Spring!

I have many posts in my head for you about bathrooms and spring and knitting. But, until they are actually written, here are some teasers.

The lilac leaves are new as of today. The sheep and goats are glad to be eating the grass that's just started growing in earnest as well.

Two walls

It's time for your Daily Tiling Update!

 

It's time for me to get a beer.

Tiling off the leash

Bill asked that I not start tiling the bathroom until he was able to work on it too because he wanted to be in on the fun. But after a day of that, he realized what he really wants is to be in is a working shower and the whole process would go quicker if I tiled while he was at work.

Being left alone with a bunch of tiles and blank walls is leading to some unconventional tiling. I can't abide straight lines and perfect spacing. Ick! It makes me feel restricted and bound and boring. This, makes me feel more organic and grounded...

I'm nearly done with the back wall (there is a heart stone that was added after this picture was taken), and just started on the one to the left. When I'm not mixing thinset or freezing at the wet-saw, I'm dreaming up new ways to use the remaining tiles. It's just like quilting but with rocks, ya know?

Bathroom tile warm-up

Bill had to go back to work today, so I've been sending him pictures of the bathroom to keep him excited for an evening of tiling tonight. TILE! TILE! Perhaps you'd like to see some photos too?

I was in charge of removing all the linoleum on the floor. Grrr. But done:

I also sanded some plaster which made my hair white. This photo was meant to tease Bill with how beautiful I'm looking today with the dusk mask, ear thingies (we just call them "ears" as in "do you have your ears on?"...but they must have a real name?), and dust that I can't shower off.

Our floor tiles are Travertine 6 x 18 subway tiles which will be offset by 1/3 because it looks balanced and will result in the least amount of cutting. Coopworth approves. (Actually, he just wants lunch.)

I cut some waterproof floor stuff. Note the holes for the toilet and water pipes. That's some fancy utility knife action there, my friends.

The shower walls are porcelain. I would have loved real stone for the shower, but the Bathroom Remodel Fairy didn't leave enough of a budget under our pillows. The shower is 2 2/3 tiles wide, so I think we're going to offset the rows like this:

We also have a wee accent stripe of white stone that will go somewhere. The tile man sold us "pencil" tiles (rounded sticky-out things) to put on the top and bottom of the accent to frame it and camouflage any difference in width between the accent and the porcelain. I'm not loving them and hopeful we can do something more artistic instead. They seem very serious and proper to me and that makes me sad and rebellious.

To balance out the straightness of the serious square shower tiles, we got Travertine cobblestones for the shower floor. They feel more earthy and natural - and therefore more happy-making - to me. I have the main bits laid out and there are lots of free-standing stones to fill in the gaps. We'll be sticking them down tonight!

Remember when this blog was about home improvement?

Surprise!!

We had a septic issue earlier this week (clogged vent pipe + tree roots in the drain pipe to the septic, which led to shower water bubbling up in our bathroom sink), which let us discover the floor under our toilet has been rotting due to something about a wax seal.

So, since we had to rip up the floor under the toilet anyway, we decided to go all in and redo the entire bathroom.

Monday and Tuesday were for dealing with the septic issue. Wednesday and Thursday were for demolition (I. Hate. Linoleum. Forever.). Today we're starting to reconstruct.

(Check out the 4 layers of wallpaper that were behind our shower!)

In an ideal world, we wanted to get a shower base and just tile the walls...but we live in a house where (as Bill keeps pointing out) the bathrooms are "retrofitted." They weren't here when the house was built, so they are eeeked in. This resulted in our shower drain being off center in the shower base and not really moveable without mucking about with 150 year old floor joists. As a result, we'll be building a shower base with Michigan Mud and something the Tile Shop calls "goof-proofs" to help us get the slope to the drain just right. We got some kickin' cobble-stone like tiles for the base that I'm pretty excited about.

Today we're prepping for tiling. We're hoping to get the bottom layer of the shower base as well as the bathroom floor ready for tiling next week. There is a bit of drywalling we have to do and Bill's working on the cement board for the shower walls right now.

