Bathroom Update V

We have had a busy week. It seemed like the bathroom remodel was slow, slow, slow but then once all the plumbing and tile was in it flew by.

During the last update I shared that the plumbers were here. 

It took about 7 hours for the plumbers to move all the supply lines and hook up the new pressure valve for the shower.

The tile guys met the plumber here Monday morning to look at the position of the tub so they would know where to put the shower pan. It is all a tight fit and the whole thing made me nervous just like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. 

That is for my sister. ;)

Tuesday they added all the concrete backer board and built and poured the shower pan. 

Wednesday they tiled the shower

Thursday they tiled the floor.

Friday morning they grouted. 

The tile guy said it would take two weeks and it only took one.

As Bill said, "They under promised and over delivered."

It made me so happy!

Now it was our turn to crank it out.

Bill and I got to work as soon as we ate dinner Friday night.

He went to Home Depot for supplies. 

I covered up all the new tile and got up on the ladder and started scraping popcorn off of the ceiling. 

As soon as that was done I rolled on the new paint.

( I have no pictures of this because it was horrible and I was very crabby.)

I had paint issues this weekend. The first one was with the ceiling paint. I bought Valspar. It goes on pink and dries white. Well I have to say I didn't love the product at all. It was steaky and thin. I had to keep rolling on more and more coats. I should have gotten to Sherwin Williams.

The next morning I did all the cutting in of the ceiling paint. 

At this point I still thought I would keep the Sherwin Williams Stamped Concrete color. 

I love SW but I was a little frustrated that they discontinue colors and paints so often. I had Stamped Concrete for about 6 years. I needed to do some touch ups so Bill got me more paint. The new color didn't match the old color because they changed formulas and it looked a little greener instead of blue/gray. So in order to touch up, I had to repaint the whole wall. That is what I was doing the day I found the mold. 

I had two walls that were the old color and two walls that were the new color. I was trying not to get any paint on the two walls that were the old color but the ceiling paint was so thin that it dripped like crazy. Now I had to repaint the two walls that were the old Stamped Concrete. Since I didn't love the new Stamped Concrete I went to get new paint. 

Ay yi yi!

I finished painting the walls Saturday night. The new color is Gray Screen. It is a light blue/gray and very pretty.

(and I have a whole can of the same formula to do touch ups.) I chose this color because I wanted a light blue that reads grayer rather than baby blue. 

Sunday morning I got up and started painting the trim. 
White Duck by Sherwin Williams. 
It's what I have been using for my various paint projects.

It will be my new trim color throughout the house once I get motivated to start painting doors.

 Bill spent all weekend fixing sheetrock, cutting trim for the baseboards and making the surround for the tub.

His millwork on the new windowsills is amazing. We had water damage where the windows leaked.

He picked out the trim. I love it!
  Poor thing, he had to make several trips to Home Depot for the right supplies. He worked like a trooper and by Sunday night we were both exhausted. My legs ached from climbing and up and down that twelve foot ladder. 

The plumbers were here this morning installing all the faucets. :)

This afternoon the glass guy comes to measure for the shower surround.  

I will be fluffing and staging and then it will be time for the reveal!
Here is a sneak peak.

Katie
Linking with,
Savvy Southern Style   
From My Front Porch to Yours  
The Brambleberry Cottage   
French Country Cottage 

Bathroom Update III

Things are rolling along with the bathroom. 
This is what it looked like last summer. 

I prettied it up as much as I could but the tub was turning wacky colors.
  
Bill took a day off of work to do the majority of the demo. 
He smashed the cultured marble jetted tub into pieces and carried it out in contractor bags. 

We haven't used the thing in ages yet there was still water in the hoses. Yuck!
Next he demo-ed the shower.
As we suspected there was mold. 
It was primarily under the shelf 
but, it was also in the back left hand corner.

 Bill was not happy to see that the builder didn't bring the stud all the way to the sill plate. The wall moves if you push on it. 
The tile guy came to measure and to take a look at what construction will need to be done to rebuild the pan, fix the stud and repair the sill plates and then tile.  
He said that his part should only take about a week and a half.
He sent me back out to look at more tile samples. 
I need floor tile
 wall tile for the shower
 tile for the shower pan
bullnose edge tile 
and a boarder tile
I have picked all the tile except the tile for the shower pan. 

The next step was finding the vanity.
It was an ordeal.
We didn't want to keep our vanities because they are too narrow. Each section is only 24 inches wide. 
It doesn't have very functional storage and it is low. 
We want a more modern height hopefully with more drawers. Something that looks like furniture.

We searched and searched the internet. We were going to buy something from Seconds and Surplus, a local builder's supply outlet, but realized that getting a 67 inch vanity with a granite top and two sinks up the bend in the staircase would be impossible and these tops don't come off with out possibly cracking.

So I decided that we needed two vanities 30 inches wide. 
We can center them under the light fixtures.
We went back to the big box stores to look at their selection in person. 
I am glad we did. I wanted white. The white cabinets weren't true white, they weren't even off-white, they were cream.

Here.

