Powder room

As I've mentioned, our first floor is very open. The living room, dining area, and kitchen all bleed together. It's great for entertaining — there is tons of space for people to hang out, and if we're keeping an eye on the stove during a party we're never really out of the action. We love it.

However, it is tough to figure out how to fill the space. I worry about strong statements in one part of the first floor that may clash or not carry over to the rest of it. As a result, we've been very conservative about adding pieces and statements to the first floor, and we tend to play it safe with a neutral couch or a fail-proof dining table.

But it's the dead of winter, people, and dammit, I want some color. And I want it cheap. Enter: Hot Lips.

Our powder room is its own little space, and it was sorely in need of some attention. It had one blue wall (our fav, colonial blue), a couple of afterthought photos on the wall (one of which had no glass in the frame because we are high class), and a junky wastebasket that left scratches on the wall.

No longer.

In progress:

Tai ceded this one to me, and I ran with it. The trick, Hot Lips lovers, is to make it so inconvenient to move the bathroom fixtures in and out that once it's done your husband's abhorrence of the color doesn't compare to the hassle of taking apart a sink and toilet.

I, on the other hand, genuinely love the color and selected it above other equally questionable options.

The camera phone doesn't really know what to make of it, though, as you can tell by the near-red to deep-magenta depictions here. And maybe my eyeballs don't know what to make of it either. While I was painting, I'd have to come out of the room every few minutes and blink hard for a while before I could see straight.

My favorite thing, though, is the combination of the pink against the blue, along with this Todd Chilton painting we have in that area. I think the jewel-tone pink fits perfectly with the grays and the blues.

My second favorite thing about this, though, is the story the paint store guy told me as he was mixing my quart. One of the store's clients, a "gentleman's club from somewhere along State Street, I think" came in and requested a few gallons of Hot Lips. The club owner painted the outside of his "establishment" in Hot Lips because "you know, it was, um, a gentleman's club. Then, the city came through and made them repaint in gray and black three days later."

Hot Lips is so hot that even a strip club isn't allowed to use it. I'm proud it found a home in our powder room.

Master suite paint

When we painted our giant wall blue, we extended the color into the north wall of our bedroom. My thinking at the time was that it was a nice statement of unbroken blue along one whole side of the house. My thinking since then is that it's boring.

(Sidenote: we were so out of our minds during the building process and we had to make so many snap decisions, that we might be undoing some of those last-minute picks for a few years to come. See also: kitchen, Ikea.)

So our master bedroom had one colonial blue wall with a few hastily placed paintings. As we've lived in the house a years, the bedroom just felt kind of thrown together — no deliberate decisions or direction. I wanted something calming and neutral so that the new paint color could match whatever we decide to do with new bedroom furniture in the future. We agreed on spring flowers. This is the second-girliest color in the house, but it works in the space because it's a shifter. Depending on the light, it can look like a barely-there gray, or a deeper blue. It almost never looks violet/lavender, something we discovered after having the chip on the wall for a couple of weeks before painting.

Eventually, we'd like to replace the bedroom set with something in a lighter shade of wood (maybe walnut-esque), and I think it will look better than our current espresso color scheme.

I also love this style from FLOR, and am looking forward a day when we have enough disposable income to put down squares of this under a new, lighter bedroom set.

The view from the top of the stairs:

You can see just a teensy bit of the new color, but what's important is that the colonial blue ends at some point. It's a pretty modest change but one that feels good as the first step in reworking the bedroom.

Our bathroom was totally white and also needed some help. Again, we had a lot of hasty decisions that added up to a thrown-together bathroom — a crappy Ikea towel rack with crappy Ikea towel hooks, a crappy Ikea TP holder, etc. I took out all of that. Tai mudded over the nasty gouges in our wall from all that Ikea shiz, and then I painted with sidewalk gray.

Sample patch:

Final product:

It's barely different from the bedroom, and it's light enough to not interfere with putting on makeup or stumbling around blurry-eyed in the middle of the night. I also really like that it's neutral enough to accommodate pretty much whatever color scheme of towels/shower curtain that we come up with in the future, making change an easy prospect.

Glut of Photos

We've been in the house for a few weeks now and are still working on getting things put away and completely finished, but we are loving it and it instantly felt like home. We haven't really taken any photos since we moved in, but here are a bunch of photos taken from mid November to mid December that shows the process.

