LIst update: The devil is in the details

And update on our list for you all:

·         Move bathroom to guest bathroom

·         Hang tarps and lay carpet protector down for demo

·         Buy bagster and other demo products

·         Cover vents to dust does not get everywhere

·         Remove medicine cabinet and other electrical fixtures

·         Remove light from wall

·         Remove mirror

·         Take out toilet

·         Take out bathroom vanity and sink

·         Rip up flooring

·         Remove door and frame

·         Remove fiberglass shower

·         Remove crown bolding (save for later)

·         Take out wall, cut half wall next to toilet

·         Call plumber to move plumbing for new shower and sink

·         Build new wall in bedroom (contractor)

·         Level flooring

·         Buy tile for floor and shower

·         Hang sheetrock

·         Hang hardy backer board for tile

·         Build shower pan (Contractor)

·         Move electrical outlets and lights

·         Lay floor tile

·         Lay shower tile

·         Grout and finish all tile

·         Paint walls (do a beadboard?)

·         Bagster pickup

·         Install new toilet

·         Install new lighting and fan

·         Install new vanity

·         Install new mirror

·         Rehang crown molding in bedroom

·         Install all new shower fixtures and faucet in sink

·         Finishing touches

·         Drink a beer (or bottle of wine depending on our mood)

 

 

This list just reminds me of how naive I was when I started this whole thing. There were SO MANY more steps to this project. But we will not complain. We are almost done!

We can see the light!

Here it is y'all! The latest updates in the bathroom! 

Parker and I have finished the grout and the baseboards and The room is definatly coming together. We installed the drain and sealed up all the corners in the shower so when the doors are put in it is water tight. 

 

I wanted you to have a side by side to see what the tile looked like with out grout. It makes a huge difference right!?

 

I think it came out pretty darnd good! What do you think?

 

You can also see I grouted the tile on the floor too. We used a grey grout and sealed all of it. So it should always be easy to clean and maintain. The tile, I remind you was only 99 CENTS a foot! WOOT. 

We painted all the baseboards and caulked them so they look all finished. I think it came out nice. The only area we are concerned about it this corner where the tile meets kinda funky. We will have to caulk it I think.

 

In addition we have put in the new bathroom vanity and our plumber will be installing the fixture to that this week. Things are really moving along if you ask me!

 

 

Parker will also finish the crown molding and we will show you pictures of how that came out at as well. I think you will like how it looks. We sure do!

 

There are whispers of guests heading our way this weekend, so I will have to update you on how all of this held up with five extra people hanging out!

No Dobt, We Grout!

I am a natural rapper of course.

In other news, we grouted the shower walls. And it came out great! I have yet to wash off and seal everything so I will show you the best part of the action shots.

 

 

As you can see the grout we used is white, and it was messy.

 Basically we just slopped the grout on the walls and pushed it in with a float.

 

 Here I am. This step is board and easy but super gratifying. It makes the shower look more finished. It was a great feeling.

 More pictures of the finished shower floor and bathroom floor to come soon!

 

Step 700 - Tile

Okay so now we are ready to tile.

We have had several issues come up with the tile situation and I want to cover some of them because I think they will help you all understand the feat that it is that we finished this all by ourselves.

First, houses are not built square. So our walls are not plumb. That is an issue when you are tiling a corner! Especially when tiling a corner with small tiles like our chose white subway tiles. Joy. Another challenge. By the way the tiles are from Lowes. $.22 a tile. Pretty good price and we got 5% off with our consumer credit card from there. So that made it cheaper than anywhere else in town.

So we first spent about 5 days laying out the tile on the walls. I bet you many of those DIY blogs don't tell you about that process. No matter what we did we ended up with weird cuts on the end of the walls and in the corner. I wont make your brain hurt with the math but let's just say it was not easy.

Here you can see we began to lay out the tile the way we wanted it. We taped up each tile in the section to see how it would look. Here is what we started with. This about when I realized that the niche, although nice was going to be a pain.

 So then we created a plumb line above where the rubber shower pan was behind the cement board and screwed in a board to hold up the tiles as we went. As you can see we are just getting started cutting and laying everything out. Looks good right? Parker was going at a good pace and this all took him about 5 hours or prep and work. I know. It is hard.

