Yay for bathrooms!

Today we got the whirlpool tub moved upstairs from the den into the actual bathroom. It took 3 men to get it slid up the stairs and around all the corners and settled into place.

We also have now removed the sink from the powder room to have it ready to be installed in the upstairs bathroom. This means that the only working sink in the house is the one in the kitchen. I am not sure how this will work yet, but should be interesting.

We also have the wall tile done in the 2nd bathroom upstairs and it looks fabulous! I can't wait to see how it will look with the fixtures and tub in place.

More fun to be had!

Small people for Small spaces

Sometimes, it is a blessing to be on the short side, and able to fold myself up small, and other times it is not. The past few days have been more on the "not" side of this. As we found out earlier, our house has no insulation. None. Nada. Zip. We have been trying to rectify this situation as we open up walls and ceilings.

As most of the ceiling of our den is currently open, we can get into the crawl space above the addition (the one that resulted in suspension of the 2nd floor many years ago) and put insulation in. The caveat is that the opening is very small, and the only one around here small enough to get inside it is me. Up the ladder I went, with long sleeves and pants, and respirator and safety glasses, and gloves and bandanna. All of this was required, as, 1. I didn't know what I was going to find, and 2. we were using the blown cellulose insulation. Very dusty, and very messy.

I did stick the camera up into the space before I went in to see if I really did need to go up, and to see if there were any surprises. As you can see, there were nothing but pipes and rafters.

After I got folded up into the crawl space, the hose for the insulation was sent up after me, as we both didn't fit thru the hole at the same time.

Here I am with my hose. You can see that there is not a whole lot of room in there with me. I could not sit up, nor turn over, but had to sit on my hip on the ceiling joists so as not to fall thru the ceiling. Not too comfy.

After about 45 min of shoving the hose in farther, and blowing insulation all over the place, I managed to fill about 2/3 of the space before running out of insulation. This means that we will still need to put some more insulation in this summer, but it is still better than before.

Oof. I am not looking forward to doing this again.

Quick Bath Update

We are getting ever closer, although some days it does not feel like it. We now have the vanity upstairs in the master bathroom, and it looks great with the tile and the walls. We also were able to get the sink top set into place as well. Now it's just waiting for the plumber to come back to install the faucets and hook everything up.

In the other bathroom, the tile is going in. As there was a bit of a mix-up with the floor tile, I had to choose a new pattern. And of course the pattern I like, in the colors I want, is set to be discontinued this year. Luckily for me, there was enough at the local warehouse for our floor. Now that it's in, I think I'll like it even better than my original design. And the walls are slowly, but surely getting covered as well. This bathroom will definitely be bright! How can it not, with so much shiny white tile?

A Weekend Off

After much working on the house, both inside and out, and with minimal breaks, we were happily forced to take a break this weekend. This is because we had our first guests come to visit since the remodel began - my brother and his wife.

Nevermind that there is still only one working bathroom, and it is not on the same floor as the bedrooms. Nevermind that there is no heat on the 2nd floor. Nevermind that the only shower is still in the basement. And nevermind that all of the furniture for each floor is stuffed into a single room on that floor.

Our guests were quite ok with this set-up, as they have already lived in one house while fixing it up in a similar manner, and are currently in the process of doing another. The goal of the weekend was to have fun and try to forget the work that needed to be done on the various house projects, ours and theirs.

The theme of the weekend ended up rather focusing on good eats: wine, cheese, and chocolates. Yum!! How can you not have fun when those items are involved.

We went on a winery tour at Wollersheim Winery, where we partook of a very nice wine tasting, and of course tried all of the varieties. Then we went for great Italian antipasta and pizza, and headed to the grocery to get some good artisan cheeses. On the way out of the grocery, we decided to walk along the shops, and we girls thought it would be a good idea to stop in the little chocolate shop for a look and perhaps a taste.

This shop does not have ordinary chocolates - oh no, it has very fancy handmade chocolates. We decided to get a box of four, so that each of us could choose a chocolate.

There were so many beautiful chocolates and exotic flavors (i.e. bacon, anise, basil) it took most of 20 minutes. We also got a spicy hot cocoa to take with, as it was quite wet and cold, as the month of March is want to be.

Back to the house where we ate cheese and chocolates, drank wine and played games. All in all a great weekend of relaxing with wonderful people to share it with.

Let there be light! (And a clean tub.)

This week was the first nice weather we've had this spring. This meant that it was finally time to tackle the windows.

First, all of the siding for the second floor on this side of the house had to be taken down. It had to be done carefully, as we needed to reuse it once the new windows were put in.

Under one set of siding, we found old cedar siding that also needed to be cut through in order to make the window opening.

It was a pretty yellow color. Maybe someday we'll turn the house back to that shade.

Then we went from this...
To this...
To this!

Voila! A new window where one had not been before.


It then took most of the next few days to get the siding back onto the house, as the openings we needed were now in a different location than before.

And, as I could not help with the siding and windows, and I did not want to waste the nice weather, I got to clean the tub.

I had to get as much of the old layers of paint off of the tub as possible. To do this, I had to use an angle grinder with a nifty wire wheel on it to scrape the paint off.

I spent about 4 hours scraping paint off of the tub. And I didn't get it all off! Interesting things that I found were:
1. You cannot hold an angle grinder easily, it must be held at an awkward angle to do its work.
2. A tub does not want to give up its paint nicely. It flings it all over the yard.
3. Our tub was made Jan. 3, 1926 by the Kohler company. It had its birthday stamped on the bottom.

Little Luxuries

One of the little luxuries that we decided to splurge on for our new bathrooms is to have heated tile floors. I had put one into my basement bathroom in my previous house and loved it.

We got the kind that you can add a real thermostat to, so that we can set it to the exact temperature that we want. Since we were putting in brand-new tile floors, it was very easy to get laid out.

Once the heating cables were put down, it was on with the installation of the tile. It took quite a while for me to figure out how I wanted the pattern to go, as of course I changed my mind after we got the tile. We ended up going with a rather Mayan-influenced design. I like it alot, and it will look quite nice once the fixture are put in.

The "playpen" for the tub came in quite handy for putting the tile up on the walls to make the shower surround. It also made it much easier for me to get up near the ceiling to put the grout in.

Finally things are starting to look like there might be a bathroom under all of this.

We have walls.

Yes, that's right, we now have actual walls. Not lines on the floor, not pieces of 2x4 nailed in place, but actual real walls.


Walls that look like walls. Walls with openings that one can lookout of.

(Although, we are not putting windows in between rooms. This actually just me looking thru what will eventually be medicine cabinets on the other side.)

We have walls that have insulation in them. You may be wondering why we are insulating interior walls, as they do not really need to be. We decided that since bathrooms have tile, and tile is not very sound absorbent, we would insulate around the bathrooms so that one can still sleep in the bedrooms while someone is singing in the shower.


We also have a wall with an opening for a window to the outside. This is the window that I found back when we were tearing out the bathroom. As soon as it is nice outside, it will become an actual window, rather than a window-looking-at-siding.

We also got the support for the new master bathroom tub built. It may rather look like a playpen, but trust me, eventually there will be a tub there.

It just happens to be located in the first floor den at the moment. :)