One Room Challenge - Week 4, Room #2

It feels like we've been talking about this 3x5' floor forever right?  I feel ya.

We painstakingly measured and remeasured and remeasured.

Then finally we laid all the tile.

With the help of a 4 legged supervisor.

Done!  The grout looks pretty white now but it will (IT HAS TO!) dry gray.  

Check out the other ORC participants here.

One Room Challenge - Room #2, Week 3

Who says you don't need math?  There was a lot of math involved in this floor design.  Herringbone floors are pretty but I never gave much thought to the actual process of getting it to look pretty.  This was our inspiration and look how perfect those tiles look...now we need to get ours looking that way.

Source

You see if you don't have a perfectly square space (and who does?) then the herringbone will get all out of whack at some point in the room. To combat that we laid a border tile that was exactly square (the bead board will hide any gaps) and then began to figure out the herringbone pattern from there.

Complicated step #2 is figuring out how big the tiles should be and how to lay them in order to reduce the number of cuts and strange triangles on the end.  In our case, this meant tiles that were 3 13/16" x 7 3/4" with 1/8" tile spacers.  Got all that?

Complicated step #3 is deciding where the 1st tile should be laid and then work off that.  If that first tile isn't perfect then the entire design will get off track.  Sean drew diagonal lines from corner to corner of our square border and then worked off of that.

It is a very good thing that one of us is a turd polisher perfectionist (spoiler alert - it isn't me!).

Check out the other participants' progress here.

Two Room Challenge - Week #2, Room #2

Hi again.  Week 2 of my self-imposed Two Room Challenge (you can check out the other participants here).  Head spinning yet?  I am.  The amount of demolition dust in my house is insane slash totally normal for us.   

Today is the powder room.  A reminder of we looked like a couple weeks ago...

...and how we look today.

The overall look I'm hoping for (though maybe I'll replace the wallpaper while we're at it?  I mean, it is 8 months old after all).

We're still in a hurry up and wait stance with the plumber so in the meantime we choose tile.  I love this herringbone slate floor (coincidentally from prior One Room Challenge participant!):

Because this is a very high traffic bathroom with boys who can't aim I'm going to go with a porcelain rather than natural slate.  This is a pretty good fake (it even feels real).  We bought it in 8" x 32" tiles and we're going to cut it down to 3 13/16" (got that?) x 7 3/4"...and when I say "we"...

My brother drafted up the design so we finalize the layout before we actually started cutting the tiles.  The hard part about herringbone is that you can't just cut tiles and lay them down.  In order for the design to work out perfectly you have to take into account the grout lines.  Hence the reason for the crazy 3 13/16" measurements.

No one should be surprised I asked the husband for the most complicated tile layout I could imagine.  I'm the same person who also sweet talked him into building me a crazy complicated gable :)  I think he still likes me.

Check out the other One Room Challenge participants here.

Two Room Challenge - Week 1, Room #2

Welcome back.  If you're following along, Linda from Calling It Home is hosting the One Room Challenge and because I'm a masochist I'm making it a Two Room Challenge.  One intentional (family room) and one unintentional (1st floor powder room). 

The powder room was the unintentional renovation.  While installing a slider door in the basement we discovered mold and rotten wood from a toilet that had probably been leaking for years.  

The good news is we discovered the problem before it was a widespread mold problem and our toilet fell through the floor.

The bad news is that it meant we had to completely gut a room that we had already renovated.  Womp womp.

So down to the studs it went.  Not even a sub-floor remains.  That's the basement floor you see between the joists.

 The room looked like this the day we moved in.

Then it looked like this...

...then a little of this....

...and today it looks like this:

The plumber says the stack would probably be fine for another 10 years but because we already have the walls open we're going to replace the entire thing now.  Cha ching.

Sigh.  Money and time I hadn't planned on spending.  Plumber comes next week and then it will be time to put this room back together.  Again.

Check out the other crazies attempting the One Room Challenge!