home is where the couch is

I'm a list girl. I have lists all over the house. Grocery lists, lists for things I have to do that day, that week, that month, supper lists...So of course, I have a list for the work we're doing in the back addition this month. I am determined to at least have a bathroom by the new year. Or at least a toilet.

My lists can be adjusted, I'm not so anal that they are written in stone. Which is a good thing because we're already a little behind. We were supposed to be mudding all the drywall screw holes and papering all the edges and corners this week. We were also supposed to be finishing putting up the drywall, but we ran out of drywall sheets. So instead of doing what was on the list, I was emailing and calling around for a truck or trailer large enough to put drywall into. Thank goodness for friends that we haven't seen in months that don't mind us mooching their truck.

I did get most of the bathroom door primed and painted. I'm pretty happy with it - it looks great and you can't tell where the door holes were unless you're looking really hard. Hopefully this week I'll be able to get the coats painted...it is on the list of things to do.

I did put in all the Schlutter Kerdi and I am pretty stinkin' proud of myself. If you don't know what it is - it's messy and time consuming, that's what it is. It's basically an orange membrane that you mortar onto your shower walls, floor, curb...anywhere water will hit. If you have a leak in between your tiles, the kerdi membrane will keep the water in and the water will just flow down to your drain, because you've kerdied the crap out of everything. I think it took me 8 hours give or take. I could kind of stand up straight when I was done...

We also put down the in floor heating wires. Well, the Man did that while I went out with the girls. I didn't thoroughly research everything like I usually do and didn't realize that I needed to prime the floor before we put self leveling compound down so that the compound can meld to the floor, gah, so the heating cables were down when I rolled on the primer. I hope that's okay, I don't want to invest all this work just so my tiles can crack!

We have been busy beavers this weekend. Even with the Roller Derby World Cup streaming live from Toronto!! I wish I had been able to get tickets, but this reno just sucks the money out of our bank account.

We've created a game plan for the next few weeks. We would have LOVED it if we had been able to finish this back addition before winter hit, but we now know we're really slow workers. And man, it's going to look good!!

I've been online looking at pocket door privacy locks. There isn't much out there that is affordable.

Halliday Baillie Locks

Linnea Solid Brass Mortise Pocket Door Privacy Latch

It's solid wood and still in good shape and I plan on painting it white cause, you know, paint hides a multitude of sins. There was an issue though. When I printed off the template for any of the privacy locks, the previous door holes were too far from the edge and none of the new locks would have covered them up. What to do?

I found a great answer on yahoo answers.

I filled in the mortise area with a similar sized piece of wood and glued it in. After it set, I filled in any area that the wood didn't fill and shoved as much wood filler in there as possible. Sand, prime and paint. I make it sound so easy. Could be because I'm still at the sand and refill section...

Windswept Smoke vertical siding

Things are slow going in the back room addition. I'm painting all the tongue and groove boards. There are about 200 of them. Or more. Feels like more.

 The Man has been working outside nailing up 2x4's around the window so that my little brother can put some aluminum or something around them to give them the framed look. The little brother says you don't need wood underneath, that he can just bend the metal so that it looks framed. But honestly? This is us and we're awfully good at banging into things. That metal will be dented like crazy if there's nothing underneath to keep it solid.



We have a visitor for a few days. Another teenager. I don't know how long they're going to be here but this should be interesting. Three teenagers and two adults with one bathroom. We better get crackin' and finish this thing so that none of us kills each other over cold showers!!

When we had a contractor here to work on our addition, the main thing we wanted was for our floors to be level and not bouncy and for everything to be structurally sound. Well, the floor in the bathroom is still bouncy. Grr. There's nothing we can do now except put another piece of plywood on top to strengthen it. I plan on doing the tiling and I will cry if they crack from bouncy underlayment. It's bad enough that I opened the tiles the other day and they were the wrong colour. And I can't return them. I did cry actually.

What colour I THOUGHT I bought

What colour I ACTUALLY bought

What happened was I got a super great deal through WagJag. I went in and I could have sworn that we looked up the tiles my brother had gotten and ordered the same ones. So I didn't check my tiles when I picked them up 8 months ago. I assumed that they were correct. I know, I know, when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me. So anyway, I opened them and they are really dark. Like black. And if you saw my previous post, I bought a dark Ikea vanity. So it's dark on dark. I'm trying to look at it that it's going to be a very masculine bathroom. I'm so disappointed because I hate walking in a room and just hating something every day. That's what's going to happen. I'm just going to hate it. Every. Single. Day.

