Update Tour: Orange Bathroom

This room is now referred to as the orange bathroom, because it is. The color is Orange Crush from Valspar. And I heart it. I heart it so hard. 

This picture strangely cut the walls into yellow and red. Rest assured they are very orange. I love the shower, and the epoxy grout means there isn't a line of caulk in any seams. They grey plays really nicely with the orange.

Our fight for the hex tile has finally ended and its awesome. It has the same epoxy grout as the shower, which makes it super easy to bleach mop. (Which has been done - don't ask.) It runs at a toasty 73 degrees, which definitely takes the chill off. My right toes can somehow find a cool spot when standing at the sink, but I haven't heard anyone else mention it and it's easily solved by moving my foot. We actually decided to keep the original door and put some hinge pin door stops on it to protect the sink. The back of it has one coat of white paint already. The window trim is back up, and is looking NASTY, but it won't for long. We have to use exterior paint on it because it is actually in the shower a bit. 

The cabinets were hung much lower so they're actually accessible. Cabinet doors are in the cabinet workshop in the basement. Hopefully they will be hung in the next week or so. (Side note: I still hate open front cabinets! Even more passionately now that I've lived with them for a few months!)

We need a little trim around the top of them, since they were originally touching the ceiling. 

Our sink is the bomb. We have a Kohler medicine cabinet named Archer. 

Because awesome.

I went with the curved shower rod for extra space. It comes pretty close to the fan light but doesn't actually touch it. It's not exactly symmetrical, but it's definitely worth it from inside the shower. 

And the look back:

The look through...

Moving day or the day before (it's all a blur to me now):

Week One in the new house:

Insanity

The past three weeks have been a mad dash to get the house habitable as quickly as possible. Habitable might still be a stretch, but I am writing this post from my bed in the new house! 

We hired all the guys. (Our electrician is actually a woman, but you get the gist.) On the whole they have been pleasant and friendly and easy to work with, despite the logistical issues of plumbing vs. electrical vs. drywall vs. tile. I think our biggest setback has actually been scheduling around Thanksgiving. Seriously people! Quit holidaying already. (J/k)

We had a rare night out a few weeks back, and I was showing these pictures to friends who were asking how the house was going. After I asked one of them how things were going for them, and he said "Well I don't have any pictures of my water softener on my phone, so..." We are, apparently, old.

 In line water filter, or something like that. 

Our petting zoo of kitchen appliances! We have guys taping and mudding drywall as I type so hopefully these will be in the right spots soon. I made the Sears guys week when I walked in and said, "Mr. Darryl, I'm ready to buy". 

We got spray foam insulation. It is messy! It makes the Mr. very happy. 

The master bedroom. It is no longer this clean. The Mr. made the lights work and installed the ceiling fan all by himself. Still waiting for the electricians to connect the 'receptacles' aka outlets.

The kids playroom and the master as of 48 hours ago. I love love LOVE how the paint colors have been working out. Hotel Cincinnatian Abbey (valspar) for the kid and Palladian Blue for us (Ben Moore). Pantone Ecru in the landing. 

Bathroom floor!

Master floor. We used Rejuvenate to seal the floors, although the master didn't get the full dry time before drywallers were walking through it. We will see what it looks like when it's clean. 

About 3pm yesterday.  Pantone Ecru on the walls. Grandpa T did all the cutting in around the crown molding without tape. Amazing. 

About 9pm last night. Liquid level over electric heat. You might remember that we took out the heating duct to this room when we enlarged the wall opening downstairs. They will put the tile in today. 

My current view. In a blessing from the past or a show of gratitude or whatever, I discovered that someone had but screw holes exactly 40" apart which made it possible for me to hang six sets of blinds in about 40 minutes with my eyes crossed from exhaustion. Thank you, house. Thank you. 

Walls walls walls

We have a laundry room! Or nook? Closet, perhaps?

View from the master bathroom.

View from the hallway. Can't wait to teach the kid to wash his own clothes!

Apparently there were ceiling lights in the dining room at one point. Eagerly awaiting their triumphant return.

We also have a new wall between the bathrooms. 

Can I just say how proud I am of the Mr? If you had asked me in May if he was about to start framing walls and plumbing  houses I would have tried to let you down very easy, cause I'm nice like that.

Let the sun shine in

If you know me, then you probably know that's a 40 Year Old Virgin reference, and that Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and Romany Malco are bare chested singing and dancing inside my head right now. (Hopefully inside your head now too). Because NOT ONLY do we have a toilet that flushes without buckets (!!!!!!!!) we also have an amazing new window!

Guys hard at work. It's hard to remember how high off the ground the window really is...

Like, standing on scaffolding high. 

