Hello from Snowy Delaware

[Hello? Spring? Where are you?]

March 25th and snow? I've seen snow past March before in Virginia, but never enough to stick. This is a picture of Our Old Colonial, taken on my way back from the gym this morning at 7:30. This is the most snow we have seen all year [it is still snowing at 3:00 in the afternoon] and it is in March. It has warmed up enough so it isn't sticking anymore, but my goodness, what a sight!

I have no pictures of the bathroom for you. They'll be coming soon. We worked on plumbing the bathtub all weekend. One stinking joint just didn't want to seal, so we had to take it apart 3 times, clean it up and put it back together. Not to mention the numerous times we tried to just heat the thing back up and add more solder.

But, after all that work! We were able to shower upstairs for the first time in over 4 weeks! It was glorious!!!

Oh and the high tomorrow, is around 50 degrees! Bye bye snow!

The Shower That Was Not and Tiling tricks!

Well, remember last Friday when I said that we would be showering upstairs this morning. I should have known the instant I said that, the instructions on the grout drying time would morph from being 48 hours to a week! [of course they were always a week, I just thought they were 48 hours]. So, while we got most of what we wanted to done over the weekend, we are not showing upstairs until next week. Bummer.


[Putting up the subway tile]

The subway tile went up sort of as planned. It did go up on Saturday, however it went up on Saturday afternoon rather than Saturday morning. Saturday morning we spend SHOPPING.... no not fun shopping, Home Depot shopping [fun for some, not for me early on Saturday morning for approximately 2 hours].

Tiling itself, yet another not-so-fun activity. It took 6 hours from start to finish and that was with using a tile saw. I can only imagine how long it would have taken otherwise.


[Subway Tile, before grouting]

While tiling about 400 subway tiles is very tedious, I did learn a trick along the way that made the second 200 go much quicker.

My tile tip: apply the mortar using a spackle knife rather than the smooth side your toothed trowel. When I used the trowel, half of the grout wound up flopping onto the tub [very frustrating]. I had a lot more control with my 4 inch spackle knife, which made everything go much faster and cleaner!

My second tiling tip: This tiling tip is for those of you who are planning on getting your tub refinished. Tile before you get your tub refinished! This way you don't have to worry about getting grout and thinset all over your newly refinished tub and most of the clean up is left to your tub refinishing guy. [This tip came from our tub refinishing guy-who did an amazing job!]

Our tub refinishers came on Monday morning and got our tub looking all shiny and new.

It went from:

[Tub abuse]

To this:

[Can you hear the angels singing?]

I will leave you with one last photo of the bathroom:

[still a little finish work left, but looking so much better!

Oh the bathroom

The bathroom is coming along. Not as quickly as we had hoped. We foolishly thought the whole renovation would take about 2-3 weekends with some work during the week. Well this week we didn't get much done as we had hoped, I don't know about you guys out there, but this whole springing forward thing has really gotten to me.

I'm the type of person that does not like to get up a different times even on the weekend, let alone reschedule my entire week! So, I've been a zombie all week and the thought of working on the bathroom once I get home from work is not my idea of fun. That being said, we still have spent some time working up there throughout the week after working really hard all last weekend, just not as much as we had planned.


[Here I am shoveling tile out of the tub]

We were able to get the toilet and the sink re-installed last weekend after clearing out the rest of the tile, so we moved our bedroom back upstairs. I'm not sure if I mentioned that we had spent the last three weeks sleeping in our guest room on the first floor while the upstairs bath was out of commission. I felt homesick, even though we were just down stairs, I wasn't in my room and I didn't like it! Call me a baby if you must!

The drywall is up and I put on several coats of joint compound. It is ready to be sanded and painted [cross your fingers that gets done tonight]. The concrete board is up around the tub and ready to be tiled [cross your fingers that happens tomorrow morning].


[Toilet where it belongs]

And finally we have the somebody coming to refinish the tub bright and early on Monday morning! So, come Tuesday, we should be showering upstairs again in our shiny new bathroom. *fingers crossed* *knock on wood*

Other projects happening around the house might surprise you [I say this because they surprise me]. What surprises me the most is that there ARE other projects going on at the same time as a bathroom remodel and they aren't small! What happened was that I decided last Saturday that I wanted to knock down a non-structural wall in the unfinished basement and then semi-finish the two rooms into one large TV room. So, we did just that. We took a sledgehammer to the wall [that I never quite understood why existed in the first place] and the wall is no longer. We still have a lot of work to do to make it finished, but it already looks so much bigger! I'm very excited about it!


[The aftermath of the wall demo]

We're hoping to get some work done in the basement over the weekend too and finish this project up over the next few weekends! Hopefully before April, because our month of April is booked solid with events on nearly every weekend!

Hello!

Hi guys! I hope things are going well for everybody out there. 2013 is shaping out to be a bit rough for me, but I'm trying to stay positive. *squints eyes and whispers, "positive thoughts, positive thoughts"*

We continue to work on the house, but not with quite as much gusto as last spring until recently when we started work on the upstairs bath.

In an attempt to relieve some stress, I decided to start a battle with our upstairs bathroom. I declared war by taking a hammer to the dingy tile. Unfortunately, the 1. tile was extra thick, making it not as satisfying as had hoped, 2. there was about 3/4" of concrete between me and the studs and 3. as I would find out within the next 12 hours for certain, I was coming down with a cold and finding it hard to breath with all of the dust. Matt quickly took over and continued down the wall I had started to behind the toilet. Once reaching the toilet, he picked it up and moved it into the tub.


[Partly demolished tile wall]

I stayed away from the bathroom for the remainder of the evening and the following day. Fortunately, we have 2 bathrooms so while this one was out of commission we just moved our business downstairs.

All of this demolition took place on Sunday night. The next day we went to work like any normal day. However, coming home I was welcomed by something out of the norm.

When I walked into the kitchen I found that our Island had water splattered on it. At first I was curious *tilts head* what have those cats been up to? *switches on light* Wow, that is a lot of water.

Then there was the moment when a droplet of water fell from the sky, I looked up to see a bubble of water in the ceiling, and I realized just exactly where the water was coming from. It was coming from our bathroom! Which is located directly above our kitchen. I sprinted up the stairs (cold and all), noticed that the shut off valve had not quite done its job and was actually leaking water drip by drip onto the floor, which over the past 18 hours had been enough to leak onto the kitchen island.

I looked around at the tile covered bathroom and didn't know what to do. So I ran down to the basement to find the next shut off valve, which was conveniently located above above an are vent and very difficult to turn, I did manage to turn it just a bit just enough to create another leak in the basement, this one was much smaller and onto a concrete floor that I didn't care about, so I gave up on that and sprinted back upstairs (still sick mind you!). I decided that in order to stop the leak I would need to reinstall the toilet, which would involve me clearing the tile that was now surrounding the toilet drain, heaving a very heavy toilet from the tub over and over piles of concrete and tile back to where it belonged. I did this, while asking the toilet (not so politely) to cooperate with me and quickly the problem was temporarily solved.


[note the mess on the floor]

Then I went down stairs [in less of a rush, but still quickly] and tended to the ceiling. I grabbed an old towel, jumped up on the island, and held the towel against the bubble at which point it burst and a small flood of water came down. I pleaded with it to stop and it didn't, at least not right away.


[not to bad]

I have since allowed the ceiling to dry and started to spackle over the damage. With a couple coats of spakle and some paint it will look good as new, but my... what a way to start a week.

As my colleague said after I told her the story, "When it rains, it pours!"