The tile I have to work with

I know I pick on the Man for being a perfectionist, but this is my issue. Things don't have to be perfect, but they have to at least look like the image I've had in my head for 2 years. This doesn't. I don't have the money to go and buy new tiles. I keep looking at the receipt and going online and checking to see if somehow there was a mistake, but I can't find it. I'm debating at going into the tile store and looking at their tile board for this tile and see if there was a mistake on it saying it was one colour instead of the other. I just don't think I would've picked this colour!! I even have a photo of the one I wanted on my ipod! Maybe I should go in, just to cover all the bases. I'm ranting now, sorry. Arg. I'm just so disappointed.

Few hours later...
I did go to the store. I thought for sure their tile board was incorrect. But it was me. I ordered the wrong tiles. What to do? Well, I've decided I'm not going to live with it. I'm going to take apart my Ikea vanity and return it and get a white vanity. Good thing I like putting Ikea furniture together! Can't say I'm going to like taking it apart though.
You may think I'm nuts, but honestly, there's some things I can't live with and I would rather do things that feel like a hassle rather than regret it every time I went pee. I haven't told the Man yet; he'll probably tell me to just leave it and don't worry about it. But this is who I am. He nitpicks about things 1/8" out of place, I nitpick about colour.

A few more hours later...
yup. He told me to leave it, that he's fine with the two dark colours. Where's my ikea hex key??

I love putting Ikea furniture together. It's like lego for adults. If you ever need help putting your Ikea purchases together, give me a call.

The Man needed to be picked up from the airport, so after I found him wandering around looking lost, we stopped at Ikea to pick up our bathroom vanity.

In our previous bathroom reno, we bought a Godmorgon vanity with a Braviken sink.

I love the design of the vanity. I love that you have drawers that utilize all the space possible, instead of cupboards that just waste space. Our upstairs bathroom is very small and we needed as much creative storage as possible. After going through the bathroom and getting rid of a garbage bag worth of junk, everything we need fits in that vanity.

For our new downstairs bathroom, we bought the Godmorgon again, but this time we're getting a different sink. They didn't have this kind previously. Maybe they did elsewhere, but not at the Ikea I went to. 
We purchased the Odensvik sink with only one bowl. It's a bit deeper and since we bought a much wider vanity, the sink has some space on the sides! One con about the Braviken is that the sink expands to almost both side edges, not leaving a whole lot of room for hair dryers and straighteners...

We thought about trying to float the cabinet. They show that a lot in their catalogue, but that thing is super heavy and I can just envision it crashing down one day, so we'll use their legs. They're handy anyway when you have uneven floors since the legs are adjustable. It was very helpful when we did our reno upstairs with our sloping floors. This downstairs floor should be much more level.

So that's what I did this week. Along with help the Man drywall the bathroom ceiling and bring in all the main room ceilings tongue and groove. It's been sitting under our hillbilly garage waiting until we have room to store it inside again. I've been looking at it and debating what I'm going to do with it - besides put it back up on the ceiling. I think I'm going to paint it white. For those of you gasping with horror. Stop. It's starting to feel brittle and at least the paint will hold it together. Plus it's in that older honey shade which is not going to work in this room. Get over it.

Renovating is such an up and down experience. It's so exciting at the beginning, before you realize it will take over your life and create such a mess. We're almost done all the insulating, which in my opinion, is the worst part of it. I can handle the mess, the lack of floors or walls, the lack of an extra bathroom with teenagers. I can handle all of that. Insulation is so itchy and messy, it gets in your lungs even when you're wearing a mask. And now we're almost done!! Hallelujah! In the last few weeks, we've gotten:

Now that so much of the picky stuff is done, we're almost at the fun parts!! Put up the siding. Drywall, prime and paint. Put up the tongue and groove ceiling. Lay the heated floor in the bathroom. Tile the bathroom and install the fixtures. Put in hardwood flooring. Put up moldings around windows, door and bottom of walls and then voila! done. Sounds so easy.

There was a lot of complaining from the Man that I was always trying to get out of doing stuff. I freely admit that I was. It was things that I wasn't the great at doing and if I attempted to do it, he complained and picked at what I did. So, yeah, I did get out of as much as I could - but I made sure he had a meal every night, that there was a path to areas in the house and the sheets got changed when they were too picky with insulation.

We were reading about Myer Briggs personality profiles. He's an INTJ and this is what it says about him, it totally goes over into the way he works on this reno:

"INTJs are ambitious, self-confident, deliberate, long-range thinkers. They dislike messiness and inefficiency, and anything that is muddled or unclear. They value clarity and efficiency, and will put enormous amounts of energy and time into consolidating their insights into structured patterns."

and then there's me...

