It Has Begun!

Guess who has tiles attached to the wall in her new bathroom?

That's right! Meeeeeeeeee!!!!!

Once we got all of the villaboard up on the walls and our plumbing connections installed, we were ready to bring in the tiler. It's crazy, but I actually feel kind of guilty that we aren't sticking with our die-hard DIY commitment and attempting to tile the bathroom ourselves. We simply don't have the time, though. Not only are we juggling full time jobs so it would take a LONG time to tile the room properly on the weekends (factoring in all of the mistakes we would make), not to mention the fact that we are a little scared of prolonging our time using the existing slightly-unsafe bathroom, but the big reason? We're on a deadline. Tom and I are heading off on our dream once-in-a-lifetime tour of Europe in just over two weeks. For three months! AAH! Even I can't believe it!

So... given the time constraints, we're going with the tiler, ok?

OK. Glad we got that sorted out.

Once we had constructed the new doorway, the tiler was FINALLY able to come in and waterproof the room.


According to Australian standards, we need the whole floor waterproofed, plus 100mm up each of the walls, plus all the way around where the shower will be, up to about 2100mm high.


That had to dry for a day, and then the tiler could lay the 'bedding' - a concrete mix that builds up the floor a bit so that it can all drain towards a floor waste in case we ever have a flood in there. This also had to dry for a day, while we impatiently waited for tiles to start materialising.

And then came the wonderful day that saw the floor tiling completed.



And then... the wall tiling!


And then if you look to the left...


Oh oh. See that black tile resting at the bottom of the wall there? We placed that there once we realised that although our tiler had done a magnificent job with tiling that wall, it was supposed to be done in our black pinstripe tiles (see here), not the same tile as the rest of the floor and walls!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

sourced from New York Presbyterian

Breathe, Bec, breathe.

So we called the tiler, who apologised profusely and had to rip off most of those wall tiles. To save him a bit of effort, we suggested that he only rip off the tiles that he absolutely had to - the ones that wouldn't be hidden behind our fairly large vanity unit (see here). So we marked the area where the vanity unit would sit, and he tiled the black pinstripe tiles around it.


Much better! Although it did look pretty strange with the white tiled rectangle at the base of the wall.

As you can see from the reflection in those gorgeous black tiles, the opposite wall of the bathroom (i.e. the one to the right of the window) is still very blue, so stay tuned to see what happens with it!