Bathroom update: we have tile in the shower

We were on vacation most of last week so there was nothing happening in the bathroom for almost 6 days.  We got home at 3 on Friday.  Matt helped unload the car, ate lunch, and by 4 he was working on the bathroom.  Between Friday afternoon/evening and Saturday (post Color Me Rad) he got the rest of the walls up.

filling the seams of the cement board before tiling

 

Sunday he tested the water connections to make sure they worked before they were harder to get to (they worked, yay!) and then the tiling starting.  Tiling never seemed that bad before, just stick them up there, right?  Yeah...just watching Matt it looks horrible.  There is a lot of measuring, cutting, and lining up involved.  He's using spacers to keep the gaps the same.  He has to work fairly quickly before the mortar dries.  It's a pretty stressful process.  I've helped were I can but it's mostly him.  I think they floor seemed a lot easier in comparison because there was no cutting and imperfection is part of it's charm.

If everything continues to run smoothly we should be showering in our house in about a week.  That'll be 6 weeks since we last did that. 

After this is mudding and sanding the drywall walls.  I realized if you've never had the pleasure of drywalling you might not know what that means.  We hung 4'x8' sheets of drywall in the bathroom.  The seams and nail holes have to be "mudded" with something similar to the putty used to fill nail holes in a wall.  We buy ours pre-mixed because we're a little lazy.  You mud everything, wait for it to dry, then sand it down and mud again. Then sand and mud and repeat until you regret ever taking on a drywall project and your house is covered with dust.  The goal is to make it all look seamless (as most walls in your house probably do).  It's easy to do but very hard to do well.  I've only done this a few times (at the lake and on our stair project).

It's not fun but compared to all the other things Matt's tackled in the bathroom (redoing all the plumbing and electrical, tiling the floor and surround) this seems pretty easy since we know how to do it.  Not looking forward to it but at least it's a much smaller space than the stairs so hopefully it's not horrible.

Then we finally get to the fun stuff like painting, trim, figuring out the floating shelves.  I'm really excited to see it all come together.  For so long it's seemed so far away but now it's not!  We could actually be painting before too long!!