So Tired

I haven't updated in awhile because I have been crazy busy working on the house. I am doing most of the interior finish work so since I last posted I have spent more hours than I can count finishing the and grouting tile, installing the bamboo floor, putting up base board, installing cabinets etc etc etc... My dad has been great, putting in many late nights with me and my brothers in law were really helpful getting a lot of the bamboo down two Saturdays ago.

The metal siding is almost done outside, most of our exterior concrete is in and most of the final grading has been done as well. We are really closing in on this.

Here are a bunch of photos that I'm too tired to narrate, so hopefully they tell the story pretty well on their own.

Am I Bad at Blogging or What?

After the sheetrock was done, things on the inside were turned over to me for the most part. Originally we had planned on doing all the painting ourselves. I hadn't really thought through sealing the windows and doors and after looking into a few products we determined that it would be best to have them spray lacquered. We had a couple of painters that Davido has worked with give us a bid on it. Dave Miller and Dave Burleigh at Allstar Painting gave us such a good bid for that that we decided to also have them spray the primer and a finish coat of white on all the walls and ceilings as well. This saved us a ton of time. In the course of one week we had all the doors and windows sealed and all the walls painted. We still have some walls that we will paint an accent color on but I can't tell you how relieving it was to have the paint 90% done in one week. The painters were great to work with and let me do some of the prep to help keep costs down. They also did an absolutely great job. The combination of a really good paint job with an excellent sheet rock job make the walls look like a million bucks.

We went with a Kwal-Howell product called Envirocoat which is a no-voc paint and it turned out to be a really great product. The walls were given an eggshell sheen and the ceiling got a flat paint. With so much ceiling and no texture anywhere, a flat paint up there will keep light from glaring and make any irregularities in the ceiling less noticeable.

Between helping us prep for paint, Davido and his guys finished up the cedar siding. It looks really great. The mitered corners are a really nice touch. We just hope that they don't shrink up too much. Each board has two coats of sealer on all sides and all cut edges were sealed and all joints were glued, so we think it will do okay.

The painting was done last Friday around noon and as soon as they were done I got working on the tile work. Friday and Saturday morning I got the backer board down and then Saturday afternoon Kersten showed up and helped me start laying the tile down in the bathrooms and laundry room. She was actually really good at it. She's really a good baker and she said that spreading the mortar reminded her a lot of frosting a cake. Saturday we got all the laundry and second bathroom and about half of the master bathroom finished. I was back at it Monday night after work and finished the master bathroom. Then Tuesday night and Wednesday night my Dad came and helped me get the walls around the bath tub in the second bathroom finished. He was a huge help and once we settled on a plan of attack we were able to move pretty quickly. Friday I spent figuring out the rest of the shower pan for the master bathroom shower. Our plumber did the base slope and water proof membrane which had to be inspected by the city a couple of weeks ago but it still needed a mortar layer over top of the membrane for the tile to go on. I used a sand/portland cement mixture that goes in as a dry-pack application. Enough water is added so that it feels a bit like wet sand. It was pretty tedious getting the perimeter edges level and then sloping it towards the drain, but it's done now and I'll start working on the tile for the floor in the shower next.

We went with a 2x2 inch tile mosaic on the floor by American Olean in Ice White with a matte finish. The walls are 3x6 subway tile in the same finish.

Wednesday we got most of our finish electrical work done and even got some lights working. This makes working at night so much easier. We are just waiting for all of our accent lighting to come in and that will be installed. We've got some cool fixtures that we are excited about. Thursday they started installing the ductwork for our air conditioning system. We have radiant heat but really hate the heat, so we are going to have an exposed spiral duct running down the hallway on the first floor that will have registers to cool the first floor and trunks that feed registers in the floor for the up-stairs. We also put an exposed duct in the hallway upstairs to pull all the hot air that will gather at the top of the vaulted space out of the house and cool the house more efficiently. They should be all done on Monday.

Vaulted space

We are tentatively expanding the vaulted space in the living room (far right of the floor plan here, the part with the "x" through it). It had been a bit pinched with all the design tweaking we did to the second floor.