 Once we got started though we got moving. We mudded out the edges of the niche so the tiles would lay flat on the wall. This crated a slight bump on the wall that we are hoping will not be too noticeable in the long run. I guess we should have known how hard this niche was going to be, but oh well. We rolled with it.

 Here it is finished after two days of tiling. We still needed to do the bull nose edging on the tiles and top but I thought Parker did a pretty darned good job right?

We will have spacing that is slightly off in the corner but not by much. We just had to think outside the box and I think we did a good job mitigating any huge issues.

 Here is a close up of the tile with out the grout done. Looks beautiful right? Ohh La La! In case you are wondering we used little pieces of cardboard to prop up the tile when they are not lining up right. Works like a charm.

 So in the same weekend we tackled step one of the ceiling. We added bead board! I love it. It was super hard to cut and we are going to have to fudge a bit of the space around the light. Also caulk and cover the nail holes. But we love it. Plus Parker and I got to use a nail gun. So much fun.

 Love the wide shot. Right?

It's Been A While

We know it has been a while since we have posted on the blog. A lot has been going on. Let me give you a quick update and then we can get to the good stuff.

First off Parker has changed jobs. He no longer works at his horrible retail job! WOOT!!! We transitioned this whole month of April and it has been a big change for us. Luckily Parker found a job at a great company that we hope will give him a lot of chances to grow professionally.

Next, my car died. I know. With the bathroom and the job change you would think we had enough on our plates. Apparently not. So Parker and I had to rush around and buy a new car much sooner than we had thought. Although it is great I have a brand new beautiful car that I love it was a little much to take on. We are recovering though.

So I am sure you can understand the bathroom has had to take a back burner to life. It happens, and we are better off for it, but still, it would have been great to have this all stretched out a bit more over time. Not over three weeks. Let's just say a lot of the following drink was consumed to help with the stress:

Anyway we are getting back to it with lot's more changes to the bathroom to tell you about. First up tiling and then grouting and sealing. Then we install the ceiling and plumbing and fixtures.

It is all happening this week and weekend.

List Update - There was so much more to this than we thought

So this list I made when we started was just a scratch on the surface of all the word we were going to have to do. But we are moving forward. Check it out:

      Move Parker’s closet to guest bathroom

·         Move bathroom to guest bathroom

·         Hang tarps and lay carpet protector down for demo

·         Buy bagster and other demo products

·         Cover vents to dust does not get everywhere

·         Remove medicine cabinet and other electrical fixtures

·         Remove light from wall

·         Remove mirror

·         Take out toilet

·         Take out bathroom vanity and sink

·         Rip up flooring

·         Remove door and frame

·         Remove fiberglass shower

·         Remove crown bolding (save for later)

·         Take out wall, cut half wall next to toilet

·         Call plumber to move plumbing for new shower and sink

·         Build new wall in bedroom (contractor)

·         Level flooring

·         Buy tile for floor and shower

·         Hang sheetrock

·         Hang hardy backer board for tile

·         Build shower pan (Contractor)

·         Move electrical outlets and lights

·         Lay floor tile

·         Lay shower tile

·         Grout and finish all tile

·         Paint walls (do a beadboard?)

·         Bagster pickup

·         Install new toilet

·         Install new lighting and fan

·         Install new vanity

·         Install new mirror

·         Rehang crown molding in bedroom

·         Install all new shower fixtures and faucet in sink

·         Finishing touches

·         Drink a beer (or bottle of wine depending on our mood)

A Time Capsule (sort of)

Parker and I have been busy hanging sheetrock in our bathroom. And  honestly if I never see another piece of sheetrock in my life it will still be too soon. I am over the sheetrock. It crumbles, it is uneven and it gets dust everywhere. I am over it.

That being said, we have walls now! WOOT. I am not going to show them to you all yet because we are still finishing them out with patches and stuff. When we are ready you will be amazed.

