Weekend Project

Sorry I forgot this picture in until half way through the post and I can't for the life of me figure out how to cut and past in blog land so it will just be out of place. This is our new addition for this project. I am cheap so the tool for the work I was in charge of was the cheapest one I could find - about $90. I did tile the kitchen/dining room, entry/hall, laundry room, master bath, and I think Dan's kitchen with the old saw - but I just wasn't going to do it anymore. We were going to rent a saw but Andy decided to buy one - without any complaints from me.

It is great it has a lazer and a moving tray - it easily switches to mitering - it has it's own table -and most important it doesn't spray gross tile chunked water all over me while I use it!!!

So we have remodeled most of our house but our last two bathrooms have been daunting to me. Mostly because I didn't want to rip out the tile. We had people from church help us rip out the master bathroom and it looked like an awful job. Besides I am not terribly fond of tiling.

When our adjacent room flooded and we had to rip things out in there we figured we might as well attack the bathroom too. Like all remodeling projects it hit a few snags but I guess we should expect that by now.

The wall tile came off great; we were even able to pull most of it off by pulling off the drywall that it was connected to. We did find some moldy drywall at the bottom of the wall that needed to be replaced. we were also going to put in a recessed medicine cabinet so we pulled off all the drywall on the sink side of the room. Snag #1 - we have a huge pipe running up the middle of the wall where the mirror should be. Liveable, but it sure would have been nice not to have to redrywall for no reason- oh well.

The floor tile was set on top of 1 inch of cement that all needed to be taken out. Andy had the aid of a jack hammer for this and did a pretty good job of getting the unwanted cement out while leaving the foudation. There were only a few gouges. I did have to go back with a floor scraper and smooth it all out - I'm so glad I didn't have to do the whole job that way!!! Snag #2 Andy broke part of the toilet flange out. Really this wasn't too big of a problem because it was set up too high and needed to be fixed anyway.

We got all the new drywall up by the end of last Saturday - which was my goal for the day. Snag #3 was that when Andy went to put the new ends on the old pipe it was too bent to work. He ended up taking his 6th or so trip to Home Depot for the day and capped the lines. The plan was to take the drywall back off and put in new pipe. So while we reached my goal we had to redo.

This meant I couldn't mud the cracks and paint during the week but we survived.

This weekend Andy fixed the pipes and reinstalled the drywall and we scraped the floor some more. He also put the new saw together which turned out to be major process and took nearly 2 hours to complete.

Then I got to do the tiling - fortunately Andy was a good sport and mixed my thinset and cleaned out the bucket and tools in the end. Snag #4 we left the bag of thinset out in a turrential downpour. Fortunately it was lined with a plastic bag so some of it was still useful, but Andy did get to take another trip to Home Depot to get some more.

I found something out this time when I tiled... When I haven't spent 5 days on my hands and knees using a hand razerblade scraper to get the linoleum and glued down paper off the ground, over abusing my knees and wrists and really just all of my tile position muscles before I even start tiling millions of square feet of tile, and I am not 6 or 7 months pregnant like I was tiling my shower and Dan & Miranda's kitchen... Tiling isn't really too bad; it sure is nice to look at my work when I'm done and be impressed with myself!!!

My goal for this week is to grout, mud, sand, prime and paint the room so that when Andy gets back from his trip to New York he can put the fixtures in and I can have a bathroom again!! I guess we'll see how well the kids cooperate with this plan=>.