The Boulder... To be continued

Chris has a nice story to tell you about the boulder but he's been a bit busy to post the pictures and update the blog. I wouldn't do the story justice so I won't even try. He'll update soon, don't worry.

In the meantime, half of December is almost over and what do we have to show for it??? Not much. Obviously our latest project is the master bathroom. Here's the list of to do's before we started...

• door (plastic brown accordion door will not do. let's see how a bi-fold looks)
• toilet (purchased and waiting in the mud room since the end of summer)
• lighting (done)
• vanity (also purchased and waiting since the summer)
• paint (need to pick a color)
• regrout (sloppy & inconsistent 1/8", or less, grout between 12" tiles... sigh)
• change toilet paper holder (porcelain holder that's be pseudo painted over... Horrid)
• baseboards (decent but we've got lots left over so we might as well change it)

That's about it.

First things first... the door. The infamous 30" bi-fold bathroom door has been trimmed to fit the 28" opening. The only problem now is the height. We didn't compensate for the track so we have to trim some in that direction too. Will we ever get that door up???

The lighting was updated when the rest of the house was done. Its pretty plain and simple but cheap. Maybe we'll get fancier ones later. Now the mirror/medicine cabinet is another story. Imagine a nice big 2'x2' mirror with moulding to match the sink and cabinet. You think to yourself, "This is nice. We can keep this." Then you open the mirror to find a 12"x18" opening sunk into the wall that vaguely resembles a medicine cabinet. That's like half the size of the mirror! And that's not all. Instead of say a magnet keeping the door closed like most medicine cabinets have, this guy attempted to use velcro. VELCRO!!! One question comes to mind... WHY??? But wait, that's still not all. Velcro might not've been his first choice. Perhaps he did originally want to put a magnet or latch or some other form of closing device. Its logical to assume that he'd buy a kit and put it on. Most kits have screws to mount the mechanism. Seems easy enough. So genius proceeds to put the screws in the back of the mirror to line up with the cabinet frame. Uhhm, the mirror only has like a 1/4" thick or less piece of fiberboard behind it. And the screw must be longer than 1/4". Screws don't normally go into mirrors very well. Now the reflective surface of the mirror is scratched and there's essentially a hole in the mirror. Luckily he didn't break through the glass, but the mirror is now flawed regardless. So Chris tore out the whole thing and patched the drywall for our new surface mount mirror/cabinet. Much better.

Since Chris was in the drywall mood, he took off the towel racks and tried to smooth out the wall. Like everything else, our lovely previous owner must've had five different types of towel racks cuz there were lots of holes in the wall. The surface of the wall was uneven too, like he had a spackle party. And what does Chris discover under that mess?... He spackled over the wall anchors. We end up cutting out a piece of the wall cuz that would look better than us trying to "fix" it. Just replace the whole thing. Another discovery Chris made, the towel rack was less than an inch away from the studs on both sides. You can tell this guy knew what he was doing.

In between the days of waiting for the joint compound to dry, Chris chiseled out most of the grout from the tiles. We can't regrout until we get the toilet out. Fun.

Moving on... Chris attached the moulding around the shower doorway and baseboards yesterday. We have so much extra that we're just going to redo the baseboards everywhere. And a side note... Are you supposed to use caulking to adhere baseboards to bathroom walls? Cuz our beloved previous owner thought that would be a marvelous idea.

Someday our house will be done. We'll still accept donations. ;-)