Tomorrow is Tile Tuesday

We are laying the tile on the floor and shower walls tomorrow. Who knew that the prep work would take so long and would be so much work?!

Here are a few of the things that my friend Leah and I have been doing the last few days:

1.) A trip to Lowe's to purchase all the supplies for tiling and preparing the walls and floor.

2.) We discovered that the demolition crew wasn't quite as finished as we thought, and that required several hours of us pounding and ripping drywall and removing nails from the upper shower area.

3.) We then had to start cutting and measuring the cement board, (AKA HardieBacker to the handy folks of the world!) This might SEEM like an easy step, but when you have an old house, measurements never seem to come out quite right. So there is lot's of measuring, cutting, hauling the piece of cement board back and forth between the bathroom and outside, and then re-measuring and re-cutting. Thankfully, that is done!

4.) Then all the seams had to be taped and sealed.

Here is Leah taping the seams. Oh yah, and we have a bath tub again! Just can't use it quite yet...the kids have been running around a bit stinkier than usual.



So pretty much Leah rocks and has some mad skills in the handy department. She will literally be saving us a couple thousand dollars with all the work she is helping me do. We will be heading to Home Depot at 7am tomorrow morning to rent a tile saw and we will be tiling until we finish. So it might be a really. long. day.

Of course, we have had lot's of other things going on besides our bathroom remodel. There was Christmas...hope everyone's was Merry! My Mom and Dad took Seth to a local outdoor mall to see live reindeer and other Christmas-y fun.


I will post Christmas pictures after we get this Tile Day over and done with. Must go to bed and rest up for a long day of manual labor :-)
I will leave you with a picture of my Caramel Pumpkin Cheesecake I made for Christmas dinner at my Mom's. I got the recipe from The Pioneer Woman's website, and it was quite tasty and not too shabby in the looks department either.

Tile - Chosen and Purchased

The plumbers are here and think they will be finished by the time they leave today.  Hooray! That means we can start right after Christmas on the portion of the remodel we are doing ourselves (with the help of our ultra-handy friend Leah!)

We went and searched for tile on Saturday.  I finally settled on this really neutral ceramic tile that has the appearance of travertine stone.  There are two reasons it is better for us to use ceramic tile rather than actual Travertine: 1) Travertine is porous and uneven in texture, therefore it is harder to sweep and mop because things get caught in the crevices.  2) Ceramic is much cheaper!

So here is the tile.  We are putting 18x18 squares on the floor and 12x12 tiles in the shower.  

This is the sidesplash of the granite that is on the countertop of the vanity. The granite is really warm, so I liked how this neutral tile brought out the tan tones in the granite.

We are also going to do a row of accent tile at eye level on the shower wall. It will be a row, two or three tiles high, of this 2x2 accent tile.

In other words, we will cut this sheet of small tiles into either 2 or 3 rows and lay them side by side in a line.

Here are some examples of what an accent row of tile looks like in a shower:

Fun Times with Father and Son

Steve and Seth using a head lamp to read "Go Dog, Go". 

Priceless.

I am finally over my Vanity issues

Thanks to everyone who chimed in on the bathroom vanity choices.  About 80% of you preferred the black cabinets, and I was going to go in that direction. And then...I had a wrench thrown in my plan!

Because I found a different vanity than any I had posted that day.

And I loved it.

And I bought it.

I decided that black is popular, but warm wood is more "me". Almost everything in my home is warm tones, and when I saw this one, I knew it was the one! It has clean, simple lines and I feel like it is a classic piece that will not go out of style. It was delivered yesterday, and it is beautiful! It came completely assembled, and it weighs over 400 pounds. Yowzer.

Now I just have to pick tile that will match it for the flooring and the shower. So many choices, and I am not known for my decisiveness!

Here is the shower faucet I picked out this morning. Things are moving along!

Full Throttle Re-Model

It is upon us.  The bathroom re-model that we have been 

anxiously anticipating for months.

There is no turning back.  Not when your bathroom looks like this:

Here was our starting point.  

Seth is taking us on a tour through Pepto Bismol Land.  

"And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have more pink tile!"

Yes, there was a whole lotta' pink in this bathroom.  Pink floor tile, pink wall tile, pink countertop tile.  There actually used to be pink and white striped wall paper going from the tile line to the ceiling, but we got rid of that pretty soon after we moved in.  My friend Amy really liked the pink tile in a "vintage" sort of way.  Sorry Amy, I didn't save any for you!

(Side Note**- Click on Amy's name and head over to her blog to see information about the book that her and her husband Josh wrote called "From Ashes to Africa".  It tells the story of the adoption of their son Silas from Ethiopia and it will be out in March. We are so excited for them and are eagerly anticipating our copy!)

This is our friend Danny:

He owns a landscaping business (Ponds and Lawns if you live in the Collin County area) and it was too cold to work outside yesterday.  So he brought two of his guys over and they demolished the heck out of our bathroom in less than 4 hours.

Here are some pictures of the process:

Bye, bye pink tile.  We shed no tears for you.

So this is what it looks like currently:

It is a bit unsettling that the underbelly of our house is now exposed to our cozy, warm dwelling space. It is cold, drafty and downright scary under there. I have to keep Seth and Caleb from getting into that bathroom. Because if one of them decides to go exploring and crawls under the house (Caleb), Mama's not so sure she is going to go in after him!