If you have sharp eyes and a good memory, you'll notice a very slight shift in the placement of the second floor over the first. We're moving it to the west to create a little more vaulted space in the living room. The second-floor jog at the loft (top of the stairs) is what will require one of the structural beams in the house (it's also where we're talking about whether that beam will be exposed).

You can also see the orientation of the master bath, including a re-orientation of the toilet room, and the shower-only stall at the south (or "bottom") of the master bathroom. This particular orientation would not accommodate a double-sided linen closet, but it does reclaim a foot or so of space that we desperately needed for the second bathroom to be truly comfortable and functional. And the door for the master bedroom can be at any point along that approach hallway — as per a commentor's suggestion, we will likely put it at the public-space-end of the hall.

Master bath update

We may be ditching the full tub in favor of a shower only. I know, I know...I said I didn't like showers only. But space has become a bigger issue than it was before, and in order to get everything else in there in a way that makes sense, we may be relying on the tub in our second bathroom instead.

Our schedule has morphed a bit as we approach the end of design. We met with Kenner, Matt and Stephanie last week for our penultimate design meeting. Our next meeting isn't until May 7, but in the meantime, the team is finishing design and starting construction documents — blurring the lines between the two phases ought to keep us on schedule for bidding and permitting during June. We'll be firing up the chainsaws for some "brush clearing" on the lot around mid-June, and we're still hoping to start construction somewhere between mid-June and early July.

The master bedroom mash-up

After looking at the different bedroom options, we realized that a great solution was probably going to take a bit of mix-n-match. We're not totally sure that what we want to do will actually work, but the design process has involved some dreaming for us, so why not a bit more?

This is what we'd like the master bedroom to look like — we pulled elements from three different sketches to get to this option.


If you can't read our scribbles, then the bedroom portion is from Option 3, our preferred toilet-linen combination is from Option 2, and the rest of the bathroom is from Option 4. We're not quite sure that our preferred drawing will work, hence the (2), with a slightly smaller linen closet and re-oriented toilet room.

Also, kudos to Lisa for her two-sided linen closet idea. We will henceforth call it "The Lisa." (Other naming opportunities still abound.)

Master bedroom layout

We've been working on laying out the master bedroom and bathroom. As it turns out, making a closet, toilet room, double vanity, shower/tub and linen closet into an 18'-by-18' grid is a bit tough. This was the first go at it:

We wanted to redesign this version because 1) we forgot a linen closet, 2) we needed a bit more living space in the bedroom part itself, and 3) it turns out that I really don't want a walk-in closet, even though I said I did. Ever the indulgent ones, Matt and Kenner sent over a few other options.

Option 1:
Option 2:
Option 3:
Option 4:
Option 5:
In each drawing, north is "up," and the rest of the second floor is to the right of the drawing (you can see the entrance to the master suite in the same location on each drawing). We're still working on the drawings, but in the meantime, which would you choose if it were your bedroom?

After: bathroom

Next to the kitchen, the bathroom got the most in the way of a facelift. It doesn't look like much, but this one is about twice the size of our last bathroom, which was comically small.

Before:


After:


The toilet, sink and cabinet are all new. Again, that's the slate tile with sealer/enhancer on the floor. The color is what I would call ice blue, but Benjamin Moore calls it "Whispering Spring." The mirror is from Lowe's or Home Depot, the light fixture from Galaxy Lighting in South Salt Lake and was about the only one that we found for not a lot of money but with adjustable wiring for our nutty off-center junction box. It's still a pretty tight space, so we didn't have a lot of leeway in terms of the layout (I was standing in the tub to take the picture above).


There's still a gap to the left of the sink cabinet because the wall wasn't square (imagine!). That gap may be permanent, because I'm out of ideas for filling it in.

Countdown

I'm putting this out there to hold myself to it: we want to move in on Dec. 15. That's two weeks from tomorrow.

