Heya! Oh my geezus (Gus’ latest catch phrase)! Here we are at week 10! It’s been so long since the last update, I feel so guilty. The holidays threw a wrench in my plans so we will just ignore them, and not even count them as part of my timeline. We’ll just skip right over Christmastime and begin week 7 right after the New Year. Can I just say again that I am soooooo looking forward to wrapping this up!

At the start of week 7, I was still waiting for the floor tiles to be delivered from Clé, and the only job I could work on was that one thing thing that I was trying to avoid at all costs. Lemme just say that grouting can go jump off a bridge and die. It wrecks your shoulders, is incredibly messy, and it somehow can make an hour seem longer than even the least enjoyable church sermon of your youth. With a lot of focused meditation, I got my mind right, and just did it. Over the course of 2 or 3 afternoons I managed to grout the entire shower including the shampoo nook. You may have noticed that I grouted everything except the bottom 1/3 of the shower. My plan is to finish tiling the shower pan, and then finish the subway tiling and grout after. The cement hexagon tile needs room to expand and contract, so having the subway tile (on the wall) float “on top” of the cement tile (as opposed to butting up to it) seemed like the better move. *Technical writing is not my strong suit.

After dousing myself repeatedly (with all my clothes on) from the shower head, I was able to install our brand new sparkling shower fixtures! Everything works and no leaks! And how about that setup? I really love everything about the Kohler Purist line, it’s able to be both modern and traditional at the same time (which is exactly what I need in this new basement bathroom of this old house).

The grout still needs to be cleaned up, the tiles still need to be sealed, and the corners need to be caulked — but we’re getting there!

Here’s when it starts to get good. Week 9 the floor tile finally arrives. It happened on a super snowy day and my delivery guy could only drop the palette in the street. This was the same day that our water heater and boiler went out, so finally receiving the tiles and having to lug box after box in from the street was a welcome positive for the day.

I immediately removed the toilet and began laying out a dry run of the tile in the bathroom. I wanted to see how the pattern fit. I used pennies as spacers (since I didn’t have 1/16 spacers purchased yet and they are basically the same width). At first I had the tile arranged so that the lines of the tile were all going the long way down the room (we’ll call this vertical). I realized after laying out all of the tile that it would be much more successful if I rotated it 90º to have the line of the tile run horizontal. I made sure to have the toilet line up with one band of horizontal tile, as well as center the drain in the shower. After putting all this effort into this project I needed to make sure that I did my best to prevent any part of the room from looking lopsided. The shower drain and toilet were the biggest visuals, and they needed to be centered! Everything else wouldn’t stand out as glaringly if it was not completely symmetrical — you have to pick your battles. The moral of the story is, that I am very crazy.

I made you guys this “tile layout”
\ so you could maybe understand my thought process. See? Toilet, centered. Sink, centered. Shower drain, centered. So worth the extra time it took to do this part.

This pic is me trying to illustrate to you, how I went about dry fitting the shower and then using the laser level to line up the pattern in the main part of the bathroom. After finding this center mark for the drain, I was able to run this pattern the long way to make it line up right in the middle of the toilet (see below). Everything is so dang symmetrical!

Yesterday I held my breath and began installing the floor tile. The first tiles were laid right off of my laser level, and then continued down towards the toilet. Cutting tile to fit around the toilet and making sure that everything was square, level, plumb, and looking amazing took up most of my time yesterday. Tomorrow I will begin again and hope that the rest of the bathroom fills in quickly, as I expect it too because the detail cuts are few and far between.

Can’t wait to share week 11, I think lots will have changed and I have my hopes set high that the floor will be completely installed. Home stretch, here I come!