a hole in the center of the tile. He used a masonry drill bit to put small holes around the perimeter of the cutout. This is an error prone strategy. Sometimes the tile just shatters from the repeated drilling. Sometimes, as in the following piece, he didn't keep enough pressure on the tip and it got away from him, scratching up the surface and effectively ruining the piece. Eventually, after about 7 tries, we got the 3 pieces of tile we needed with cutouts.

And finally, after a 10 hour day, our last wall has tile on it. We have NO more tile to install. Only grout, paint, baseboards, door trims ... you get the idea.

I think I can now definitively say that the Australian glass tile is so worth it!

"Are you still alive in there?"

Tile wasn't the only thing that we've been working on. In our "down time", we slipped in more work on the closet floors and I kept painting everything in sight. During the week, I took some time out to wood putty over the nail holes and the gaps in between the boards. Travis had to sand between each coat of wood putty and we did 3 total in the end. The floors looked like they had caught a bad case of measles after each coat of putty.

Once we were done with sanding, Travis carefully shop-vac-ed the floors and used a rag dipped in mineral spirits to clean the boards in preparation for the polyurethane. I slipped in to paint the inside-face of the pocket door. How you might ask? By trapping myself in the closet with a stepladder and my painting supplies of course. This is what prompted Travis to drop by every 30 minutes and ask if I was still alive. He was worried between the fumes from the mineral spirits and the paint, I might pass out. At least this time I had working lights and the option of cracking a window. I am so sick of painting doors already. I don't know what's worse -- the door thresholds or the doors themselves. At least I'm done with all the thresholds already and now have only 2 doors remaining.

Once I'd gotten a few coats of paint on the door, I started in on the polyurethane. You can see the sheen of the boards change as it's applied. The grain really stands out more. We didn't stain any of the boards in the rest of the house when we last refinished since we really liked the color of the raw wood. (For reference, these floor boards are red oak.) Applying polyurethane is actually very soothing and straightforward, not at all like painting doors. Now there's just 2 more coats of this gloss finish, a buffing round, and 1 coat of semi-gloss to finish off the floors.s

Tile Day 2

We got lucky and got in touch with the tile store this morning so have 2 more boxes of the wall tile on order. Travis wanted us to focus on the floor for fear of color variation in the next batch of wall tile. I think it will be negligible given it is glazed ceramic tile which generally has really low variation between batches. The color formulas are pretty stable given it's mass produced. Even Daltile's website says so. Other than color variation issue, we didn't have enough tile on hand to finish even one of the remaining walls, so I agreed to go with the floor instead.

We started by doing something we had skipped on the wall: plotting out the tiles. This wasn't so necessary on the wall since a rough calculation guaranteed we wouldn't end up with thin slivers of tile at one end of the row. Thus, we could take the easy option of just lining up full tiles in one corner and working towards the other, cutting the last tiles as needed.

On the floor, it's a whole other story. The floor had plenty of obstacles to work around: the vanity, the door threshold, and the toilet flange. In addition, we wouldn't be able to cut the little copper accent tiles. They were just ¾ x ¾ inch. Even if our tile saw could cut the copper sheeting cleanly, which I doubt, there just wasn't enough to hold onto to feed it through the saw. So we had to choose a positioning of the pieces to allow us to only use whole accent tiles, at least in the visible spots. So we busted out the speed square, tape measure, pencil, and ruler and started drafting some rough placements on the floor.

And we changed our mind when we realized that we were running too close to the tub with our initial placements.

We made a crucial, and in hindsight utterly enlightened, decision to dry fit the entire floor. As it turned out, we needed cuts everywhere. We only ended up with only 10 pieces of whole field tile. Everything else had to be cut. This part took a good 5 hours. See what I mean about our speed with the wall yesterday being completely due to the simpler pattern. I really do swear I won't do this windmill pattern again. Well, at least I won't attempt to do it myself again.

