Painting the Bathroom

These are cell phone pictures of what Boots was doing last weekend.

This weekend he's working and deer hunting. Probably no pictures of that. ;)

Stupid Bifolds

They're back!

Does anybody hate bifold doors as much as me?

Kitchen and Bathroom Floors!

As I promised Monday before last, I am finally back with an update to our kitchen and bathroom floor.

Check it out. 

  Wowza!  Every time I walk in there and turn on the light, I'm like, "Whoa!  I forgot you were here!"  Such a nice surprise for the absent-minded.

 The swag lights are still there, we haven't touched the ceiling or painted a lick on the walls yet.  We have no sink, there was a mix-up at Lowe's and it didn't get ordered when we originally ordered it.

*  Note to anyone that might order from Lowe's:  Pay for it!  They can't not order it if you throw money at them!  Even if they say you will pay for it when you pick it up, no!  Force them to take your money!  *

  Since that mistake, we have ordered the sink again and paid for it, it has arrived at the store but, the night we were supposed to pick it up was rainy and we didn't want to risk getting the cabinet wet so we're picking it up this afternoon after Boots' dentist appointment. 

  We do have a new, white throne btw.  Like The King, it does rock a little so we've got to pull it back up and reassess that situation to save ourselves any additional heartache down the road.  Apparently, a rocky toilet is indication of a possible party just waiting to happen.

  The tub is also white, after two coats of tub paint and four days of drying time.  The box recommended three, we gave it an extra day and still had problems.  It looks great from a distance but, up close it's not so pretty.  Bubbles and paint slippage and the like. 

  We tried the cheap route and it didn't work so I'm willing to pay somebody now.  We have an appointment with a professional who we hope will give us an estimate we can live with.  More on that later.

  Here are pictures Boots emailed me (I stayed at work the night he painted) of the painting the bathtub process.

  Not looking too hot, yet.

  This is after the second coat and it's looking much better.

  Moving on to the kitchen!

  Ignore the mess, just stare at the floor.

  I'm like a bug to the zapper, "Pretty......It's so pretty!"

  The kitchen comes alive with a floor!

  Check out the tops of the cabinets.  No more space!  This is how the tops of the cabinets were when we bought the house and although I'd never thought of doing that before, I liked it.  I'm not big on decorating or dusting so losing that space was no big deal to me.  In fact, closing all that in was a very big deal to me. 

  Here's a "Boots' Phone Photo" to show you what it looked like while he was still working out the "how is this going to work?" part.  Something involving crawling around the attic and lots of hammering. 

  Once he worked out the kinks the actual process went pretty fast.  Nail gun probably helped with that part. 

  Yay, Boots, for his creativity in getting 'er done!

  We bought everything from Lowe's.  The tile is Mesa Rust, we used gray-colored mortar, 1/4" spacers, the grout is mocha (I figured mistakes would be less noticeable with a grout nearly the same color as the tile), and we returned the grout sealer after getting a pro's opinion that it really doesn't work and is pointless unless you have light colored grout. 

  I just knew the haze remover was going to be a major player in getting the grout off the tiles but, I got tired of waiting the prescribed 72 hours and took a dry, clean towel and buffed it off.  Magic!  Cheap and fast too.  So the haze remover got returned as well.

  It was a happy accident how we matched up the vein in the two tiles above.  Sadly, they won't be seen very often because the refrigerator will go right on top of them.  Oh, well.  I'll know it's there. 

  See?  Right under the fridge.

  As far as the actual work of doing all this:

  Sunday night: I was on call, I stayed at work.  Boots painted the bathtub twice.  We met up at Lowe's for the last minute "we need this" scramble.

  Monday morning:  I left work and met Boots and my uncle at the house to get started.  They marked off the floor so we'd know where to start.  Mixed up the mortar, opened the first box and got started.  The first few tiles were a little nerve-wracking but, after we got settled into "this isn't so bad" we rocked right along.

  We rented a wet saw (life-saver!) from the local Ace and that was the best $35 we spent all week.  My uncle made all the cuts for us and we just laid it down until we took a break for lunch then came back and finished up the kitchen after eating.

  There was lots of grunting and sighing going on during the laying of the tiles.  Being 20 weeks pregnant and having a little extra in the middle makes all that getting up and down off the floor more difficult than you would think.  Or maybe you already thought of that and I didn't.

  This is my "Rachel's Getting Messy" outfit.  I like to wear it when I'm painting and such.

  Monday night we put up a little plywood fence to keep the critters off the floor and peeked over it every few minutes to admire our work.  I thought all the little orange spacers looked like little grave markers but, Boots said they were little orange Armageddon men.

  Tuesday morning:  I woke Boots up at 5 AM and we went to work demolishing the blue bathroom.

