My goodness gracious, folks. Installing wall tile is hard work.

Just ask Jason. He did it all this weekend.

We spent last week getting things in order for the Big Tiling Day. We bought the tiles, the grout, the thinset; we borrowed all sorts of tools and thingmajigs from our friends who had redone their kitchen floors and bathroom. I watched some videos and read some articles about how to tile walls and Jason read a book we borrowed and talked to some people who had done it already. We were ready. And nervous. But mostly ready. Kind of. Because we kind of skimmed the articles and the books and fast forwarded through the videos. Because we’re rebels. Also: kind of stupid. But we’d skimmed a lot of articles so I was confident in our ability to hang a few pieces of tile without killing anything.

At first it was kind of rocky. We had already measured and marked the walls, but our thinset was too thin and the tiles kept slipping and falling. I put up two tiles and held two tiles while he put up two more. There was a lot of standing around with my arms in the air attempting to press tile into the wall, and then a lot of “Can you move?” and “Can you hand me that?” and “Can you just…” Two people was one person too much for that job, so after some brief discussion about who should do the tile (Jason won by default as we’re tiling to the ceiling and I am just not tall enough to reach it), I went to tackle our spare bedroom/office area/dumping ground for all of our crap for which we cannot find a spot.

It took a really long time. An embarassingly long time. We still had boxes we hadn’t unpacked from when we moved in 4 months ago (we are clearly on top of things) and those were the boxes of crap that don’t really have a category (a candle holder; an old journal; a Thanksgiving cornicopia; some ribbon; an old Boy Scout uniform; pictures on CD). I found places for them! Sometimes those places were in a trash bag, but whatever. Who needs wedding pictures? NOT ME. GET THEM OUT OF HERE. (I did not throw out my wedding pictures, even though we never look at them and we also have a gigantic book of pictures so PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME WHY we need three CDs of wedding pictures that are just taking up space? CDs do too take up space. Not a lot, but still. How am I supposed to simplify if no one will let me throw out shit I never use? Gah!) I felt all kinds of accomplished. An organized office area eases my stress levels. I need to be able to find things. My mother was right this entire time.

Our house came with really pretty wooden blinds that also hadn’t been cleaned since… uh, well. Ever. I never cleaned them. I meant to, honestly. I just got distracted by the fact that our house smelled like a dog for two months and then we had a small ant issue and the blinds never got cleaned. Maybe Jason cleaned them when I wasn’t paying attention? The amount of dust on the blinds makes that theory doubtful. I had been cleaning the blinds as we’d gone through the rooms, so when we painted the living room I took off the blinds and cleaned the grime off of them. The same with the grey room. But my parents are coming on Saturday–have I not mentioned that?–so I am being super cliche and cleaning everything so when they come they will think that we magically have a spic and span house every day of the year.

I will fool them all.

The last time we talked about the bathroom, the walls looked like this:

They remained that way as the plumber came to install the tub and when the floors were installed. This weekend, however, the insulation and support beams were finally covered. We have walls, folks. Glorious, blessed walls. Go hug your walls right now and tell them you’ll never take them for granted.

Our bathroom is actually starting to resemble a bathroom again! Our friend’s brother came over to assist us in the hanging of the drywall (read: he did all the work and we bought the materials and then watched him), and I was so excited about the stupid walls I forgot that we’d have to actually tile them. Thankfully the backer board is installed and the whole thing is level, so that’s one less thing to worry about. Other things to worry about include: the tile falling off the wall and breaking my toes/foot; being able to actually tile anything; world peace.

We bought the tiles (and tile accessories) this evening and I’m getting a little bit excited. I’ve never done something this big before and I’m really hoping we didn’t bite off more than we can chew by deciding to do it ourselves.

Still To Do
Install moisture barrier and backer board
Install tile
Paint
Install vanity
Hook up sink and fixtures
Install light fixture
Install shower fixture
Replace baseboard and door moulding
Rehang towel racks
Install toilet paper holder

We’ve been owners of this house for three and a half months and I still don’t feel settled. Perhaps it’s because we have boxes in one room in various states of unpacked; there is Frog tape in two rooms because we need to paint the trim. Our sliding glass door doesn’t have blinds or curtains to cover the glass. One room has paint samples on the walls and the longer I look at them the more I hate them.

