Bathroom = Tiled

It's official. The tiles are all done in the bathroom!

And may I just say... it looks awesome!!!

Here's our feature strip up the wall to the right of the window (the tiler hadn't quite finished it at that stage).



Here it is from my favourite position, lying on the floor. This also gives you a great view of the ceiling colour.


So pretty .....


And now entirely complete, with the grouting done.


I'm not going to show you the whole bathroom just yet, because there's a certain item for that room that's still going through its makeover (see here for a big hint), and another one that's also going through a makeover that you don't know much about yet. Oooh the mystery!!!

Just you wait and see. It's going to be fabulous!!!!

P.S. Silver Fox

You know what I just realised Tom looks like as a silver fox?

sourced from Tom Cruise.com

Tom Cruise, in 'Collateral'! Perhaps that's only fitting, since both hair colours are fake, and neither of them are old enough true silver foxes yet. Thank goodness! Although give us a bit more renovating time and we both might just go grey for real!

Silver Fox

Ever wondered what Tom will look like when he goes grey?


No photoshopping, I promise! This was what he looked like yesterday after doing a bit of grinding. It's definitely all dust! More details about what he was doing to come.

What do you reckon? Can he compete with other silver foxes?

sourced from The Cinema Source

sourced from Radio Times

sourced from Kit Me Out

It's pretty hard to beat George... but he looks pretty distinguished, huh?

Allie's Hobby

I really do promise that the bathroom tiling pictures are coming soon!

In the meantime, see what Allie does to keep herself amused when we're busy:

Must keep those errant tails in check!

I've Got the Colour Bug

Remember how much I agonised first over whether to paint our master bedroom ceiling a colour *gasp*, and then which colour to paint it? And then I started dreaming about painting the internal doors in the house a colour as well? Well clearly I've caught some kind of colour bug because when the topic of painting the to-be-bathroom ceiling came up, I immediately said "not white!"

Here it is before we started attacking that room. You only get the tinest of tiny glimpses of it here in the top left, but it does show the relationship it had with the yellow walls. Yuck.


And here it is again when we were using the room for storage while we redid the floors.



Basically, it was white, the same as all the other ceilings in the house (were). The paint was in reasonably good condition, but it's still probably been many years since it was painted, so we had to paint it it. The question was, what colour?

Watch out folks, once you pop you can't stop! I couldn't resist the temptation to go with something other than white.

Don't worry, I'm sticking with fairly failsafe not-too-risky options, so I haven't gone crazy and decided to do this:

sourced from Marquis dePinkus

But I did happily drag Daniel down to Bunnings with me with our three different tiles for the bathroom and hold up paint chips against them. That was quite an experience, actually. My previous colour choices at Solver were made using those little booklets, which are not only tiny, but they're generally behind the counter in the custody of one of the staff, so I was never left to my own devices to experiment and take my time and make up my own mind. I would have had to hurt their feelings by asking them to leave me alone for a while to get a bit of paint chip privacy. While I imagine some people might like having a professional to give them guidance, I prefer being on my own and not feeling pressured into making a decision because they're getting fed up with my indecision.

So, I loved trialing a whole bunch of different colours (and brands) against the tiles at my leisure. It was amazing to me finding that virtually every colour I picked up in a certain brand looked horribly sick and yellow against our main tile, while every colour I picked up in another brand (Taubmans) looked like it worked. Who woulda thunk!

I developed a little shortlist, and lined them all up on top of the main tile (everything goes with the other two tiles - they're black).


Just out of interest, here they all are against one of our white doors. Look at how much darker they all seem against white, even factoring in the difference in lighting!



So. Which one did I choose?

The big one, called Grey Fog (inspiring name, huh?). It looked like almost exactly the same colour as the main tile, just a fraction darker. Knowing what I now know about how colours always look darker on a ceiling, I figured that was probably as dark as I needed to go to make it clear that it wasn't just plain white. Especially considering that the ceiling in the bathroom slopes down a lot, so the last thing I want is for the room to feel oppressive if I put too dark a colour up there. Plus, we're tiling a whole wall in black pinstripe tiles, so we probably don't need much more dark colour drama in that room.

I bought a wall paint because ceiling paints don't tend to come with whatever magical components they add to protect against mould, and I'd really rather not have issues cleaning the ceiling if I need to. I only bought 1 litre to do two coats on the 6 square metre ceiling, but as it turned out later, that wasn't enough so I had to buy yet another 1 litre can. Not very good value for money! I suggest going for more than you think you'll need, particularly when you're likely to have other rooms you can paint in the same colour (like we can the laundry and ensuite in the future).


Decision made, I got to work painting.


And I freaked out. Rather than looking like a pleasant grey-ish cream, it looked icky and yellowy and kind of horrible after the first coat. Now I think about it, that probably had a lot to do with all of the yellow walls that still remained - they probably reflected a fair bit of colour back onto the ceiling, particularly when it was still wet and only a thin coating.

I spent a fair bit of time in my favourite ceiling-viewing position, assessing it.


By the way, that white strip running down the centre was where we'd had to rip out the wire for the existing light in that room. Because it's almost impossible to get into the ceiling above the bathroom, all of the wiring is run on the inside of the room itself - very attractive. Anyway, we forgot about that light until I was already part way through painting the ceiling, so I had to leave that strip bare to allow for sanding down the rough edges and filling the holes the wiring left behind, before painting.


