Ladies and Gents, We Have a Throne!

While these pictures may be underwhelming to the average viewer, it was a very exciting day to me when the toilet got installed upstairs...

My bladder has calmed down in the second trimester (it would have been really great during the first trimester not to have to trek downstairs to pee in the middle of the night lol) but I hear as baby gets bigger in the third trimester the bladder issues will return and I couldn't be happier to be able to walk the few steps across the hall to relieve myself!

It doesn't take much to make my day apparently! lol

We've made a little more progress in there that I'll post soon.  Until then here's what's next...

Up next on the To-Do list:

• Install the toilet
• Assemble and install the vanity
• Install the medicine cabinet/mirror
• Replace the window
• Add trim to the window
• Fill and paint the window trim
• Finish caulking the shower
• Install the shower fixtures
• Install the shower curtain rod
• Hang the door
• Install door trim
• Paint the door trim
• Install the fan
• Buy and install a light fixture

Paint

Seeing paint going up on plain drywall is such a satisfying feeling, it makes things feel so much more finished even if they really aren't.

If you remember how the old bathroom's paint was peeling because the wrong types of paint were used, or mixed together and mould spores were starting to grow...

Because of that, we chose to use Valspar's Ultra Kitchen and Bath no VOC paint in "Smoke Infusion" on the bottom of the chair rail and it matches up pretty well with the accent tiles in the shower too.  This was Darryl's pick out of the slew of swatches I picked out and I love it.  Above the chair rail is the same Valspar paint in a white.

In these pictures, only the grey has been painted, not the trim, chair rail or white part of the walls.  They are all done now but I guess I didn't take a picture of it.


Darryl put on 3 coats of paint on the walls and added an extra coat on the shower ceiling area where more steam will be concentrated.




Up next on the To-Do list:

• Install the toilet
• Assemble and install the vanity
• Install the medicine cabinet/mirror
• Replace the window
• Add trim to the window
• Fill and paint the window trim
• Install the shower fixtures
• Install the shower curtain rod
• Hang the door
• Install door trim
• Paint the door trim
• Install the fan
• Buy and install a light fixture

And I think that's it.  So there's still lots to do, but in my eyes, they're all more fun and exciting finishing touches that I far prefer to the demo, dust and reconstruction phase.


*We made some more progress this weekend which I will post this week*

While I've Been Gone...

Through the lack of posts on here (partially due to the fact that we are far from the world's fastest renovators and have just had nothing interesting to post about and also partially due to a lack of inspiration/motivation that I've mentioned before), I've finally found some new inspiration...

Mhmm, that's right!!!  This was the picture we used to tell many of our family and friends that we are expecting.  We put it on the third page of a photo album and had people look through some pics until they stumbled upon this one (which many of them passed by without reading it lol and others were searching the reflections of the wall art for a third person hiding somewhere haha) It was a fun way to share some very exciting news.  So over the last 5 months while Darryl's been working hard on the bathroom, I've been working hard on growing a human life.  Amazing!

Help??

If anyone out there can help me out, I have no clue how to fix my blog...I opened it a couple days ago and all of the little side bars, including my "what I like to read" blog roll and past blog posts, have all been relocated to the very bottom of the page, and I can't click on any of them as links either.


I've been getting a lot of "anonymous comments" on recent posts that are clearly spam and never seem to show on my blog but always show up in my email alerts so I don't know if that has something to do with it or what.


Any ideas????  If so, please email me at little (dot) orphan (dot) aggie (at) hotmail (dot) com

Shower Tile

Gosh this tiling job took forever, and poor Darryl was about ready to rip his hair out when it was done.

(We never claimed to be the neatest renovators :S)

It looks much better now that it's all grouted and cleaned up a bit (which it obviously isn't in these pics lol).  We're still not showering in it just yet (9 months into this reno now), but I feel it's coming soon! 


There's another update or two beyond this point that I'll post soon.  The end is finally in sight!!

Cement Board, Drywall and a Tub!

Ok I drafted this post almost half a year ago and then lost the motivation to post it...shame lol.  Here's how it started out:


"Happy New Year!

We're coming to the end of our Christmas holidays and I'll be going back to work on Monday.  During our time off we've made some progress in the bathroom which is exciting. As I'm sure you can tell from the title of this post, we...and by we, I mean "D"...got the drywall, cement board and tub installed! (There was other, very important, but less interesting, work done over the holidays as well, including some electrical and plumbing work).

 

A look at what the view from the hallway looked like a while ago...

 

And where we're at now... (or, where we were back in January)

 

We have that one piece of drywall to the left of the picture where the light switches are to put up, but need to frame the door in first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cardboard is still in there because we'll be mudding and thin-setting soon and, although there is a plastic covering on the tub, that's not strong enough to protect from falling screws or harder objects (as we've learned), so that'll stay in until pretty much the end.

 

 

So we hope to get the door framed in and that last piece of drywall done shortly so that we can get to mudding and tiling eventually.  I've given up giving ourselves timelines because life always seems to have a way of changing things up and this way it's less of a feeling of let down lol.  Darryl will be starting a very important internship this week (back in January) and will be doing some shift work so we're not sure how that will get in the way yet".

So that was what I had written over 5 months ago.  Luckily there is more progress than what you see in the above pictures and I will try to be good about posting those sooner rather than later.  Even though I haven't been posting anything, I still read my blog roll list regularly and a common theme I was reading about earlier on this year was a lack of motivation or inspiration to post and I guess I wasn't alone in that.

I'm hoping with the start of good weather I'll be more motivated to keep on top of things as we still have A.LOT to get done upstairs.

Any renos you're working on?  Taking longer than you expected?  Upcoming projects?



Framing and Insulation

Well things are still slow going over here.  Scratch that.  Things are no-going.  But that's ok, we hope to get back on track in about a month or so once Darryl's done his semester at school and I have some time off from work.  In the mean time, there was a little bit more that we got done this summer before school started up again.

 

 

 

Darryl put some foam baffles in the attic for ventilation to channel cold and hot air to the roof vents before putting the insulation in.

 

 

 You can also see the fan partly installed under Darryl too, which is fantastic and should prevent any mould from forming like it did before.

 

 

This was one of those things we didn't take into consideration and ended up pushing back the more exciting things I was hoping to get done, like drywall and tiling and installing fixtures.  But it's obviously something that is needed and will help us in the long run.

 

 

Then Darryl got some framing up - that was an exciting visual change for me!

 

And this is the view from in the bedroom, looking into the washroom.

 

 

Then came some insulation.  Another big visual change that excited me - another step closer to making it look more like a livable room again!

 

 

Hopefully these rooms will be a bit toastier in the winter and cooler in the summer months now, and our energy bills will be a teeny bit lighter.

 

 

Not the most exciting or visually stimulating post, but definitely exciting for me as the rooms start to look a little less like construction zones!

 

We did get just a teeny bit more done in August before school started up, so I'll share those pictures as well.  And dream of getting back to the hard work and progress in a few weeks.