Thankfully we had inspiration from my sister.  She had just recently moved into a new house and was going to be doing some redoing.  This got the wheels turning in my wife’s head.  We knew that we didn’t have enough money to do something like the kitchen so she turned her attention to the front bedroom.  We had already been going through a purge of sorts, getting rid of all the “stuff” in our house that we don’t need or use and this room was on the chopping block.

So on a Thursday evening we decided to paint the room and most of the furniture in it and get a new smaller desk.  It’s a good thing we had a long weekend ahead of us ‘cause we would be needing it.  Thursday night we unpacked the room.  It’s amazing how much stuff was in there.

We spent Memorial Day weekend priming, paining, and putting together a new desk.  The result?  A room that is very usable and soothing to boot.  What is better than cool tones of grey on the wall and being surrounded by books?  I love it.

The next step was to find some chairs, lamps, and a few flat surfaces to set some things on.  We found an end table and bookseller bookshelf at Pier 1 to add to the room and my mother-in-law was kind enough to donate a couple chairs to the room.  On top of that we picked up a Keurig coffee maker so that we could have a nice cup of coffee with our books.

So what do you think of our library?  I love this room!  The difference is amazing and it is wonderful to have another usable and very functional room in the house.  A library.

Before I get started I just want to say that this would not have been possible if not for my dad.  It would have taken me much longer which would have only been a TINY inconvenience since, as I mentioned, my house only has one bathroom.  Thanks dad!  Pictures will be included along the way to show progress and then some random ones will be at the bottom.  Enjoy!

Friday (12 hours)

Friday was tear out and prep day.  My goal was to be able to lay tile on Saturday morning.  Getting there would take a lot of work.  I started at noon tearing out the old fiberglass shower insert.  I don’t know why but ripping stuff up is fun.  Pummeling something with a saw and hammer is very therapeutic.  I needed to be through by 2:30 so that the plumber could set the new tub.  I got through quicker than I thought I would thanks to a little handheld saw my dad let me borrow.  I had enough time to get the toilet pulled and the area swept before the plumber got there.  A good start.

The plumber got there and went to work on getting the new shower fixture installed.  Lots of intricate pipework.  This actually took a bit more time than I thought it would.  When he was done with this we got the tub out of the box and worked to set it in there.  I think that tub needed to lose a little weight.  It was a very tight squeeze getting it in and leveled.  It took some tilting and demolition but we got the tub in there.  By the time the plumber was gone it was about 6:30 and we still had a lot to do.

Next on the list was getting the Hardibacker up on the wall.  This is the stuff that keeps water and mildew out of the walls.  This went quickly enough and while I was finishing up my dad started on getting the old floors up.  Little did we know the pain this would be.

First we had to get the sink cabinet out since it was on top of the floor.  Just so you know the floor consisted of vinyl tile on top of ¾” plywood which was nailed to the subfloor.  It did not want to come up easily.  What we ended up doing was using a skill saw to section it up so we could take up smaller chunks at a time.  Thankfully, this worked and we got the floor up (mostly).  There was a place that they had built a cabinet on top of the plywood which made it very difficult to get up.  Time a pressure took care of this.

Old tub out, new tub in, hardibacker up, floor up.  Now we had to lathe and mortar the floor.  We have a peer and beam house which can cause problems for tile floors.  As the house moves the tile or grout joints can break.  To fix this you have to create a subfloor that can give a little as the house moves.  Lathing and mortaring does exactly this.  You staple lathe to the floor and then use a thinset material to cover the lathe.  By the time we were through with this it was midnight but all of the prep work was done and we were ready to lay tile the next morning.

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Saturday (13 hours)

After the long night we had on Friday, we slept in a bit and got over there around 10:30 am.  We made sure everything was mostly clean and then got after the shower.  We started by putting the insert thing in the wall (I can’t think of what it’s called right now) then we started planning the layout of the tile.  If my dad had not been there this would have taken me hours.

There isn’t much else to say except “then we put the tile up”.  It was much more complicated than it sounds.  I promise.  Trust me.  No really, it was.  We didn’t finish this until late in the evening.

