One Room Challenge - Week Four

I don't even want to talk about the lack of progress being made. I managed to cut out the hole in the vanity top for the sink, but that was about it. 

One Room Challenge - Week Three

Well, week 3 was pretty much a bust. We were out of town for 5 days for Easter, so I really didn't get much done. Last week I discovered that some of the toilet plumbing was not to code, so I have to take out a large section of pipe. Don't you love it when you have to redo the work you paid someone else to do? I brought the toilet upstairs last week thinking that I only had to set the toilet flange before I could install it. Yeah, right, like it could ever go so smoothly. I guess this isn't called a challenge for nothing.

While I fumed about the plumbing I have to cut out and redo, I re-set the bathtub, which involved more fiddling with the plumbing. I'm tired of plumbing.

I've been stripping paint off the doors with a heat gun. It's one of those things you can put down at a moment's notice, so I'll keep chipping away (pun intended) at it whenever I have a free minute. The doors are so pretty under that paint that I don't know if I'll want to paint them again.

Otherwise, not much got accomplished. I'm very close to calling it quits on the challenge, but I'm going to see how much I can get done. I know it still won't be finished by then, but I will keep on trucking.

One Room Challenge - Week Two

This week I prepped for vanity installation - installed shutoff valves, cut out plumbing access in the back of the dresser, and cut a hole in the top for the sink. Before I could screw the vanity into place, I needed to install the baseboard. I used the baseboard we salvaged from the classroom near Cincinnati, but I had to strip it of several layers of paint first. The wood was pretty but not so pretty that I felt guilty for painting it. I made and installed the plinth blocks for the doors. I wanted to get to the door trim, but making plinth blocks and stripping paint ate up a lot of work time this week (plus we were out of town over the weekend). Installing the plinths had to come before the baseboard, but the rest of the door trim can wait a bit longer.

That's it for week 2! 

One Room Challenge - Week One

The bathroom floor is done! And it didn't take 2 years to get it grouted! I used Mapei's Silver grout with the hex tiles. I would have been happy to go a tad darker, but a darker color would have drawn too much attention to my less-than-perfect tile installation. 

Grouting the floor was holding up the rest of the bathroom; the toilet, vanity/sink, and door trim all depended on its completion. I also grouted the walls adjacent to the (eventual) toilet, since that will be difficult to reach once the commode is installed. Grouting is a long - though not difficult - process, so that's it for week one!

One Room Challenge

One of the blogs I follow, My Notting Hill, is participating in a One Room Challenge. Twenty bloggers each pick one room in their homes to transform over the course of six weeks. I thought I'd play along to give myself some motivation to push through the bathroom renovation and finally get something done. So here's what I'm starting with:

This is currently what you see from the hallway. It's where the vanity will go. 

 This is opposite the vanity. I think I will be installing Ikea cabinets here, or perhaps a piece of furniture like a buffet or console.

This is the shower side.

This is the toilet side, though clearly lacking a toilet.

I'll try and update every Sunday on the progress I made the previous week. A lot of the work that needs to be done is obvious, like finishing the tile and installing a toilet and sink. But there is a bit of decorator-y kind of stuff I want to get done, too. We'll see how far I get in 6 weeks!

Once upon a(n embarrassingly long) time ago, I started tiling the floor of our hall bathroom. Two years later, it still sat undone, yet ridiculously close to completion. I only had a small area just inside the doorway left to do, which required a few cuts.

I don't know why I found cutting the mosaics so intimidating, but it was enough of a problem for me to stall out on this project for two years. I ended up just popping the tiles off the sheets and holding each individual tile in my hand (you could use pliers if you're into "safety" or whatever) and grinding it against the side of the spinning saw blade. The cuts aren't perfect, but they'll do. I only had about 20 tiles that needed to be cut, so it didn't take too long. 

Now that the floor is laid and cleaned up, I can grout! Hopefully it'll get done faster than the tiling did.

*As a small defense, tiling is not something you can do for 5 minutes here or there when you've got a small break. With mortar, you've got to have a block of time to devote to tiling, and that just doesn't happen. Ever.