Tile, Tile Everywhere

It seems that laying small tiles takes longer than laying big ones. At least that was the revelation that Laura had today while on day seven of the downstairs bathroom tile installation. Our previous tile projects involved only floor tiles that were much larger and far less complicated than what we are currently working on. We made good progress over the last two days on the subway tile walls, and it appears that there is one more day of tile installation and probably a full day of grouting to wrap up that room. We will have to get the door frame set and trimmed as well as the medicine cabinet installed before that happens, so we have a few steps to make before that can be a completed room. Super-friend Jill helped out on Saturday and Sunday with the tile extravaganza and sanding some of the existing molding to prep for paint. I was attempting to get as much dusty work wrapped up before the floor finishing starts and that was on the list. My Dad also came out on Saturday and he wrapped up the last of the floor infills in the kitchen and prepped a couple of the recovered door jambs for re-installation. He also helped me out in the upstairs shower with the first of the multi-step process of building the shower pan. We were able to get the first sloped lift of the dry pack in on Saturday and that is where it sits. Doug the carpenter also came by on Saturday and he installed the handrail to the upstairs so it is out of the living room for the floor guys.

At this point we won't be back in the house until next Sunday which means we have a week of packing up the other house, making a dump run, and building a new railing on the back stairway to the bungalow. It seems that cutting up the old railing to make a ramp to get to the dumpster means that the city inspector can require us to rebuild the entire thing to code. With plans in the near future of replacing the whole shee-bang we will be building it on the cheap. Not my style as many of you know, but I am going to try. We moved a bunch of tools to the garage with the intent to tackle this during the week. Hopefully the on again off again snow goes away that we have been having as that is truly unpleasant to work in.

Here is what has happened lately:

The stairwell handrail (on the far right) and two of the newel posts are installed and ready for the floors to wrap up.

The first step of the upstairs shower pan installation is complete.

Laura and I in the downstairs bathtub discussing the finer points of the wall tile installation.

The downstairs bathroom as it currently stands. The big wad of blue tape is holding in the ceramic soap dish.

Mind-Numbing Equity

There's no term for the "equity" that we put into our house this weekend. We made up a new one: Mind-Numbing Equity. Neither of us worked up much of a sweat but we did spend hours at the same tedious tasks. With the framing near complete, we had to open up the basement floor to allow a post to be set to support some flooring joists below the bathrooms. Justin did all of the work here save for marking the concrete with the location.

Here's our 1 foot deep hole for the post.

While he was at it, Justin busted out the last of the bricks from the chimney so he'd have it ready when it is time to pour concrete patches.

Here are the remnants of what I was doing while Justin shoveled out the basement: staples from the carpet pad installation. There are about 600 million of these in the wood floors and stairs and they all have to come out before the floor can be refinished. I pulled them all out of the stairs this weekend.

Our other big task this weekend was to deal with the flooring. We know that there are wood floors throughout the house. Most of the house is fir flooring except for the dining and living which is oak. The oak flooring is in questionable shape and to date, we've been operating under the idea that the oak needs to be replaced because it can't be sanded down and refinished. The thickness isn't there--maybe we have 1/4"-3/8" with which to work. The fir on the other hand is 3/4" tongue and groove and is in pretty good condition--nothing a good refinishing can't fix. There are several places that will need to be patched due to moving heat registers, a missing chimney and a few walls in new places. In the downstairs hallway, kitchen and a little spot upstairs there is (was) glue-down vinyl/linoleum flooring. In the hallway, the flooring came up beautifully once we applied the heat gun to it. You can see the photo below where it looks nearly brand new. In the kitchen and upstairs though, it's another story. The vinyl is really stuck. We bought some sanding/brushing attachments for the angle grinder to try and remove the glue and paper backing from the flooring. Our method works but it is slow going. We're not sure what we're going to do for the kitchen which is approximately 200 square feet and will take a lot of time.

Here's a photo of the hallway minus the glue-down flooring.

This is the little nook upstairs that we carved out from the former bathroom that is now part of the hallway and might become a little desk area in the future. The lighter patch of wood on the right is the area that we used the grinder on. This area is about 5 square feet and maybe took us a half hour to remove the glue.This is the kitchen floor, just a little corner that we scraped the top part of the vinyl flooring from. The white stuff left is the paper backing and there is a really tacky, gummy glue under that.