Then came the floor tile.  It was getting late and I was worried we weren’t going to get where I wanted to be by the end of the day.  (I wanted to have all of the tile laid and ready to grout on Sunday)  We went ahead and got the lay out done and the first few tiles cut and laid so we would have something to work with in the morning.  We left the house around 11 pm.

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Sunday (10 hours)

I got to the house around 10 am to get started.  The plan was that I would go ahead and make all of the cuts that we needed to finish laying the floor done by the time my dad got home from church.  It didn’t start well.  I botched the first few cuts I made which didn’t help my mood any.  I decided to start with some of the easier cuts first and things sped up from there.  By the time I was finished with those, the harder cuts came easier.  When my dad got there I had finished all of the cuts but one.

Then we laid the tile.  Again, harder than it sounds.  Really.  We finished laying the tile by mid afternoon.  Let the grouting commence.  We started with the tub while the rest of the floor dried.  If you have never grouted before, it is one of the dirtiest jobs you can do.  It is like you are smearing mud all over everything, on purpose.  The mud-slopping was finished pretty quickly and we washed it all down.

Next came setting the new toilet and getting the sink cabinet back in there and hooked up.  This went quickly.  We were done by about 8 pm.  I finished what I wanted to in a weekend.

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Monday

This was finishing touches day.  The plumber came back out to finish putting the fixtures on the now-tiled shower.  We had to replace a couple of the cut tiles in the shower around one of the fixtures.  There was a gaping hole.  We put those in and regrouted them and then began to clean stuff up. Lacey got home late from her trip to find a brand new bathroom awaiting her.  I think she liked it, a lot.

The only things the bathroom lacks is baseboard and a little touch up grout.  The last clean up item is to haul off the pile of garbage that is sitting by my back door.

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So there you are.  A bathroom in a weekend.   And a very happy wife.  There isn’t much else a man could ask for.

Brian

Brian

Next we started building and fitting the mantle to the wall.

Next came the staining and finishing process.  This is what took up most of last week as we had to wait for things to dry to put on second coats.

Finally, after many weeks of waiting the people doing the fireplace insert came out and did their thing.  We also installed the finished mantle.  This picture shows the fireplace completed!  We still have some work to do to the wall above the fireplace but we are very pleased with how this part turned out.

At this point I need to thank my dad for making this project possible.  Without his help this would not have happened. So, thanks dad!  I really appreciate you.

Pretty, isn’t it?  With this completed and since we weren’t going to do anything to the living room floors for a while we decided that we would go ahead and finish putting together our entertainment system that we bought back in July.

There are still many more things we want to do to our house but for now we will sit back and be content with what we have done…..for a while.

Brian

Just another quick fireplace update.  There will probably be several of these in the next week.  We put up the tile on the front of the fireplace this evening.  And yes, that is duct tape.  The two pieces in the top middle needed some support.  Nice, huh?  Anyway, the next step is grouting the tile and then we will be on to the mantle.  I am hoping to have the mantle done this week end.  That’s it for now.  Pretty isn’t it?  Let me know what you think.

Oh, and just for grins, here is a little doodle I did that will give you an idea of what it will look like when completed.  Yes, I used Crayons.

Brian

There have been too few of these updates on what is going on with our renovation projects.  That is a direct result of the speed at which these projects are going.  Very slow.  But there is progress nonetheless and we should be seeing the progress speed up.

As you can see from the picture above most of the white paint that covered our fireplace has been scrapped off and some tile has been laid around the base of it.  We will be putting tile up on the face of the fire place very soon and then comes the mantle and posts followed closely with the fire place insert.  At the earliest this project will be finished up around October 7th.  We have had quiet a few delays but things are going relatively smoothly again.  Yay!  I will have more updates soon.

Brian

• Fireplace Insert.  Originally we were going to re-brick the fireplace but it seems more economical to put in a fireplace insert.  This will avoid the cost of re-bricking and it will provide an alternate way to heat our house in the winter.
• Floors.  Ripping out the entertainment center has left a place on the floor with no carpet.  I don’t think we could find a piece to patch it so we are thinking of replacing the floors throughout the living room, dining room, and kitchen so that it all matches (and is put down correctly).  At first we were thinking of putting down a good laminate wood but now we are considering refinishing the wood floors that are under the current floor if they are in good condition.
• Rugs.  This goes along with the floors.  If we have hard floors throughout we want some rugs to break it up.
• Entertainment Center.  We tore down the old one so we needed a new one.  It is still mostly put together.
• Blinds.  After moving the TV to another wall in the living room we are finding that the current blinds let in a little too much light and cause a glare on the TV.  Not to mention they are old and breaking.  We want to get some plantation style blinds to replace them.
• ?????.  Throw in any other type of random remodel and you could add it to this list.