Anyway, Parker and I thought we should put a little note in the walls for the next people who renovate the bathroom in our home. So he took some time to write up a cute note telling those people about us and we left a few pictures of us (Harry included) as well. We packed it all up in a plastic baggie and stuck in in the wall behind where the sink will go. We hope it will be found by people who love our home as much as we do. But not too soon obviously!


Here are some pictures of Parker putting the baggie behind the wall.

This also gives you a hint as to what the walls are looking like these days. Let me tell you, they might look good in pictures, but they look even more amazing in person! We are really excited to get moving on to the next phase!

Timelines are not really a thing for contractors...

 The last time we left you we were working with our contractors to get some of the basic framework done in the room. We have officially his the wall and are now trying to push through to the other side, back into productivity. The contractors, no matter house nice they were, took FOREVER to do thier work. To the point that Parker and I steped in and started framing out the wall ourselves. How is that for learning curve!?

Anyway here is what they did in the bathroom. First we had the contractor take out the framing beams in the ceiling so the ceiling would be flush the whole way through. Now we just have to patch it up. Then we had to have another two studs added to the attic so we could patch up the ceiling and also frame out the new wall. This was a giant pain in the butt and poor Parker spent a lot of time hanging out in the fiberglass insulation. And you all know how much we love fiberglass!

 Then we had the contractor frame out the new wall and hand the new door. here is the door and the framework. We actually learned a lot about the process and decided in the future (if we ever have to) we could totally do this our selves.

 Then we had him build our new 4 by 3 foot shower pan. It took him a while to get started and we ended up buying him the easy frame tools that you just bud in after setting them up. If we would have known he was going to go that route we may have just done this ourselves too. But we were glass to not have to lay on the floor for hours figuring this all out.

As you can see the shower pan came out great! We are finally starting to see things move along here. So last night Parker and I started to hang the cement board backer for the shower. Typically you hang the cement board and the sheet rock horizontally across the studs. But since the studs were exactly three feet and so was the width of the cement board we went vertical for one of the sides of the shower. I hope it works out ok. This stuff is super heavy and hard to hang. I do not want to have to undo it all.

Speaking of undoing it all, check out the other wall we finished last night. Looks great except we forgot we were putting an inset int he wall and have to cut the cement board to fit it. So I guess we are going to have to undo the backer board! UGH!!!!

Tonight our friend is coming over to help with the electrical, and then we are going to work on the cement board. We will show you an update when we have it!

Sticky situation and floor leveling = late night

Next up for the bathroom is to rip up, clean, seal and level the floors. Parker and I started on the floors the night before. We found it to be fairly easy to rip up the tiles that had not been walked on a lot. The stuff that had been tore into shreds and was a pain to get up. We eventually got it all up and there was this horrible sticky glue under it.

I had read you would need to scrape and wash the floors before doing anything else. So Parker on his day off to care of scraping everything up. I then got home and hand washed the floors with basic soap and water. Then we applied the primer. Here you can see I used a bucket and an old paintbrush to apply it. It looked like milk when it was wet. As it dried it became clear.

 It took much longer for it to dry than we thought so we had to stay up very late to get the next steps done. As you can see in the back left coroner of the picture below there is the shower and then the drain covered by a green bucket. Well there was a big hole in the slab of the house that our contractor asked us to fill in before he built the shower pan. So Parker and I got at it.

 Here is Parker filling in the hole. It was a pretty easy process. And the cement set in 40 minutes. Great stuff.

 So, here is the bathroom in the morning. We were super tired when we did the leveling of the floor so there are not many pictures of the process. Basically you lay this play dough  type stuff on the ground and spread it out and it fills in the holes where there may have been bolts and stuff in the foundation. It makes it much easier to lay tile later on. So we thought it was worth it. Mixing it was really hard but once we got it down it was easy to work with. I definitely think it is a two man job though.

Above is a picture of the floor, holes filled and leveled. We cant believe how much better it already looked! Little did we know our contractor and plumber were going to come in and rip it up the next night. More on that later though... UGH.


Here is an updated list for those who are keeping count!