We ended up giving the ceiling three coats, just to be on the safe side, and we're really pleased with how it's turned out. Here's the view from the sleep-out before we sealed that wall.



Just you wait to see what it will look like with the tiles! Heaven!

I might just make you wait for a big reveal. That totally has everything to do with wanting to keep the mystery alive, and nothing to do with the fact that I may or may not have lost some photos of it.
Now really truly, my next post will be about the tiling happening! I promise!

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!

Woodworkers Extraordinaire

We are sooo impatient to get to the point where we can start tiling our new bathroom, but we have to get a few more bits and pieces out of the way now the electrical, plumbing, and villaboard are done.

The first thing? To close up the gaping hole in the bathroom left by the old doorway.


Obviously putting villaboard up on the bathroom side of that solves that problem, but from the other side that doesn't t look so good. So it was time to go shopping for some more second-hand VJs to make it look like a door never existed on the sleep-out side of the wall.

Technically that's not a task that holds up the tiling process, but because the VJs need to be nailed into the frame that the villaboard is glued to on the other side, we figured it was sensible to try to get that nailing out of the way before the villaboard was completely glued in place (and then tiled over), because heaven forbid we cause the tiles to move by hammering the wall behind them!

First things first, remove the architrave surrounding the door.


And then removing all of the non-full-size VJs. We can't have any tell-tale joins that give away the fact that this used to be a door now, can we?!


The ones above the door were pretty tricky to remove, actually. They were nailed into something inside the ceiling that we couldn't see (and can't access, because the ceiling cavity in this sleepout area is so tiny we can't get in there).


Tom ended up sawing off the boards with the circular saw (it's getting a workout at the moment) as close to the ceiling as he could, and then hammering them up into the ceiling.


He did first try pulling them down out of the ceiling, but they wouldn't cooperate, so hammering upwards was the solution.


Last one...


Allie watched from a safe distance.


Then we whipped out the circular saw again to cut through the doorstep (the floor of the sleepout is a bit lower than the main floor of the house, so each doorway off it has a piece of timber that acts as a doorstep. It would have peaked out underneath our VJ wall if we didn't remove it. Can't have that! Remember, this door has to act like it was never there!


And then came the fun part... well the fun part for me because it's the turning point where we can stop destroying things and start creating. Time to attach the VJs to the wall!


First one down (or up).


Allie made sure she supervised Tom's technique, and checked that they were all straight.


The gap is closing...


And that's as far as we got. As it turned out, we didn't have enough second-hand VJs that were tall enough, so we couldn't completely finish the job that day, but not far to go. I couldn't resist immediately attacking the new boards with a paint scraper. Not only are those VJs filthy (I think they're from the same batch that we put on the West Wall of our kitchen), but the existing paint on them is in terrible condition. I could pretty much peel the top layer of paint (the dirty one) just with my fingers (which in retrospect is what I should have done in the kitchen), and it didn't take much effort to peel the layer below that off with a paint scraper either. It's more work, but the perfect paint job on that wall in the future will thank me. You can see the peeling process creates quite a mess, though, as it did in Daniel's room!


So what's next? The bathroom doorway. We had to build a new doorframe for the new doorway that we had cut out. We thought it made sense to make sure it was snugly fitted in there before the tiling started so that everything slots in nicely.


Sounds simple, right? Two posts and a beam along the top, yeah?

No, of course not! We are living in a Queenslander, remember? So everything has to be pretty. And has to match the other doorways in the house. We currently have five doorways leading off the main living area, one of which is right beside our new bathroom doorway. So, they have to match, since any differences will be pretty darn obvious.

So, I put on my thinking face.


Daniel and Allie, not having anything useful to contribute, decided to go for comic relief.


Cute. Very cute.

Back to work! Tom bought two lovely long vertical posts that are the same measurements (i.e. width and depth) as the ones on the other doorways, and I salvaged the top horizontal pieces from the kitchen door that we had removed months ago.


Then came the very interesting process of measuring and cutting notches into the two verticals so the horizontals would fit in there securely. We grabbed my two horizontal beams (since you need one at the top of the doorway itself and then another one above the fancy window-ey thing above the door, like on the laundry doorway), measured where they went on the laundry doorframe, and marked on the new vertical posts where the little pre-cut chock bit would need to slot into the vertical post so they fit snugly. I swear I had more photos of this part of the process, but they seem to have disappeared!



Tom got it perfectly slotted in, and then when we stood back and compared the height of the horizontal above the door from the bathroom to the laundry, the bathroom one was too high! It had turned out we'd measured our chock mark off the wrong measurement from the laundry door frame. Not too hard to fix, we just expanded the lower end of the hole on the verticals so the horizontal would sit that little bit lower, and filled it up with glue so it couldn't go anywhere.

And voila! Done! Tom gave them a quick undercoat so the naked timber fits in better with our beautifully painted dining room, and we had officially relocated the doorway to the bathroom (pending the extra fancy bits like architrave and finishing putting up the VJs in the sleepout).


Next step hopefully... tiling! Huzzah!