There was no way I could get the picture to balance on my iphone. The window is so bright!! But you can see the Mr.'s recent plumbing progress under the window. 

So I took another picture to show much light we're getting in the dining room these days. 

Now that the center section is gone, we can see so much further into the park (over our neighbor's shed), but there's a lit path that's visible into the park, and I think it will be really lovely in the evening. 

In less exciting progress, after much vacuuming and mopping, the Kid has a place to play and actually has indoor toys on site! We're still waiting on the new electrical wiring before we can paint, but we'll be painting like gangbusters in a few weeks. Tentative plan is to reseal the hardwoods, move in, and have them refinished professionally later. Yes, it would be better to do this before we move. It would also be better to be millionaires. 

So we're not millionaires, but we do have giant dancing light up fountains on 'our grounds'. 

So here's a gratuitous fountain shot from our morning walk with the wagon. 

Next time I am going to ride and he can pull me. 

P.S. I thought that I might take a video of the Viper flushing, but then I thought, no, that's weird. People who read blogs on the internet probably know what flushing toilets look like. Rest assured we are BEYOND THRILLED about the flushing of the toilet. RIDICULOUSLY GRATEFUL to be able to use the bathroom in our home without having to go outside! (Giant bottle of hand sanitizer outside the door.)

Celebrating functional commodes with steak and sushi (and water that comes with umbrellas)

Behold, the Bucket Flush is BACK!

The big day has finally arrived - the day when we can go to the bathroom in our own house!!! I contemplated taking a video of it flushing, but I opted against it. If you haven't been without a toilet for months, you probably wouldn't have appreciated it in the same way. 

The Mr. is to be highly commended for his hard work, dedication, and new found skills. We're a little ways away from having running water yet, but the supply lines are connected through the bathroom. The tile came down for the water supply business, and he's already put it back. So getting running water to the toilet will be a basement project, not a bathroom project. 

Daddy's little helper helped for about 10 minutes before there was yelling and water all over the floor. Fortunately, our neighborhood block party was taking place so I walked while the Kid rode his bike around the corner and we hung out with our neighbors.

While we were at the block party, I got a text saying the Mr. needed another pair of hands. Clearly bringing the Kid back to the house would a) impede progress significantly and b) take a long time, since he had teamed up with the neighbor kids and was having the time of his life. I happened to mention this to one of our neighbors, and he stepped away from the grill, handed me the tongs,  picked up an extra beer for the Mr. and headed down to our house to help install the toilet. One of the many reasons that we can't wait to move in to this house!

The toilet is now installed, does not leak, and the tiles have been reattached to the wall. Hopefully they'll be out of the way enough that they won't pop back off. We have some grouting to do, but what else is new?

The Mr. headed back to our old house, took a shower and got cleaned up and came back for the end of the block party. It was a great afternoon, with lots of great people to hang out with, delicious food, and a pack of kids gleefully playing in the (barricaded) street. We came back for the cars and the guys had to test out the new toilet. Buckets of water obtained from our own hose! (The white bucket is actually empty, but he really wanted to carry a bucket. And a flashlight.)

The sun sets over the park, lighting up our whole cluttered porch. We can't wait to live here. 

The Great Wall

The wall that has been holding everything up for weeks is actually finished. In the end, it was one of the cheaper and faster projects we've done. In one day, the crew had widened the original opening, replaced the studs, and sistered the joists running through the bathroom. Pretty sweet, really. 

Not the greatest picture, but I think it's funny how well you can see the window in the master bathroom from the kitchen right now.

So the joists that were beveled and notched and just cut to pieces have been sistered across the bathroom floor. The really rotted nasty one in the kitchen has also been sistered, but that sister joist runs all the way across the ceiling of the kitchen (on the left in this picture).

A nice visual of how much wider the door opening is. It's about doubled in size. We had hoped to be able to take it out one stud further, but to do that we would have had to re-engineer the basement, because of the load distribution over the lintel of the doorway downstairs. This is one where a) getting what we wanted would have been impractical in terms of the amount of work and money and b) we chose to work with the house and not force it to do things that didn't make sense. 

So then this afternoon the Mr. moved the doors around. This is the door to the mudroom, which we moved a few inches to the left. This is to accommodate a utility sink in the mudroom and a full size counter/cabinet in the kitchen. 

If you'll recall, our original plan was to bump this wall out into the little closet to get a full depth refrigerator on this wall. Because of the brick column, which is supporting a steel beam which is supporting all the masonry on the second floor, we aren't able to do that. We've decided to go with a counter depth commercial fridge/freezer instead, and leave the wall alone. 

The doorway from the office to the kitchen is framed out now, to give us more counter/cabinet space. You can see the brick column just to the right. 

Next up: plumbing, electrical, dry wall, paint, world peace and moving.