When we pulled out the horrid fiberglass shower form, we were hoping to find treasure in the wall. We always hope for treasure. The walls have never delivered. Dumb walls. We just got a piece of a pipe and a half-ton of walnuts. Dumb squirrels in the dumb walls.

We did make our own little treasure for the next folks that tear down a wall. Bill and I wrote a letter about us, the house, and the world in 2014 and I put it in a Ball Jar with a bit of the linoleum floor I've been tearing up, some wallpaper, and coins. I also included a zip drive with some photos and videos of the house and farm and a copy of some of the posts from this blog. I have no idea if anyone will find it or if they'll be able to do anything with it when they do, but it seems fun.

Back to work! More to come as we (hopefully) make lots of progress.

13,000 words

Ready for some pictures?

Our coop (Coop d'etat) has been beautifully painted thanks to help from the family.

The chickens quiet enjoy it.




The bathroom has also been painted. Before:


After:


Growing in the garden...
Onions:

Potatoes amongst many weeds:


Dessert:


Beans, which we hope do better than last year.


Flowering peas:

Bathroom yick

We have a "master bedroom" on the first floor that we haven't paid much attention to since we moved it. It is currently a glorified closet and a night-time kitty jail. Not the nicest room in the house. Which is pretty sad, because in its prime, this was probably a lovely front parlor.

Some day it will be my crafty room (does "Fiber Studio" sound too snobby?), but now it is just yicky. This is due in part to the odd bathroom that was insensitively placed in the corner of this room - hence the "master bedroom" title. The room is now so oddly shaped that it could never function as a bedroom, unless the owner had a little tiny bed.

The bathroom is also disfunctional and poorly planned. For one, there is no heat register - we worship a small space heater in the winter. Also, there is no outlet for the humid air...no fan and the window, despite an hour of conjoling, scraping and banging, is inoperable. The moisture combined with lack of sufficient bathroom paint, has led to this:

And bubbles in the wall paint:

Plus, dirty brown is not the cleanest feeling color for a bathroom.

Someday, once the upstairs bathroom is functional, we'll get rid of this one in a creative way that allows us to keep the vital, pipe-carrying walls, but gets rid of most of the room. Until then, we are covering the multitude of sins with a coat of clean-colored, fresh-feeling paint. More photos soon!

Now with 50% less blue

Two of the four rooms in our house that were a tired sky blue when we moved in have been transformed into much nicer rooms that people would actually want to spend time in. You may recall our bedroom was the first to be tamed...

Bluefore and after:
And now the living room is done being painted! More photos when it's cleaned up, but here is a preview.

Bluefore:

(This, by the way is a photo of Bernie on the night before we brought Sugar home and threw his entire world into disarray. He thought the new doggy-sized bed was for him. Sucker.)

AFTER:


Two rooms are still in a state of bluedom. This was previously, I imagine, a lovely parlor before an awkward bathroom turned it into a "master bedroom." We've never showed you a photo before this moment because it is really the saddest room in the house. It will be the next to be tackled with the intent of creating a hobby room. We'd ditch the bathroom, but the walls contain the pipes going to the upstairs bathroom we want to keep. Dilemma.


The kitchen and adjoining pantry are also blue:


Eradicating those blues, however, is for another time. After a hard day of painting, some sleepy snuggles are now in order and I'm going to get in on this:

I'll take "Things that are yellow for $200"

I dyed some yarn with garlic mustard leaves this weekend. I know what you are thinking... boiling the leaves of a plant called "garlic mustard" must have been stinky. It was.

The resulting dye is a greenish yellow. This will soon be a lacy garlic mustard scarf!


Here are long awaited photos of the old-timey wallpaper we unearthed in our upstairs bathroom. Dunno what happened to the last ones in an old post, but I tried a billion times to fix it. Or like, three. Here is the old and older wallpaper without the derisive commentary.