Renovation... 2 steps forward and 1 step back

The exciting news in my glamorous life is - we spent last weekend painting and tiling the one working bathroom we have at the moment. When I say tiling I mean the floor. The inside of the shower is still a hot mess and has plastic sheeting covering the walls. We still have to make and install the counter top, so for the moment it's plywood and oilcloth. I did manage to paint the walls and trim of the bathroom and to paint the front door as well.

It never ceases to surprise me how a bit of white paint makes things so much better. The front door was stained and filthy from years of neglect. Walking into the hall felt so depressing and we all tended to leave the front door open to brighten up the space. That was getting increasingly uncomfortable as the days got colder. Once the door was painted the whole space felt light and happy.

We still have a ways to go with painting but those two relatively small projects helped our mental state tremendously. Down the road we plan on adding color into the space, but for now just having it cleaned up is enough.

What didn't help our mental state was the persistent leak in the downstairs bathroom wall that we couldn't locate and kept getting worse. So instead of spending this weekend moving further forward we went backwards and ripped out a part of the upstairs hallway wall. I guess the good news is that is was a simple problem (if you call tearing out a wall simple) and hadn't caused mold issues in the wall. A valve had not been tightened properly so once it was tightened the leak was fixed. Of course now there is the job of re- drywalling the wall - AGH!!!

Note the temporary curtain instead of door - def on the to-do list!

I know that a ripped open wall is extremely exciting but if you think that's great your going to plotz when you see the tile job we did! 

This is what we've been living with the last 3 months...

 Check out the beautiful American Standard faucet amongst the chic plastic lined wall look!  Now imagine those same faucets against beautiful tile.

We wanted to have the tile run up the side of the tub. To be able to do this we used the American Standard Studio Bathing Pool and faced it with Durock. We then used Dash Patch to build the curve where the floor meets the tub side. After a few hours of drying time we were able to tile the surface.

We used Nemo Tiles pennyrounds in blue. To be able to get all of the tile to line up we started at the top of the tub, worked our way down and onto the floor. 

It was definitely time consuming to get the tile lined up on the tub side, but once we got to the 

floor things moved along quickly.

 We struggled with the grout color. Originally we had planned on going with a dark charcoal but as we laid the tile we were concerned that the darker grout would show any imperfections where the penny tile didn't line up perfectly. In the end we chose a lighter grey.  It looks good although I wish we had been able to use the darker color.

I know this is a lousy picture - I took it late at night after we had finished. The Resolute light is pretty cool and my picture does not do it justice. The sink is from Porcher and faucet is the Serin from American Standard. The medicine cabinet is Nutone from Build.com

This post is sponsored by American Standard and Porcher.