So apparently fixing a fireplace has a domino effect to it.  As I mentioned before it has been a while since I updated you on this project and guess what, nothing is totally done yet!  Everything is hinging on what the fireplace people tell us and we have had some trouble getting them to come out.  Well they finally did so we should know something soon.  When that soon comes I will let you know what happens.  Maybe when something changes I will get some more pictures up.

So to summarize, we are in the same place we were before just with more projects and a little more information.

Brian

Our house has a fireplace.  It has actually always had a fireplace but it has been covered up by an entertainment center that the people who lived there before us built.  We have now ripped said entertainment center off to reveal a fireplace that needs some work.  We were aware before getting into the project.  Here is the sad part.  We tore the entertainment center down on Monday, hoping to get the people from the Fire Escape out there to give us an estimate sometime this week.  Well, they won’t be able to come out until August 18th.  This means that we won’t be able to put the floor down until then also as we don’t know what all redoing the fireplace will entail.  I suppose I can be patient until then.

The fireplace isn’t the only thing being redone.  In the process we will be replacing some of the floors and putting up a new entertainment center (that was bought from IKEA!).  Since the entertainment center is moving I had to relocate some wires (cable and speaker) which meant that I spent Monday evening in the attic.  Yes, this was the day that it got up to 107 degrees outside.  I don’t want to guess what it was in that attic.

So all we have to do is wait until the 18th of August.  Hopefully after the estimate they will be able to get right to it.  I will try to keep pictures posted so that you can view the progress.  I am excited to get this done!

Oh, and here is a picture of our new entertainment center 70% put together.

Brian

On another note, some of you may know that I enjoy writing.  Weird, I know, an accountant that likes to write, but I do.  I have really enjoyed writing here on my website but I have always wanted, deep down inside, to write stories.  I have developed several ideas over the past few years but have never known how to get them into story form.  They have just sat as notes in a Word document to be updated every now and then.  I have been doing some research on how to write and one of the suggestions I heard was to just sit down and do it not worrying about exactly how it comes out.  You can always revise later.  Just sit and write, or as the person I heard it from said it, butt in chair, hands on keyboard (BICHOC).  This is so simple right?  Well their advice coupled with talking to one of my friends about his writing and I am about to finish the prologue to one of my stories.  I never thought I would actually have any of this story written. I figured that they would just stay in my head forever.  Well, that’s not going to happen now.  I don’t know how long it will take me to finish this or if it will even get published (that’s a laugh at this point) but I am on my way.  I have officially begun one of my long-term goals.  And with that I will take my bow and leave you to wonder what it is about.

Brian

The next step was planting the plants as seen next.

So here we are with all of our nice and very little plants at the end of May.  The squares you see that have nothing in them are lying to you.  (The beans are hiding there)  Now our responsibility was to water.  And so we did.

As you can see above the bean plants are finally coming out!  This happened practically overnight.  We were getting worried that our bean plants might not even sprout but after about a week they came up all at once.  I came home for lunch and a few had started coming up.  I watered them and by the time I came home there were about double of them.  Amazing!  This last picture is the most recent one (as of a few days ago) and you can really see a difference.  The thing that has astonished us the most was the cantelope plant (it is at the top in the picture above). It had stayed about the same size up until about a week ago.  Look in the picture below (top right hand side on this one and you will see how big it has gotten in about a week.

As you can see we have gotten smarter as we go.  The soaker hose makes it much easier to water.  All the beans are growing up and we are expecting some real vegetables soon.  We have already harvested one jalapeno.  One of our bell peppers that was starting to grow got blown off in a storm we had a few nights ago.  Sad.

So there you have it.  Our first garden.  I will keep you updated on how it goes.

Brian