Blitz day 2

We hit the ground running early today. Another quick trip to the permit office to clear up a couple of issues. Then a friend of ours came over to help me hang some doors and knock out another bedroom of flooring. There was also a trip to the paint store to pick out a master bath color. Looks like green is going to be the winner. If you ignore the mess the house is looking good!

Weekend blitz and 1 year anniversary

I took an extra long weekend since we have off for Presidents day. With 5 solid days of work ahead we should make some good progress. We're hoping to knock out a good portion of the master bathroom and get both of the other bedrooms floored.

Today is also our 1 year anniversary of starting construction! One year ago today we kicked this project off by knocking down the old porch. Neither of us thought we would be as far as we are in the construction process so hopefully by next year we will be finished!

Newest Toy

We ran into a slight problem yesterday when I started cutting our 12 x 24 tiles and slid the tile through the saw and...stopped.  The arm on the old tile saw blocked the tile when we were cutting them in half.  We'd been debating replacing the tile saw anyway since the old one was, well, old and something of a starter model.  You can see it in the first picture and it's just a little bit undersized generally.  We bought it back when I still had my old townhouse and we were putting up new backsplash and retiling the one small bathroom - it was sufficient for those smallish jobs but now we've got so much more work for the saw.  So after a little research and a trip to Home Depot, we're now the proud owners of a Ridgid tile saw, which cuts so much more smoothly, makes less of a mess, and is all around a much better saw.  It also folds down into a great size for moving around the house or storage.  Since I'm in charge of tile cutting while Brian handles installation, I'm looking forward to the afternoon's work on the master bath now!

More floors, master tile

Nothing too exciting, just some more flooring in the hallway yesterday. We are ready to start flooring into the other bedrooms, but we are quickly running out of room to store everything. At this point we are constantly moving things around in all the rooms. The master bath tile was also started yesterday. We found out our tile saw didn't fit our big 12x24 tiles so we had to buy a newer (and way better) tile saw. More on that later today.

Details details

Laying the bullnose for the stairwell took me two solid nights this week. I tried to keep the joints as tight as I could so I'm hoping they stay like this forever. This weekend we are going to start tiling the master bath. The fun times just keep coming!

One job I'm glad to be done with

This was not my favorite job on this project so far, but the shower pan is finished and ready for tile (after the mud pan cures). We used a product called Goof Proof to create the correct pitch on the floor and curbs that are nice and square. It was a lot of hard work, though. Just mixing the 4 batches of dry pack mix (60lb bags of sand with about 12 pounds of cement) was hard enough, but you had to constantly smooth and stamp the mixture into the forms to compress it. From start to finish it was about 2.5 hours of work. It was quite tiring! Next time I think we will spend the extra money for a custom tile-ready shower pan made out of plastic or maybe use one of the Kerdi products that don't require a mud pan. Doing the pan this way may save a couple hundred dollars, but it's a huge process over several days and is very messy.

We also figured out how we're going to floor around the stairwell opening and the stair treads. I should be able to finish up most of the hardwood in the hallway this coming week. Next weekend I think we'll be making some good progress on the master bath tile.

I've got something in my pocket

Just another weekday night here...spent building a wall and installing a pocket door.  Our master bath tile arrived today so we were feeling motivated to get the pocket door for the water closet built since we can't lay the floor tile until that wall is finished.  So, a few 2 x 4s, one pocket door kit, an interior door slab, and a lot of nails later, we have a wall and a door!  Next we'll add drywall and then we'll be ready to move forward with the tile.  Every day gets us a little bit closer to moving upstairs and into the master suite...