Maybe we can take showers tonight.....

What a weekend! We rented a tile saw Friday  night with our overly optimistic thoughts that we might be able to finish all the tricky cuts for the wall tile and the floor in time to return the saw when the rental place opened at 9 am the next morning - which would give us a a 4 hour rental instead of a 24 hour rental - but working until midnight, there was still plenty to do the next morning.  But - by 9 pm last night, we were grouting!

Love, love, love the marble "rug" in the shower floor.  The bench on the right is going to be great, too. 


We're been in this house for 7 weeks - and maybe tonight we'll actually be able to take a shower!  Actually, 7 weeks doesn't sound that long until I think about the daily bathing using the kitchen sink --



The long view shows the undrywalled walls, wooden floors and the janky shower curtain we'll be using until we get shower glass installed - which won't happen until January!  We'll be leaving in a few days to go back east for Christmas -- I wanted to be sure we had a semi-functioning bathroom when we returned!

Finally....starting to tile

OK -this is getting kind of ridiculous - between Dale working overtime and me finishing up the semester with meetings and grading, we just weren't getting anything done at all.  But finally this week we have the shower pan poured and now it's tile for awhile!

Hard to take a picture this evening - the tile is bright white and I am hoping to get the walls done tomorrow morning.  I have a few tiles that I need a wet saw to cut, so I am just leaving those until I rent one this weekend (I need one for the floor), but I should have all the wall field tiles done.  I am hoping to post a picture this weekend of a semi-complete shower.  The room still needs drywall and a floor, but what I am really wanting is a finished shower!

patiently waiting....

Oh, bathroom, when will you ever be done?  I spent a little time this weekend - while waiting for various things to dry - fixing up a couple of display boxes for this great collection of vintage porcelain and ceramic baby shoes that I have. 

And then, of course, I could not find the box with all the little shoes in it.  I think I have about 35 of them.  I may need more shelves....

While dismantling the previous bathroom, I saved the drawer from the vanity.  I also had an older small drawer that I added a fun decorative knob to.  I found some scrap wood from the scrap wood pile (which is kinda enormous right now) and cut some extra shelves to fit.  The larger drawer had really horrid floor tile stuck to the bottom and I could not pry it out, so I glued some pages from a vintage music book to cover it up.  So these are going to go on the wall in my future bathroom. I have another drawer out in the garage to work on still.  Who knows, maybe I'll find the baby shoes by the time the bathroom gets finished, which appears to be in the not-to-near future.

Table makeover

I have been scouring Craigslist for a dresser to convert into a vanity for our bathroom, but we need a pretty specific size, and I have some things on my wishlist for it (curvy front, long legs, drawers on each side, not just down the middle), so nothing's fit my requirements yet.  However, I did see a kitchen table (another thing I've been looking for) - and the price was right - FREE.  So Dale and I drove over & picked it up on Saturday morning. 



 It's a pretty small round table (42" diameter), but with the leaf in, it measures closer to 5', and so that works for our kitchen. 









 It's nice enough oak with a claw foot pedestal, but the top was in real rough shape --







So I took the sander to it and got the top all sanded down to bare wood.





Painted the pedestal a nice satin black (along with the apron of the table)







Projected an image of a French Chocolate ad from Graphics Fairy on the tabletop.

(this is not my original idea - I am copying from a table I saw on another blog I read: Red Hen Home)

Painted this with black acrylic paint --

Distressed the lettering a bit with sandpaper, then gave it two coats of Antique Walnut stain.  This is the first coat going on --   

Second coat finished, and first of 6 coats of hand-rubbed Poly.









Put it back together and now it's in my kitchen!

Sigh. It looks so nice, it makes the kitchen look even worse!  I think I need some black chairs to go around it - maybe an assortment of mis-matched chairs with matching fabric seats, all painted black.

Shower progress

Arg - with all the power outages caused by winds out here in SoCal, Dale was on-call this weekend, so the planned progress with getting the shower ready to tile was delayed - but he did get an initial layer of the mortar bed down.

 

He was just getting ready to do the final layer when they called him to work.  I sure hope we get a shower soon!

Tree in front of the house

The weather is still nice in sunny Southern CA, so I'd rather be working outside than in - besides, I have a TON of grading to do and I need a physically satisfying job to take my mind of it all!  So I decided to start tackling the tree in front of the house by the street.  With our plumbing woes of a couple of weeks ago that revealed that we've got a massive amount of roots in the old pipes, the plumber said that some of the main culprits are the ivy on the ground and growing through the tree.  Plus, that poor sad tree is covered in ivy.

This is how it looked when we closed on the house.  The ivy in the planting strip will have to be dug out, but for now, I'm going to start liberating the tree.

Today, I cut a strip around the entire tree of ivy vines and branches.  I had to saw a bunch of them off.  Luckily, this is a type of eucalyptus tree that sheds bark, so once I cut through the vines, it was relatively easy enough to pull them off the tree.  I am hoping that cutting a ring around the tree will help the ivy above start to die --- but I don't hold a lot of hope in this theory -

I also have to cut and clear years and years worth of vines, grass, droppings, eucalyptus pods and McDonald's toys from the base of the tree.  Oh, and dog poop.  One of the downsides of having a messy yard is that people apparently don't think they have to clean up after their dogs when they poo by the tree -- and really, who'd blame them?  Oh yea - ME.










So now it looks like a lollipop with a big green top:

Here's the neighbor's tree.  Yep, this is how I want it to look.  But it's gonna take some time.  And loads and loads of trash. 

baby steps!