I’ve always hated the bathrooms, though. Our house has the standard two bathrooms, and in each of the bathrooms are off-white acrylic inserts for the tub and shower. No matter how hard I scrub they never feel clean. The toilet in the hallway bathroom runs constantly. We’ve tried to fix it a few times and each time we tinker it stops running, but a few weeks later it’s back to its old ways. The counter tops on the vanities are a strange concrete texture which makes them nearly impossible to clean without tearing up the sponge, and while the wooden cabinets and drawers look great on the outside, on the inside they’re unfinished and sticky.

My parents have always been very fair people. They have two children: myself, and my 25 year old brother. My brother bought a house about two years ago, and anyone who’s ever bought a house knows that the little things can add up quickly. All you need is a new light, and all of the sudden you’ve spend $300 dollars. My parents figured out that they spent about $1,500 on his miscellaneous house stuff and, in the interest of fairness, decided to send us that same amount of money to do with what we wished, as long as it pertained to fixing up our house.

We decided to completely renovate the hallway bathroom. It was the one seen by most people and it was the one with the bathtub. At roughly 35 square feet, it was also the biggest bathroom in the house, and would therefore be the most expensive bathroom to redo. There are other things we’d like to do to our house as well: new sprinklers, a back deck, hard wood floors, new kitchen cabinets, building a desk for the office, removing bushes from the back yard, covering up the man-made pond area that has since dried up and is now growing… stuff. But the bathroom? The bathroom is the most important part. People see the bathroom. They use it. They judge us by it. Don’t act like they don’t.

First, we needed a plan. We needed to budget our money effectively without sacrificing what we really wanted to do in the bathroom. We knew that we wanted to replace the existing vanity with a smaller one (the old one spread across one wall and made the bathroom feel smaller) as well as replace the old acrylic insert with a tub and tile the walls. The old tile floor would go as well. And let’s throw in a new, non-running toilet while we’re at it.

We spent a lot of time at Home Depot researching tubs and pricing out fixtures. We decided on a bathtub and a toilet with relative ease. In the middle of June we went to Portland for a meeting with the adoption agency and hit up Ikea, as I’d never been. We really liked this black/brown sink cabinet – it was exactly what we were looking for. Jason went back a few weeks later and picked up both the cabinet and the sink (sold separately). About two weeks ago we went to Home Depot again and got a light fixture, the faucet for the sink, and the fixtures for the shower/tub.

Which brings us to yesterday, when we officially started the renovation.

We are lucky enough to be friends with a dude who knows his shit when it comes to installing bathrooms. He does it for a living, in fact, and was gracious enough to help us throughout this process. Jay and his wife Meg came over last night to get the demolition under way.

Jason and I removed all of the non-essential and easily movable things from the bathroom and threw them in one of the bedrooms. (See the Frogtape on the baseboards? It drives me crazy but we have to get a different trim paint because the flat paint we thought we wanted gets very dirty very easily. We should have known. Life and learn. DO NOT USE FLAT PAINT FOR TRIM OR ELSE YOU’LL HAVE TO REPAINT EVERYTHING AND YOU WILL HATE YOUR LIFE.)

It didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Meg and I went to get a pizza and by the time we got back, there was no more sink or toilet. As the pizza was cooking, the boys were sawing the tub in half and removing it. Then they removed the tile from the floor.

What I like most about renovation so far is seeing what things used to look like. The floor, for instance. Once the tile was removed we were able to see a yellow linoleum underneath. I can absolutely understand why it was covered.

Tonight involves cleaning up the remnants of the drywall and tub, which they sawed in half like manly men. Actually, they had to saw it in half or else it wouldn’t have been able to fit through the door. But still. THEY SAWED THE TUB IN HALF.

What does one do with the old bathroom stuff? Why, they stick it in the garage!

Our plan is to install the tub and flooring over the course of the next week or so. Then we’ll tile the shower surround and I’m a little nervous about that because I’ve never tiled anything in my life. But! It will save money and it will be a good learning experience, and hopefully I’ll be able to help other people with what I’ve learned, just like Jay has helped us.