I also reaffirmed how I really have forgotten all my maths, especially the geometry bits. (I never did like geometry much.) I mis-measured about half the cuts and constantly got confused about how I was to even measure, not to mention the countless times I placed the little accent tile in the wrong corner. Of course Travis would only notice after I'd already measured a piece of tile and had him cut it. Luckily, we completely over-ordered on the floor tile so we could easily cover my mistakes. I'm sure measuring tile cuts sounds really simple and tile contractors and carpenters do this all the time. But I swear it's really hard when you're sitting there trying to attempt it. I've noticed this every time I've done flooring or any kind. Cutting around a door threshold is just not straightforward. The pros have an arsenal of shortcuts that have been passed by exampled. We've reverse-engineered some of them in the past but don't use these skills often enough to remember them between remodels. And on top of everything else, we both wanted to do this pattern on a diagonal so anything we did remember would require about half an hour of reasoning and discussion to decide whether they even held over to diagonal cuts.

About 8 pm, we finally had everything dry fit. I was possibly delirious with hunger because I had been making ever more egregious measuring errors and only found them to be incredibly funny. Travis's cold was starting to take over. (Have I mentioned he's been sick all weekend and I've been a complete slave driver project manager?) But I figured we were so close now we could just get this behind us tonight. So I pushed for us to grab a quick dinner and come back and set everything.

We had tested out the accent tile against the field tile and noticed the accent tile is only about half as thick. So we needed to do something to boost the height. After unsuccessfully trying to back-butter an accent piece (applying extra thinset to the back of a piece of tile), Travis suggested treating the thinset like frosting and pastry bagging it into place. This was nothing short of brilliant. This allowed me to fill the notch lines from the troweled thinset on the floor and then build up the height as needed. It also gave me the fine-grained control to do all of this neatly. Then I could just drop the accent tile into its spot and nudge it even with the pattern.

We wrapped up about 10:30 pm which is actually pretty speedy. I'm pretty happy with it so far. Let's hope the grout will go in nicely and clean up some of the larger gaps around the edges so we can hide the rest with baseboard.

Here's a closer shot of the pattern. Those little dots are our copper accent tiles. The inspiration for this pattern actually came from a hotel we stayed in earlier this year in Tahoe. The bathroom was basically this same pattern. Neither of us had seen such differently sized tiles used together and we were both taken with it. It is impressive that such a small addition spices up a boring beige so much. That was when we changed our minds from doing a traditional straight layout to this little monster.

Tile Day 1

We managed to get going on the tile about midday Saturday and honestly made pretty good progress in around 6 hours of work. I must credit most of that to having picked a much easier pattern to execute for the shower walls. Almost none of our speed can be attributed to our experience as we both found we had to rummage through the musty recesses of our brains to remember how to do this tile business. 

We started off by taping the edges of the tub with blue tape and butcher paper and laying the canvas drop cloth along the bottom. We were sure to make a big mess with the thin-set as always  I don't think we'll ever acquire the skill to not. When mixed up, thin-set has a consistency close to that of crystallized honey. It's sticky and gooey and highly viscous -- all in all, very difficult to work cleanly with.

Taking a break to check our progress and make sure we were keeping our rows straight and lining up the grout lines properly.

Just finished the glass tile rows. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for the night.

Our little stalker dog Pixie peeping on what we're doing from the hallway. She may also have been hungry at this point and was trying to get our attention so we would feed her.

We managed to finish this one wall over the tub today so you get an idea of the look I'm going for. We did a plain subway pattern with the "Elemental Tan" tile and then accented it with the priced-by-the-piece-not-the-square-foot, hand-made in Australia, "Red Planet" tile from Maniscalco. I realized that we also got the glass accents in the master bath from that same company. I must be having a subconscious love affair with their lines of glass tile. By the way, if you look closely, this is what 750 tile spacers looks like. It doesn't go nearly as far as you think it will.

And here's a close up of our fancy red tile. Now I think this was totally worth it. I'm not sure Travis feels as strongly yet but there's no turning back at this point. At least he doesn't hate it.

The bad news however is that my worst fears were confirmed -- I can no longer do maths and miscalculated the amount of wall tile we need. So let's hope the tile store is open today so we can go order 2 more boxes. I'm just praying we have enough to make an effort towards the wall with all the knobs and valves today. Otherwise, we'll just have to tackle the floor where I've once again outdone myself and chose a windmill pattern on the diagonal no less. Wish us luck.

Merry Christmas!

Hope everyone is having a safe and happy holiday season.

Lots of love from Travis, Shan, Remi, and Pixie.

Our fireplace is serving as the surrogate tree this year due to this. And of course I picked up stockings for the puppies and hung them with care.