The only one that was white had a Carrera Marble. Soaps, lotions and cleaners can etch the surface of Carrera. I don't want to have to nag my better half about chemicals on the bathroom counter. If the cabinet had been a regular shape I think we would have gotten two of these and replaced counters when they were worn out but these cabinets had an odd shape. The MDF was also chipping on the floor model.

I thought about getting a buffet and retro-fitting it for sinks. 

Typically they aren't deep enough.

We went to Home Depot and played with the ready made unfinished cabinets.

Here.
I actually really liked this option but Bill would have had to add feet and some other stuff to dress them up a little. 
It would have been about $350.00 for three cabinets. Very affordable but granite and sinks would have added to the cost. Again, Bill wasn't impressed with quality.
We looked at the custom cabinet options but felt they were expensive. 
Bill just kept pointing out that basically these are just boxes with doors. He could build them if he had time.  

                                          Traditional Bathroom Vanities And Sink Consoles by Other Metro Amazon

I went back to the surplus store in Dallas hoping to find something in a French style that I could paint. There was nothing with a white sink. I could live with a lot of things but I felt that the color of the sink had to match the color of the tub. I finally decided that I wasn't getting white vanities and could live without them. I will have plenty of white elsewhere. 

Instead we are getting these.

We weren't wild about the iron curlicues, but we feel we can change those out to something else. 

They have black granite and white sinks and I can always paint them gray later like our designer suggested. 

I don't know why I debated these. They have the cleaner lines we were going for and Bill liked them so much better than the other French Provincial vanities we saw.

Very cute, just not us.

I ordered them today and we can pick them up later in the week. 

I have a fairly light aesthetic in my living room and I love the pop of black from my entertainment unit. 

I think these vanities will give that same pop to my bathroom.

I will show you the tile selections in my next post.

My glammy tub is in and should be delivered as soon as the rest of the faucets come in. Once everything arrives the plumber will come to move drains and supply lines. 

Katie

Linking with,
Between Naps on the Porch  
My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia 
Savvy Southern Style

Trusting My Gut

 I think I may have mentioned when I did the post about the kid's vanity that we are doing a bath crash to the master bathroom. I found mold under some tile about a month ago.
We had a contractor come by and give us a bid. 
That process took a few weeks, but all it told us was that we really need to do most of this ourselves. It is hard to pay for a remodel of this magnitude when we have been DIYers for 30 years. We aren't used to paying for labor costs. It was a bit of shock to be faced with thousands of dollars for labor. In effect, Mr. Bill and I are too frugal (code for cheap) to pay to have it all done. We will let someone else tile the shower, install the plumbing and put in the shower surround, but the rest will be me. Bill will do what I can't. I will have a lot to blog about this summer. 

Anyway, I came home from work today ready to do some demo to the master bath. The plumber came last week and disconnected the gorgeous faucet on the faux marble tub. (Insert sarcastic face.) Tomorrow is trash day and I thought I could chip off enough tile to fill up a box. We very rarely put big stuff in the trash and they will usually take what I put out. 

I thought for sure the tub backsplash would almost pop right off in a big sheet. I was right. 

Now that I have updated you on the state of the master bath, I will get to the reason for this post. 

For years I have been dying to chip off the tile around the tub. All along I thought it would be an easy process. In fact my gut told me I could easily chip it off and put something with a little more sparkle. Something that would tie the old boring tile in with an updated tile for not a lot of money. 

I was pretty content with how the bath looked cosmetically. Oh it was 90's but at least it was white. My big beef was the discoloration to my tub. It was turning off white. I thought a tile that blended a little better and provided some glamour would do the trick.
I held back because Bill was resistant to the idea and I was a little afraid I might have to do some drywall repair. My instinct kept telling me, though, that it would be an easy update.  

Well today I found out how right my gut was. I used a small crow bar and a hammer and in about 30 minutes I had two sides completely finished. When they built the house they used a bullnosed tile. In order to create the bullnose they put another layer of sheet rock on the wall and tiled to it. 

That layer of sheet rock came off almost in one piece. If I had know there would be two layers, I would have pulled this off and enjoyed a bit more high-end tile around the tub.  

Oh well! I should have trusted my instinct and just gone with it one summer day when Bill was at work. I could have had it all done and cleaned up in one day. It would have been fun to see how long it took him to notice the change. ;) 

Here is what I found under the cultured marble tub. 

There does not appear to be mold growing under the wall of tile in the shower. It seems to be limited to the outside corner of the shower door and the corner under the tub. 

There was no mold under or near the tub.  

All this to say that my gut was kind of telling me this was a shower door problem. I got freaked out by the mold and I should have listened to my friend who said tear off the side panel of the tub and have a look. If we had done that, we could have seen the extent of the damage before we started throwing tile away. Bill may have said it was time for a new shower anyway, but we probably could have just gotten a new shower door. 

Don't you just love the construction debris? There was even a cigarette butt. I love that they were smoking in my house. I've never even let my family smoke in the house!

I will let you know what transpires.
Sprinkled with gut instinct,
Katie