  (Boots said he'd been waiting two years to get rid of that blue toilet and blue sink.)  We started throwing stuff (toilet, sink, cabinet, wallpaper) out the front door at 6:05 AM and I was sure the cops would show up at any minute to write us a noise violation.  Luckily for us, our neighbors either didn't care or were sleeping soundly.  Boots laid the tile in the bathroom (too small a space for both of us to work) and I got busy grouting the kitchen with my uncle.  Let me just say this: grouting is no picnic.  I'd rather lay tile in the whole house than to grout.  Zero fun.  After lunch, we cleaned up and declared the project mostly done.  Boots and I took a break from working Tuesday afternoon/night and ate a pizza in the park for a nice change of scenery.

  Wednesday:  I buffed the kitchen floor with a dry, clean towel and was pretty proud of myself for being so ingenious and getting the haze off the tiles.  Boots put up the tops of the cabinets and we went to another dentist appointment.

  Thursday:  Boots mixed me up some grout and I grouted the bathroom floor and regrouted a few low spots in the kitchen.

  Later than night we took our inaugural shower in the painted tub and decided maybe we should hire somebody to do it professionally.

  I'm so glad this project is over.  It wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been but, I'm still glad it's over.  Having a floor is nice, very nice.  Now I can add "laying tile" to my resume.



Last Look

I hope these are the last few days our kitchen and bathroom look like this.

We (Boots mostly) have spent the last week getting our mojo back to attack the rest of fixing up this house and making numerous trips to Lowe's to buy supplies and things we'll need.

Boots has been painting, changing electric plugs and light switches out, wiring up new lights, hammering and nailing boards in the attic, stressing and scheming about how we're going to do this and that. He's a train- takes him a while to get rolling but, then he's hard to stop.

Monday, we'll (Boots, my uncle, and me) start laying the tile in the kitchen and bathroom.

At the end of the week, after the dust clears, I'll share "after" pictures. These are the "befores." I've found that we get more work done when I'm not trying to take pictures of every little step to document the process.

After walking on concrete for nearly a year and a half I'll be glad to have a real floor.

Please note that I did not clean any before taking these pictures. I wanted to preserve the horribleness that is the bathroom.

(Someone needs to learn how to white-balance their camera!)

Goodbye towel bar that we never use!

So long swag lights!

(Anybody want these? They're nice but, got to go!)

Here's to you getting replaced!

See ya, scraps of old linoleum!

Au revoir, blue toilet!

Can't wait to see you after your makeover!

We're planning to replace this blue tile with some other tile but, we haven't picked it out. That will probably be our next project.

Driveway Drama

  (The drama part comes from me, as in the thirty minutes I spent writing ONE paragraph to perfection only to delete it with the swipe of a fat finger!  The actual driveway process has gone pretty smoothly so far.  Proceed.)

  As evidenced by this super (not) awesome photo I took, our house has a one-car carport.  One car, not three cars plus a boat.  It doesn't take much to guess that this can be a little complicated since all four won't fit in one space and no matter how creative we line up on the driveway, somebody always has to move so somebody else can get out.  It just doesn't work. 

  So for nearly two years now we've been parking two vehicles outside the carport and one on the driveway outside the carport, but behind the boat (not pictured, it's in the backyard!)  This has worked fairly well, but it's a grass killer. 

  And see how close Boots' truck is parked to that flower bed on the passenger side?  There's a Hawthorne tree in that flower bed and that thing hurts!  I'm talking thorns big enough to make the thorniest rosebush green with envy if it wasn't already green.

  See, look!  Hawthorne is that big one as tall as the house.  It was waaaaay bigger and more humongous than this, but I've tried killing it (several times) by whacking all the limbs back as close as possible in hopes that it will just dry up and die.  No such luck.  If you want hardy and dangerous, Hawthorne is your man tree.

  After hem-hawing around for about 18 months, I've finally decided that it's time for Hawthorne to go.  So on the afternoon of a 100 degree day, Boots and I dug up and transplanted what flowers we did want (one rosebush, about fifty orange daylilies, and some things I don't even know) and ripped up what we didn't. 

  We're planning to cover this whole dirty area with crushed asphalt right on up to where the grass meets the concrete driveway.  There's just no point in having a flower bed that no one will see because a truck parks in front of it and these two bites of grass are more trouble than they're worth when it comes to dragging out the lawn mower and cutting them.  Neat and tidy from here on out is the game plan.

  (This might classify as a crime scene photo.  See the drag marks?)

  The flower bed was pretty much vamoose at this point other than that little swatch of ivy.

  And my pitiful garden (too much shade) may make itself useful now.

  I watered these suckers every day for three days and then I forgot.  Maybe they'll make it, but probably not.  I have a black thumb.  If they live, they may be moved again to another (better) location.

  So ends Day One of the Driveway Drama.

Day Two (four days later, still 100 degrees) was a bulldozer in our yard leveling off the driveway so it will be nice and smooth for the crushed asphalt.

  The driveway will come together in stages and include a big roller to help pack the crushed asphalt down tightly.  

You can't even tell there was once a flower bed there.  The bricks look so tidy now without all that junk  overgrown mess Hawthorne covering them up.  It should look pretty nice after we get it all done.