Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

Well, it's now well into 2013 and life marches on.

This picture is a view to our back field, however, last weekend we had record warm temperatures and all the snow melted. Alas, that warm weather does not last and we are getting colder and colder and will expect more snow soon.

Dave and I have created a "to do" list for the month of January. An item on that list is to get the drawers finished for the downstairs vanity and get them installed. This, as with every project at Hardy House, has been more difficult than planned. The drawers had to be cut to work around the plumbing. This we anticipated. What we didn't realize is the poor shape the drawers were in. Dave has been repairing and re-gluing them. A couple are still in clamps and one may be ready for installation tonight. Actually, with the warm weather this past weekend he was able to work on these. The barn is just too cold this time of year, otherwise. It really limits our ability to work on things.

So the rest of the items on the "to do" list for this month are mainly ensuring the designs are solid and accurate for the rest of the built-ins in the house. We also hope to hang the door to the basement. This all doesn't seem like much but Dave's a busy guy at work so time is limited and the weather is limiting. We do what we can.

What are your plans for the next couple of months?

Downstairs Bath

Check it out! The tile work has been done. Some caulking, some of the fixtures still need some installation and tweaking but it's basically done. The vanity, mirror and lights are installed and artwork hung. Again, caulking still needs completing but it will happen shortly. Curtains will be delivered shortly and we will get the shower curtain rod installed and a few other things need to be installed yet, but it's coming along and it's usable. Yipee!

As a reminder from previous posts, we bought an antique oak dresser and modified it to be a vanity. We bought a piece of stock oak and routed it, etc., then stained it for a back splash. We mounted it to the vanity with steel plates. We purchased the antique oak mirror at an auction never thinking we would put the two together but realized they were perfectly paired. To install the mirror we used a slotted angle at the top which is not visible and then the bottom of the mirror we used chair braces in an antique bronze finish which connected the mirror to the back splash. The lights were from Renovator's Supply that we purchased quite a while ago. It was good to get them from storage and get them installed. I'll add more pictures once the bath is all done. Let me know what you think!

The tiling in the upstairs bath has been completed, too, but I don't have the pic up yet. We are getting there folks.

Will the Bathrooms Ever Be Done? Yup!

We had planned to tile both bathrooms this last weekend but if you've been following along, you know nothing ever goes according to plan. However, that being said, we did get all the cement board up in both bathrooms so we CAN do the tiling - probably next weekend.

Downstairs Shower

Upstairs Shower

Earlier in the week we attempted to install the cement board on the angled ceiling in the upstairs bathroom. Even after cutting more and more off, it still didn't fit right, got jammed and we ended up damaging the drywall. It is actually worse than in the pictures. It will get replaced at some point but it's not a showstopper--thank goodness.

The following picture shows how we inserted a base on the floor of the shower so that if something fell on it it wouldn't damage the shower floor. We will keep it there through tiling. Another thing I want to communicate to you is that for the cement board in the downstairs bath, we did NOT countersink the screws. Because of that the screw heads are elevated so the tiles won't be flat. We need to go back and sink the screws. We made sure we did it upstairs. Now we just need to tape, etc. and we'll be ready for tile. I can't wait.

I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have a working upstairs bathroom!

Well the shower still isn't working but that's okay for now. It's being worked on. Here are a few pictures of the upstairs bathroom. The sink and toilet are working. A mess still, yes, but I can work around it.

Dave insisted on the toilets that we installed - super water savers or something. I feel they were way overpriced and I don't particularly like the style for these baths but during a remodel you need to compromise so that's what we did.

The shower shows the plywood screwed up. That has since been overlayed with the Swanstone. We were petrified we might break it installing it but we didn't. It was a bear to install - very heavy.

This week we have been putting up cement board at the tops of the showers so that we can tile. We are planning the tiling for next weekend. Can't wait! Once the tiling is done we can get the plumber back to hook up the showers. What a grand day that will be!

More on the downstairs bath...

Here are a couple more pics of the bathroom vanity - installed. We still have to modify the drawers but have figured out a way to waste as little as possible. We are really happy with the way this turned out. It was a lot of work but we like that we could selvage an old piece of furniture AND get a unique vanity.

We also have an antique oak mirror that we will install over the sink.

The toilet seat is still not on yet - I'm not sure why, otherwise we would be using this bathroom as the water is connected.

Up, Up, And Away!

The new second floor of Hardy House
We now have the upstairs studded off. Is "studded" a word? This picture is looking into the new full/master bath. The door to it is directly across from the door from the stairs. (We are putting a door at the top of the stairs only because we have a dog and a cat and prefer they remained downstairs.)

Both doors (from the stairs and also into the bathroom) will have transom windows above the doors, letting in light and working to cross ventilate. The window is the front second-floor window where our bed used to be. Looking at this picture, a large shower will be to the right when you walk in the door. Because of the roofline there will be quite a bit of wasted space behind the shower but we are using that for something else which I will explain later.

The Shower
We had quite a fiasco ordering the shower. We researched a bunch of stuff, looked at a bunch of stuff, including tile and surrounds and came up with the decision to use Swanstone, a solid-surface product. Our fiasco was because we spent several hours one evening at Lowe's trying to order the product. The very helpful young man told us we couldn't get the size we wanted. Dave told him very nicely that we could as we had seen it on the Swanstone Web site. Unfortunately, Lowe's computers did not recognize what we needed. It ended up getting ordered incorrectly, took several weeks to appear because it was placed in the wrong part of the receiving area. When we finally got it, Dave and I struggled getting it home as it is heavier than you can imagine and we took it out of the box and wrapping and whoa! It was the wrong one. You see, we earlier realized the wrong one was ordered, tried to cancel the order, which couldn't be done (and another helpful young man went through a lot to get it cancelled eventually). So what happened was the new one had come in but we received the old one. All very confusing and time-consuming. I was really annoyed about this for a while. Anyway, we now have the parts but they are not yet installed.

Where the shower is going there was a hole in the floor which Dave had to repair. We opted to just put plywood over as it would not be seen. The cost of the shower unit, total, was $1,713.09 which included the walls and the shower pan. The walls were custom sized and we got as big a shower pan as we could for the space. We purchased these from Lowe's.