bathroom [tile]

Inching closer to the finish as tile begins...

First the shower tile:






Then the Nuheat mat goes down directly on the subfloor:


Schluter DITRA over that:


And finally, the floor tile:

So close...

Forbo Marmoleum Click has been installed. We purchased it locally at M&Z Carpets. If you're local, we highly recommend M&Z. The subfloor is concrete, so we used a trial-on leveling compound to even out some spots here and there. I should add here that we neglected to order any Marmoleum trim when we placed our floor order, and the freight charges made it cost-prohibitive to order our needed T-Mold as a stand-alone from M& Z.  So...we found this great online store, CoolGreenStuf, that carried the exact T-Mold we needed at a reasonable price. We went with Floor Muffler as the underlay/vapor barrier -- found a great deal on it on ebay where a guy was selling a complete roll and some left-over from his project, which was just enough to cover our kitchen and this bathroom.

The Marmoleum install went fairly well, although it was some tight quarters in there as you can see. There are only nine full-size squares in the floor (out of approx. 20) -- so cutting and fitting was essentially all we did. Like any project, it will go a lot smoother the next time.

Just need my plumber-uncle to attach the cast-iron flange to the drain pipe (pouring molten lead into a half-inch gap is not exactly a DIY project) and we're ready for the toilet and sink install.

The long-awaited reveal will follow.

White Oak (Redux)

As we relayed in a previous post, the discovery of hardwood floors in our home pretty much changed all of our plans. It meant we needed to complete all of the messy jobs like baseboard removal and drywall repair before we could get the floors refinished. For the most part, this meant living with just the bare essentials in the house for the better part of 3 1/2 months. I'd like to thank my wife for putting up with that situation with very little grumbling (although there was some grumbling, or, more accurately, an occassional expressed desire to actually be able to live in the house).

With the walls and ceilings in good shape, it was time to turn our attention to the floors. We first checked into Mr. Sandless. They use a quick and cost-effective, chemical "sanding" process of some sort to restore wood floors. However, they are limited in what they can remove from your floors given the very fact that they don't sand off a layer of wood from the floors. Joe at Mr. Sandless in Harrisburg was very upfront in what they could and could not do after seeing pics of our floors. They wouldn't touch the steps because of the stains (mainly from carpet cleaning), but thought that their process would work in the rest of the house. I was a little concerned because I saw some of the same staining on other parts of the floors and the stairs would need to be sanded anyway, so we decided against the sandless process.

Our realtor asked around and got us a list of wood floor refinishers that were recommended by other realtors she knew. We got estimates from 3 different outfits and chose Nissley Professional Hardwood Flooring. They quoted us a competitive price and used a dust control system, which the other two did not. And since we'd be living in the house as the work was being done, that was very important to us. Notice I did not say dust-free because that is just unrealistic when you're talking about millions of extra-fine particles of wood floating through your house.

Freshly sanded, raw, natural white oak hardwood floors...

Gratuitous pic of floor with toes in pic

It took them three days -- one to sand, one to apply a sealer and a coat of Street Shoe and another to apply the final coat. Early on we had talked about having the floors stained a darker walnut color, but decided against that in the end. And we're extremely glad we did because the natural look of the white oak in its different shades just adds this originality and uniqueness to the floor that I fear might have been lost with a darker stain. Oh...and we went with a satin/matte finish as opposed to a high-gloss finish.

The finished product....

White Oak

One of the items on our "pros" list when we were looking at houses to buy was hardwood floors. In fact, it was one of the major "cons" we had to overcome when deciding whether to purchase our house, as it didn't have them.

Or so we thought.

Houses with hardwood floors usually demand more money due to the fact that almost everyone wants them. As you'll come to discover when house hunting, the listing info for a house will usually include a blurb about hardwood as a selling point, even when they're under carpet, knowing that carpet is one of the first things people usually replace. The listing for our house didn't mention it, so we assumed they were not there. Plus, we didn't see any clue of them during our multiple visits to the house before we decided to make an offer. Our plan was to rip up the carpet in the master and put in a dark wood floor from IKEA and live with the carpet in the rest of the house for the time-being.

So imagine our surprise and delight when the Verizon guy pulled back the carpet in a bedroom closet to run a cable and announced his discovery of hardwood floors! And this was literally like 2 hours after we closed on the place! That night we pulled up carpet in the corners of every room and discovered hardwood throughout.


As we extracted the carpet, padding, staples and tack strips over the next few weeks, we quickly discovered that the floors will certainly need to be refinished. As you can see from the assortment of pics below, the finish has completely worn off in certain places, there are a few stains, there are plenty of paint splatters here and there and the chemical process of cleaning the carpet over the years has left a greenish residue over the majority of the wood floor.

I did a bit of internet research to determine whether this was a job for the pros or something we could do ourselves. Although it can successfully be done as a DIY project, the consenses seems to be that this is a job better left to the pros -- both time and money-wise. So...the plan is to get a number of quotes and go from there; but we will actually hold off on getting the floors refinished until we get the ceilings painted. We'll paint the walls after the floors are done, obviously covering them very well to prevent any accidents.

Gallons + Gallons

Behr paint has come highly recommended (from others besides Home Depot), so when I stumbled upon a huge July 4th sale at HD, we had to jump on it!

We had been discussing colors since we moved in (March 08), but hadn't done so much as snagged a color strip from a single store. Angie managed to grab some early in the week that were in our desired color ranges. Then we spent a good 2 hours at the store fine-tuning those colors. We decided on most of what we wanted for the living room, dining room and the bedrooms and took the sample strips home to "see them in action" there. This turned out to be a super-important step b/c we decided that the wall color we loved for our living room and dining room (Porpoise), was a bit too dark for our space. After some more fine tuning, we headed back to the store and placed our order -- the results of which you can see in the pic above.

We'll be doing all of the ceilings in the aforementioned rooms this weekend. Walls and trim to follow. More info on colors and pics after we get it on the walls!