Where does the time go?

Checking in quickly and realizing that the last time I wrote anything was the beginning of September. Geeze. Time really does get away from us. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Good in the sense that things progress quickly without incident, bad in that I feel I haven't accomplished anything in the time that has passed.

So...let's see what's new since the last time I posted. Well...big thing is I started a new job - two actually. I finally got rid of the cancer that was my old job and moved on and I have to say that, so far, I'm a much happier person. I work when I want. No nights, weekends, or holidays. I get to work in a bunch of different units so there's no getting into any of the silly politics and whatnot of being in one place. And...I get paid more than I did at my last job. All in all I think things are looking good :)

DH is just cruising along after his surgery in September. Aside from the humongo scar that's left he's back to his old, spunky, self. I am very thankful for his superb surgeon and gastroenterologist. Keeping my fingers crossed that DH stays in remission for...well...the rest of his life.

We started gutting the bathroom just before the last hospitalization and when the time was right afterwards we picked the project back up. I'm hoping for it to be complete by next weekend. We tore up the old tile floor, wallpapered over the old stuff and repainted the walls, laid a new floor and now all that's left is to install some trim, the toilet, and the new bathroom sink/cabinet. I'm really excited. This one is going to look fab! Here are some before and work-in-progress pics.

This is just after we finished busting up the old floor. Don't you just love the wallpaper? Nothing like cabbage roses and navy blue wallpaper to welcome you into a bathroom. It had to go!

Unfortunately, the builders applied the wallpaper directly to the sheetrock (which we knew from another project earlier on) and so it was not an option to remove the paper. Since we didn't want to hang all new sheetrock we took the easy route and just gave the wall a new covering which we painted to match the bedroom.

You can't really tell the color in the next picture
but it's a soft greyish green. Very bathroom appropriate and kinda spa-like. We found some textured wallpaper that they were discontinuing at the local home improvement store and used that to cover the old flowery stuff. The nice thing about textured paper is that it hides all the underlying imperfections. Painting over it then gave us brand-spankin' new walls and I'm super thrilled with the results.

It was my very first time hanging wallpaper and I did it all by myself so I'm giving myself a big pat on the back :)



Here you can see the whole room top to bottom. We need to put new window trim up. You might get a better idea of the room color. We laid new concrete backer board on the floor in preparation for new tile.

Because the subfloor was warped just enough we had to use levelling compound underneath the backer board to make sure there weren't any major dips or bumps. I was not about to lay tile floor to have it crack on me!

So far things are looking good an level and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we evened things out enough that everything will stay intact :)




So here is the almost finished result. We got the walls done and the tile floor is down. We used a prefab patterned tile. It's alternating hexagons with 1" squares in between.

When the bathroom is fully completed I'll take bigger closeups so you can see more of the details. I'm super duper happy at how this is turning out. Mainly because I don't think anything could have been worse than what was there before!

More to come on the bathroom reno in the next little while.

Hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are. The sun is shining here today and I'm going to leave DH to the trim work in the bathroom while I fire up the torch and kiln to see if I've forgotten how to melt glass!