"In the workplace, the INFJ usually shows up in areas where they can be creative and somewhat independent. They have a natural affinity for art, and many excel in the sciences, where they make use of their intuition. INFJs can also be found in service-oriented professions. They are not good at dealing with minutia or very detailed tasks. The INFJ will either avoid such things, or else go to the other extreme and become enveloped in the details to the extent that they can no longer see the big picture. An INFJ who has gone the route of becoming meticulous about details may be highly critical of other individuals who are not. " 

 I haven't gone over to the dark side, it's my personality to avoid very detailed tasks! And all of those upcoming projects are creative...

I have to say that my Man is the hardest worker in the world. He would work all day and come home to work on the back till 12 or 1 to finish something off. He is such a champ. It should get a little easier for him now. I love the upcoming projects and plan on being in there like a wet shirt.

I'm supposed to be working on the last wall of insulation, but I'm stalling. It's a double wall, which means, there's the original wall and then there's a newer wall built in front of it. So both parts of it needs to get some insulation stuffed into it. I am so done with that picky, itchy crap. I'm doing anything to avoid it. Such as painting a blackboard wall.

Here's some inspiring photos of blackboard walls in kitchens:

I tell ya, I'm ADD with projects. A few months ago, April to be exact, I bought a can of blackboard paint. In July, I filled in a few holes. In August, I sanded it. And today I'm taping and priming.

The Man's philosophy with any of his purchases is 'Go Big or Go Home'. That's not really his philosophy in his own words, but one that I've decided is his after years of living with him and watching what he buys. Like his giant miter saw, his giant treadmill, his giant box of Canadian Tire tools that came in a big box and was pretty useless. We often influence our partners whether we like it or not and I've been purposefully attempting to influence him to do research on what he wants and what he actually needs to purchase, instead of randomly buying it cause it's big. He's getting better. He recently bought a normal sized super awesome drill and normal sized useful reciprocating saw. AND he decided NOT to buy a super ginormous router table because it was too big. He's a quick learner. *cough 18 years later cough*

His influence on me, for this project anyway, is that I'm goin' big. I'm not going to make a cute little framed blackboard project thingy, I'm doing a large portion of the kitchen wall. It's pretty big.


Inspirational Photos: 

Apartment 2024
Canadian House and Home
A Yellow House by the Sea
The Wicker House
House Obsession
Green Home Ideas
Courtney and Wise
BeeBeeGrace

The Man and I had such big plans. We were going to get the vapor barrier done on the ceiling and the walls. We were going to drywall at least one wall. We were going to finish alll the insulation and he was going to build a box for the fireplace that's coming next week. Ohhh, the plans we had.

But the Man is a perfectionist. It took us 4 freaking long hours to put up vapor barrier on only half the ceiling. When the clock chimed 11 at night, I quit. I want this back addition done as much as he does, but enough is enough already. Putting up massive sheets of plastic on the ceiling will create some wrinkles. Get over it.

THIS is like working with my husband. Cute little guy tho.

Enter a man named Lou.

Lou is a workhorse. If you need a workhorse to come and fix your house, give me a call and I'll hook you up. He works for $25/hour and he is fast. Look at what he did in 4 hours all by himself.


All you have to do is tell him what you want and he just does it. No chatting, no hemming and hawing about how to begin. He just starts working and Bam. It's done. It's amazing.

View of the loft/storage area

But now it's my turn to hold up the project. I need to get my act together. I'm having such a hard time deciding on what kind of shower faucet to choose. I want something with a rainshower and the Man wants a handheld.

This is what I've come up with.

This is what I really like:

Hansgrohe 27160 Raindance Double Handle Shower System with Handshower and Hose

This is what I can afford:

Uberhaus "Column" Shower Faucet

I don't mind the cheaper shower faucet too much - it's just that it's a Rona brand and I can't find any reviews about it. I'm all about reviews. If you've bought a Rona faucet, let me know what you think.

What I like:

Toto TL382SDL En Single Lever Bathroom Faucet

What I can afford:

Uberhaus Design "Mistral" Lavatory Faucet

I wanted a pot light in the shower with a separate fan in the ceiling and pendant lights over the sink. The separate fan/pot light got nixed and now I need to come up with another idea. I'm NOT picking a boob light. There is actually such a thing as a boob/fan light. If you don't know what a boob light is, this is a photo of one.



They're ugly.

So, I was thinking this instead:

Nutone Recessed Light with Fan

I think I'd need two of them. One just seems awkward and lonely.

I also need to find the cheapest pocket door frame, which I think I found at Home Hardware. That's why the doorway looks so large for the bathroom. It's waiting for me.

The Man is gone for a few day, which gives me a bit of time to do some research and decide on something. If you know me, you know that I love Google and researching the crap out of something. The following video was made for me - thanks Julian Smith.