Backsplash progress and winter snow photos

For all my good intentions, would you believe we are out of joint compound? That means no more skim coating the bathroom walls until one of us gets to the store. I used up the last of it today, but there was not much there when I started.

We still have some progress to report. Dave grouted the backsplash by the pantry sink. Now we just have to paint the moulding around it and the pantry will be just about done. Here it is.


After my bathroom work was cut short, I took some time to go out on snowshoes in the fields behind the house. We got a snowstorm on Friday so we actually have snowshoe-able snow near the house. Dave and I went out last night as the moon was rising and it was beautiful and quiet.
This photo shows our house viewed from the fields. Because the fields are active farm fields in the warm months, I had never seen our house from there. Sugarloaf is in the back on the right, and our house is peeking through the trees on the left. Below is a pretty tree in the fields.

Mirrors and lights!

We don't have a lot of mirrors in our house. We joke about not really knowing if we look okay when we leave the house because we only have the small mirror in the bathroom built-in and not a lot of light to work in. That all changed today!!!

Dave installed a medicine cabinet with a mirror over the sink. Then he replaced the fluorescent light with a more attractive fixture that puts out a lot more light! Here he is hooking up the light. It sounds like he did all the work today, but I helped out with the fixture installation and did some badly-needed housecleaning today.





And here is Dave admiring his handiwork. Tomorrow I will do more skim coating on the walls, and we will be painting in no time!

Bathroom walls

We are enjoying the tiles and radiant heat mat! Dave is thinking about upgrading the mat thermostat to a programmable one, though. He thinks he can ditch the one we have on ebay and get one that will warm up before he gets up in the morning. We didn't think about the thermal mass of the tile and grout and how long it would take to warm up when we got this one. It is great once it's warm, but it takes awhile to get there. I usually shower at the gym or in the evening so it's not a big deal to me. We love not freezing in there!

Last week we had to bring in the plumbers to fix a leak. It was a pipe draining the upstairs bathroom, so addressing it was somewhat urgent. The plumbers replaced a portion of the pipe. This photo shows the new PVC and the old cast iron. PVC is a bit louder than cast iron, but the noise from it draining is not bad. Not a cheap activity, but we didn't have much choice. On the up side, at least we really like our plumbers. They are nice and inspire confidence which is important when you are spending a lot of money. They also make funny comments about the "charm and character" of these old farmhouses.


Last weekend Dave added another outlet in the built-in and worked on some of the upstairs wiring. This weekend we have been coating the bathroom walls with joint compound in preparation for painting. We developed a system of Dave going first and just getting the joint compound on the wall, and then I spent more time getting the edges and stuff. It looks so much better now. We probably have one to two more coats to do before painting. These two photos show before and after.

When he took off some of the wall trim to get access for wiring, Dave found some old papers in the wall. We thought they were neat, and I thought it would be fun to post a photo of them. Some tickets to a performance at UMass, a book ordering form (the book was a bird guide), and an invitation so an event in New York state. We also found some old newspaper in a language neither of us recognized. It was written in the Roman alphabet, but beyond that we had no clue. Similar to German, but I don't think it was.

The next tasks are to finish the skim coat, paint, and put up fixtures. We may use the old towel bar, but we need a mirror over the sink and a new light. There was a fluorescent light over the sink, and neither of us want to keep it. Stay tuned!

The toilet is back!!!

Yes it's true! That is our big news! There are pictures below. But to get caught up before that, Sunday we went supply shopping because, among other things, we had bought the wrong grout. We needed sanded grout, but initially we had thought we needed unsanded grout for some reason. We also bought paint for the walls. I thought it was interesting how relatively fast and easy it was to choose paint colors for the bathroom. When we did the kitchen the paint colors were a huge decision and we were kind of anxious about them. On Sunday we picked out paint for the bathroom in about 2 minutes. The wainscot and trim will be a shade of white, and the wall portion will be a light sage green.

On Monday night Dave started grouting. He got nervous about getting it right, so we asked Mark for some coaching. Mark and Dave worked then worked together for awhile, and by the end Dave got Mark wine refills and chatted while Mark finished it up. We are really happy with the grouting! This is Mark and Dave at the end of the job.








And tonight we got the toilet back! We decided to stick with the toilet that came with the house since it's relatively new anyway and looks fine with the tile. Our plumber neighbor told us that he replaced the toilet for the previous owner not long before the house went up for sale.

The next task is to seal the grout. This weekend we will work on the walls....

8 Hours Later...

We are just about done laying the tile! (We are also both exhausted.) We did everything except the little back part, which we will do tomorrow after the rest sets. The small tiles minimized the amount of cutting we had to do. It was a bit of a challenge to get everything flat over the radiant heat mats but hopefully it will be worth it. Mark was here for most of the day getting the upstairs ready to move in, and it we were grateful to have him around to consult and offer support. Initially we thought that I, being the more detail oriented one, would be the one to lay the tile and Dave would cut. But we quickly discovered that I am maybe too detail oriented to efficiently lay tile and that Dave would have to do it if we ever wanted to finish. It looks like he did a good job, and I enjoyed cutting. Whenever we got frustrated, we just reminded ourselves how gross the old bathroom floor was (with the carpeting) and we knew that whatever we did would definitely be an improvement.





I did this corner piece:












These two bummed around in bed all day while we worked.

Bathroom progress...

We have worked on the bathroom as much as we can this week. On Tuesday we cut cement board to put on top of the wood floor. It was a long (5 hours) process for a relatively small bathroom! We also took the toilet out. Here is a picture of Dave siphoning water out of the toilet prior to its removal. On Wednesday we glued down the cement board with mastic. Thursday we (Dave, really) filled in the joints and taped them.

My job on Wednesday and Thursday was to go to Lowes for a radiant heat mat to install under the tiles and to go to Home Depot for tiles and grout. Our bathroom is generally cold, so we wanted to add radiant heat to make it more cozy. Dave wired in and glued down the radiant heat mat yesterday. Today is tile installation day! These photos show the floor with the cement board, the radiant heat mat, and the tiles we picked.

As you can see, we are also working on the walls. We know it's best to do the walls first and then the floor, but Ann, Mark, and Stella are moving in upstairs very, very soon and Dave and I wanted to get the floor done first so we can get our own bathtub and toilet back.

The downstairs bathroom.....

Here we go! You may have wondered why we have never posted pictures of the downstairs bathroom on the blog. It's because we have not been big fans of it. The woman who lived here before us was into carpeting and she ended up putting some in the bathroom! So I went to Rochester over the weekend and Dave pulled up the carpeting and pads and started working on the floor. Today I got home and the clawfoot tub was in the garage!!! Mark helped him take it out, and I am amazed that they got it out there. Now we were going to work as much as possible to get the floor tiled. This is the bathroom tonight. Sorry I didn't get the proposed tile in the photo. It's white octagons with black dots in between the octagons. Hopefully I will be able to post them soon.

Speaking of tile, we also tiled the backsplash in the pantry. We had to get new moulding to put around it and once we get it on we can grout it. Here it is. The tiles are seconds from our friend Jess's family's store in Santa Fe. They look like pretty great seconds to us!