In those two weeks, we need to do the following:

Install and paint baseboards, paint door trim, install kitchen cabinet doors, install kitchen trim pieces to match cabinet doors, build and install a concrete kitchen countertop, install a kitchen sink, install a kitchen sink disposal, install a kitchen tile backsplash, reseal the tile, build living room bookshelves and fireplace cover, install window coverings, find a plumber and get a washer drain line hooked up to finish the washer-dryer nook, purchase and install a refrigerator, install a bathroom sink and cabinet, install a bathroom mirror, find and install a bathroom light, paint interior of hall linen closet, install hall linen closet doors, install closet shelving systems in two rooms, touch up living room paint, paint inside of living room coat closet, rehang remaining doors, install new doorknobs, find and install kitchen lights, put up a shower rod, install a bathroom fan cover, saw off and cover the toilet floor bolts, caulk baseboard, install threshold pieces between bamboo and tile flooring, replace the bedroom ceiling fan with something better looking, and clean everything.

Oh my.

Toilet's in

Here's the sewer drain hole that no one should ever get too close to.


Here's the wax ring that I replaced on the bottom of the new toilet (upside-down bowl) to seal it to the sewer drain.


This illustrates me leveling out the bowl. It took a few shims to make the bubbles line up.


And here's our can, newly installed and fully functional:


We still need to cover up the floor bolts, but the covers that came with the toilet can't accommodate the super-long screws. After we hacksaw off the tops of the bolts, we can cover them up. We also have baseboard attached to the bathroom walls, but it is awaiting primer and two coats of white paint. And, when the Miracle Method tub and tile refinisher left, he took some of our fresh bathroom paint with him, so we'll be adding another coat, hopefully sometime this weekend.

Cheap and Swedish

My mother refused to help us remodel until we could provide a functioning bathroom — you know that I'm excited about the toilet since I've already done two posts about it (maybe it goes in tonight?), but here's what we're planning on for the vanity and sink:


And here's what we're thinking of for the faucet:


This setup appeals for us for a couple of reasons: one, it's IKEA which means that it looks decent for not a lot of money, and two, the sink eliminates any need for a separate bathroom countertop. I'm relieved because the idea of having to come up with a few square feet of bathroom countertop was giving me a headache (for instance, does it match the kitchen? if so, is it worth it to do concrete in the bathroom? if not, what do we get that looks good but doesn't cost a fortune?, etc.).

Tile's Done

I'll spare you all the details, but the tile has been cleaned, sealed, grouted and is done. The grout was perhaps my least favorite thing about remodeling that I have ever done. We used a sealer/enhancer, which turned our gray looking tile to almost black, which is what we wanted.

Once we have stopped making a mess in there, I will seal the tile one more time.

Here are some pictures.

The can

We are, after weeks of dashing to businesses where I would never purchase anything, ready to replace the toilet in our bathroom.

This is what it currently looks like, in the middle of our office:


And this is the video that will help us get there. I've never been so excited about plumbing in my life!

Tai-el, part II

The tile saga continues:

The entryway required a bit more prep before I could get to actually laying the tile down. The subfloor in the entry is concrete, so I couldn't just screw some Hardi-backer down. It needed to be fastened to the concrete with the same thin set mortar that we are using for the tiles. Before I could do that though, there was some old mastic all over the floor that had been used in the condos previous life to glue 1/4 inch particle board down that the carpet sat on top of. This required a lot of chipping. Then I had to make all the cuts to the Hardi-backer to make sure that they all fit before starting with the mortar, since I didn't want the mortar to solidify as I made cuts as I went. Once I made the cuts, I spread the mortar (it took about 35 lbs) and placed the boards. Then once those had set, I was finally able to lay the tiles.


Am I done yet? Nope.


There is still the issue of cutting the tiles. Kersten's grandfather offered us the use of a tile saw, which was great, so on Monday night we went out to his storage unit to pick it up. He said it was heavy but I was completely unprepared for this thing. I had rented a tile saw before, but a rental saw is usually a few years old at the oldest. This thing is at least 20 years old and is HEAVY duty. In a previous life it was used by US Steel to cut through core samples for their mining activities, and it must weigh at least 200 lbs (her grandfather was/is a geologist). The saw collapsed a cart, so to save the garage floor, I had to heft the thing off by myself; it was all I could do to move it about 3 feet inside the garage. It ended up on two sawhorses in my parents' side yard.


I made about 90% of the cuts and then went to the condo and installed them.

Because slate tiles is essentially compressed dirt, it makes a really muddy mess. Now the installed tile needs to be cleaned, sealed and grouted. My goal is to have the tile all the way complete by the end of Saturday...

...which means stay tuned for Tai-el III.