·         Move Parker’s closet to guest bathroom

·         Move bathroom to guest bathroom

·         Hang tarps and lay carpet protector down for demo

·         Buy bagster and other demo products

·         Cover vents to dust does not get everywhere

·         Remove medicine cabinet and other electrical fixtures

·         Remove light from wall

·         Remove mirror

·         Take out toilet

·         Take out bathroom vanity and sink

·         Rip up flooring

·         Remove door and frame

·         Remove fiberglass shower

·         Remove crown bolding (save for later)

·         Take out wall, cut half wall next to toilet

·         Call plumber to move plumbing for new shower and sink

·         Build new wall in bedroom (contractor)

·         Level flooring

·         Buy tile for floor and shower

·         Hang sheetrock

·         Hang hardy backer board for tile

·         Build shower pan (Contractor)

·         Move electrical outlets and lights

·         Lay floor tile

·         Lay shower tile

·         Grout and finish all tile

·         Paint walls (do a beadboard?)

·         Bagster pickup

·         Install new toilet

·         Install new lighting and fan

·         Install new vanity

·         Install new mirror

·         Rehang crown molding in bedroom

·         Install all new shower fixtures and faucet in sink

·         Finishing touches

·         Drink a beer (or bottle of wine depending on our mood) 

Friends make everything better!

Here is where we kind of had left off from our last post. Demo chaos. We spent a lot of time cleaning and ripping out more drywall and cleaning more. On Sunday we did more of the same.

After a few more hours or demo on Sunday Parker and I got smart and lured our friends Pete and Corey over to the house to help us finish out the last bits of the walls and framing. Many of you dont know Corey but she is basically the same person as me. So when I inticed her with the promis of swinging a sledge hammer and using a power tool and food she was in! I gave her a wall and she made quick work of it, and I mean quick! 

It took her all of 15 minutes to take this baby down. Look at her go!Her husband Pete was loving using the power tools as well. The two of them, with thier fresh arms, took down the rest of the demo in a quick session of 30 minutes.

This is what the bathroom looked like the morning after they left. The floors are still down, but pretty much everything else has been taken out.

As you can see from this picture we had some old insulation in the walls behind the shower. Our contractor suggested we go ahead and replace it since we have the walls open and the insulation was pretty torn up. So Parker and I picked up some 15p fiberglass insulation from Lowes and got to it. This project has by far been the easiest part of the process. New insulation comes with tabs on the edges and is pre-cut so you can make it fin in abnormal sized stud spaces. It took all but 20 minutes to take out the old and put in the new. Here I am nailing up our new insulation behind where the shower will be.

After getting everything in the walls we are now ready to take out the ceiling framing beams and update the electrical wiring and do the floors. On to the next!

You all know I love a good list!

A list update for you all just to give you an idea as to where we are at:

·         Move Parker’s closet to guest bathroom

·         Move bathroom to guest bathroom

·         Hang tarps and lay carpet protector down for demo

·         Buy bagster and other demo products

·         Cover vents to dust does not get everywhere

·         Remove medicine cabinet and other electrical fixtures

·         Remove light from wall

·         Remove mirror

·         Take out toilet

·         Take out bathroom vanity and sink

·         Rip up flooring

·         Remove door and frame

·         Remove fiberglass shower

·         Remove crown bolding (save for later)

·         Take out wall, cut half wall next to toilet

·         Call plumber to move plumbing for new shower and sink

·         Build new wall in bedroom (contractor)

·         Level flooring

·         Buy tile for floor and shower

·         Hang sheetrock

·         Hang hardy backer board for tile

·         Build shower pan (Contractor)

·         Move electrical outlets and lights

·         Lay floor tile

·         Lay shower tile

·         Grout and finish all tile

·         Paint walls (do a beadboard?)

·         Bagster pickup

·         Install new toilet

·         Install new lighting and fan

·         Install new vanity

·         Install new mirror

·         Rehang crown molding in bedroom

·         Install all new shower fixtures and faucet in sink

·         Finishing touches

·         Drink a beer (or bottle of wine depending on our mood) 

So we have a lot left to do. But we have gotten a lot done as well. We are cleaning up from Demo tonight and posting some more pictures of that process tomorrow. Then we are off to work on the floor and start building everything back up!