Independence Day in Captivity

If you're a follower of our blog, you know that last fourth of July, we were finishing up laying our travertine floor in the kitchen as we heard the fireworks off in the distance. For a few days, I thought we might have a repeat of that -- we recently decided to use leftover travertine in our bathroom and were just about ready to lay it. Alas, everything else took a bit longer that we thought and we are not quite ready to lay the tile.

Before I get in to the renovation pictures, I'll give you an update on our house mascot, Cheeba. She sure is loving the dust and mess. She gets to be "explorer kitty" every day. She's in and out of boxes, traipsing along on the plastic dust covers, and finding the oddest spots possible to take a nap. I caught her the other day resting in a box with her front paws perched atop and around the box:

And here she is stalking something or other on the plastic dust covers:

Back to the renovation. As we talked about in the last post, we went up to Frost Hardwoods to order the veneer and plywood for our bathroom vanity. Once our order was in, we had to get it back to the house somehow. Jesse's truck is out of commission and my car is just to little to handle sheets of plywood so we did what we've been doing a lot of lately: rent the Home Depot truck. Here is the truck, loaded up with supplies, in front of our house. I wonder if our neighbors think we work for Home Depot...?

We couldn't resist snipping off some of the veneer we intend to use as edge-banding and applying some finish to see what our vanity is going to look like. It was love at first sight.

As I said in the last post, we made some last-minute bathroom design changes, and we're both very pleased with the changes we made. We had ceramic floor tile, but we decided to use leftover travertine from the kitchen (we had to supplement it with ten more square feet from the stone yard, though.) We also had ceramic shower tile that we decided to replace with different ceramic tile (we special ordered that so no pictures yet.) We also switched out the glass tile backsplash/accent to something with a little more coolness to it. Lastly we made a decision to go from yellow to a green-brown paint. Jesse uncharacteristically let me run to Home Depot today to choose and buy the paint --- without purchasing a tester! He was very happy with my choice.

Below is travertine floor tile, the glass tile backsplash/shower accent, the paint swatch, and the finished piece of vanity veneer. We think it all pulls together very nicely -- hopefully the special order tile works as well!

Saturday was odds-n-ends day. We got a late start, Jesse worked on the living room electrical, and I ran errands. When I got home, Jesse put me to work finishing up wiring some outlets in the living room.



A few weeks ago, we posted pictures of the vanity plumbing. Here it is all covered up and ready to be taped and mudded.

Our next step was to embed the backerboard into a mortar bed and screw it down to the floor. It was pretty time intensive and we had to remove the toilet for nearly a whole day. The screws need to be in an eight inch square pattern, which adds up quickly. Here's Jesse taking a quick break from the floor to 'hot mud' large spaces in the drywall.

Jesse puts the last piece in, below. My job was to screw it all down. We then worked together to tape up the seams and called it a night (around 12:30am.) We wanted to keep going and get some tape and mud on the drywall but we were beat.

We went nearly a day without a toilet. I'll spare you the details, though. Here it is right after we took it out and put the backerboard down:


And here it is once we put it back in today! We're going to have to remove it two more times: to paint and to lay the travertine, but those should both be quick.

This is Jesse working with the second coat of joint compound on the bathroom drywall.


Today (7/4) we also made the toekicks for the vanity and tall cabinet, cleaned up the back yard (which was more of a feat than it sounds) and made an Independence Day dinner for our friends Jenny and Pat. I forgot to get food or friend pictures, but here's a shot of the make-shift table we had to use. Our dining room is currently a vanity counter top storage area and our table is in a room that now has too small of a door to take it out in one piece. So we kludged together a table.
In the spirit of John Hancock, we made corn on the cob, salad and skirt steak with a cilantro garlic sauce. We toasted another year of independence with an India Pale Ale from Coronado Brewing Co.
Time to get back to work!