Tai-el

I have been working on the tile in the entry, kitchen and bathroom since last Thursday. Let me just start by saying that this is the last time I work with slate tile again. It looks good, but man, it's a pain to work with. The problem mostly lies in the fact that the pieces are so imperfect. It's the nature of slate that it is a bit of a rustic material. As such, they aren't exactly square and they aren't uniform in thickness either. This makes getting perfect grout lines impossible. So instead, you have to have a margin inside which your grout lines fall. We have been trying to keep them between 1/8" and 1/4".

Last Thursday my dad, who will forever be referred to as "Rockstar Dad," came over and we took the day off and worked on tile to get us started. Even though he didn't have a ton of free time, he took time from his own projects a few days before he left the country to help us out.


We started in the kitchen because we needed frequent access to the tub in the bathroom, which is currently our only water source. By the time my dad had to leave at around 4:30, we had finished almost all of the kitchen, which is about 150 square feet.


Two things kept us from finishing. The first was that we don't have a tile saw on-site, so we left out any tiles that needed to be cut. The second reason was that when I purchased the tile that morning from Contempo Tile, they only had about 120 square feet of the 240 square feet I had ordered currently in stock. The balance would not be available until the next morning. One of the problems with slate being so imperfect, as I mentioned above, is that sometimes you just have tiles that are unusable, and I had run out of usable tiles.

In the kitchen we had been trying to use tile spacers to set the tiles. These are usually great because all you have to do is get your first row in straight and then use the spacers to insure that the rest of your tile goes in straight.


Slate, we discovered, is a different story. After some research on the internet the next day, I came up with a new method. I snapped a chalk line for each row of tile that included the desired spacing between the tiles and then did my best to eyeball the tile within those chalk lines. This allowed me to adjust for tiles that weren't square or uniform in width but still keep my overall tile rows straight.

On Friday I picked up the remaining tile from Contempo and bought some more thin-set mortar to set the tiles in. This time I got the rapid set stuff that dries in 3 hours — they said it was good for smaller jobs. Since all I had left at this point was the bathroom and entry way and filling in the rest with cut tiles, it seemed ideal. I started out by mixing a 25-lb. bag of mortar, since I would normally work with about that much of the regular stuff at a time. This turned out to be quite a mistake. After only laying about 14 tiles, using half of the mortar I had mixed, the rest of it had turned solid and I ended up having to throw it, and the bucket, away. I was pretty frustrated. I found after that that if I would just mix half of a 25-lb. bag at a time it worked perfectly, and it is really nice to have the tiles set up so much faster.


On mixing the mortar. When I picked up the first batch of tile on Thursday I also purchased a mixer (giant egg beater) that you can use with a drill to mix the mortar. This seemed like a wise purchase, since mixing by hand is quite fatiguing. When we went to mix the first batch of mortar on Thursday, it turned out that the 1/2" mixer was too big for the three drills we had on site, all of which are a 3/8" chuck. So, we mixed 100 lbs of mortar using nothing but the strength we possess in our forearms and a putty knife. Not so much fun, so the next day when I picked up the rest of the tile, I bought a mixer that would fit a 3/8" chuck and it's a beautiful thing. My 12-volt DeWalt only has enough juice in a fully charged battery to do about 4 minutes of non stop drilling, so I had to charge between each bucket of mortar.


More later.


(Our version of the Titanic handprint.)

The loo

Things are finally moving (FINALLY, people, FINALLY), with paint on pretty much every surface by now. The long road to a functional bathroom has looked like this, so far:

1. Removing the tile. (We lost the toilet's functionality several weeks ago.)


2. Pulling up the rotten, uneven subfloor.


3. Installing hardibacker, the same water-proof, even layer that we used in the kitchen.


4. Patching, sanding, dusting and painting the walls. We were pleased to receive a gallon of very nice, expensive paint from my mother-in-law in roughly the same color we were planning to use anyway. Hooray for hand-me-downs! The color is a very faint blue that evidently doesn't show up when your only light source is an on-camera flash.


We still have a few steps to go, including a Miracle Method appointment in two weeks for refinishing the bathtub and tile surround, tiling the floor in a dark slate, figuring out the bathroom cabinet, vanity and mirror situation and installing all that good stuff. Progress, though, feels sweet.