Holiday Weekend??? Not for us!

We needed that loong 3 day Memorial Day weekend. We got lots done. Kyan stayed with her grandma. We missed her, but we are thankful to have had 3 full kid-free work days. Reminded us of our pre-kiddo days of doing projects.

Me and B are at our best together during projects… weird I know, but true. We are pretty proud of ourselves, oh and very tired too!

We got the ceiling completely painted, the room completely painted, the floor prepped  for tiling (which ended up being more work than we thought it would be), the dining room and living room walls re-painted, um…. seems like more that that.

I will post the pix in order as much as possible:

Here is the paint color. It is hard to see the color actually… we will have to try to scan a chip of it in. It is called Carolina Inn Club Aqua. It takes on different shades in different light…It is probably the most subtle paint color of any we have in our house. We debated going darker, but we both really like it.

We took up a 1/2″ thick plywood layer from pretty much the whole floor. Hard work. Love our pry-bar! And treat of treats, we DID have some really ugly, yellow, 70’s vinyl floor under it afterall!

Ewwww. This is what was under one corner of the room where at one time the washing machine was. Yes, when we bought the house the washer and dryer were in the kitchen. What the..??!!! We moved those out first thing, but some damage had obviously been done:

And under that lovlieness…. one plank of rotted subfloor:

We cut out the rotted plank to reveal… our crawlspace:

We were a little nervous at this point that we may have done something bad. We cut out the plank, but were not sure how to get it back in. The plank cut out was very old, tounge and groove…..so all those planks fit together. But thankfully we got a WONDERFUL, KNOWLEDGEABLE person at Lowes. We were worried we would get some part-timer who has never done real contractor work, but instead Gene met us at the door and explained just what we needed to do. And it worked! Thank you Gene!!! :

One more layer of  3/4″ plywood to even it out with the existing floor:

Hard to see here, but when we cut some of the rug back from the dining room, we discovered what the hardwood floors look like throughout the house. Not bad. Someday we will take up rug and refinish hardwoods…someday…..:

We needed to add a bit of self-levelling compound to half the room to make it almost exactly level. It was not that bad, just a slight bit lower on west wall:

So by day 3 (Monday) we started measuring, cutting and laying the cement backerboard. This took alot longer than we thought it would. We realized we are not so good at the exact measuring. So because of our mess ups, we had one more trek to Lowes on Monday for one more sheet of backerboard…DOH! :

We are pretty proud fo this maneuver. How to cut backerboard around the pipes (which protrude a bit higher than the floor…not sure we love this set up by the plumber, but we can work with it….). Will be interesting to tile around this too:

Mortaring under backerboard:

By the end of the evening, had all the backerboard screws in. That was long and tiring, and our knees were hurting. We are soo glad we invested in some good knee-pads:

We had hoped to get the seams mudded and taped, but did not. We will do that next weekend. We probably will not have the tiles till the end of next weekend or even later, so we will use this upcoming weekend to work on other stuff: paint touchups, window frame, rug/tile transitions, house and yard work.  Kyan really wants to be a part of the process…she asked to help us tile. We are trying to figure out how to involve her in some of those tasks.

We are proud of our work and were excited to get started on our part, but we were beat! And do realize the benefits to paying it done… well if money were no object of course 🙂