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Well after a few months the bathroom is finally all finished. Took a bit longer than I excpected it, which I suppose is not suprising. It was really the tiling that slowed me down, cutting and setting the tiles was a real pain. Ohh and the 7 coats of paint in three colors certinly didn’t make things go any faster.

All in all though we are very happy with the results. I’m also quite glad that I did it all myself. it was a great learning experience, and I think everything turned out wonderfully. I also can’t imagine how people did things in the olden days (read: pre-1998). Without the folks over at the John Bridge Ceramic Tile Forum I doubt I would have gotten through it. Thats not to say that I didn’t look in books and ask friends and family for help too, but the books can’t anwser your questions when things are a bit peculiar, and sometimes your friends and family don’t have all the answers (all though they were also quite helpful!) .

Lastly I’ve found one of the biggest problems is trying to take a good picture of the bathroom. My camera is a tiny little point and shoot which is great for taking with you, but it has a rather narrow field of view, and with such a small room its hard to get a good shot. What I’ve done for this picture is to take a slew of smaller ones, and stitch them together to try and show the whole room (which of course makes for some oddities in the photo.

Here’s another picture of the finished bathroom.  Its another montage of images taken with my tiny little camera.  It didn’t stitch together as well as the other one, but it still shows the room pretty well.

Well the color saga is finally over (I hope).  After picking our first color, that was supposed to be blue-gray, and turned out purple, and our second color that just didn’t really match our tile, we’ve finally settled on this nice green color.  We also switched paints for this color.  Typically I’ve just used the Lowes brand called Valspar.   Most of the time I’ll just use the regular stuff, but for small applications I generally get the the Valspar Premium, which in semi-gloss runs about 30 bucks a gallon.  This time however we got some Benjamin Moore Regal semi-gloss instead.  It was quite pricey, at $45 a gallon, however it is noticably better than the Valspar Premium.  The Valspar is quite thick which helps it cover well, however it also seems to make it more prone to drips.  It seems that while you’re painting it will look fine, but after I’ve finished I’ve gone back and found drips where I had none before.  The Benjamin Moore paint covers just as well, but its not nearly as thick, and thus doesn’t seem to have as many drips.  I’m not sure its worth the significantly higher cost, but it does seem to be good stuff.

Well this is what happens when you attempt to put a screw just a tiny bit to close to tempered glass.  I was in the midst of putting the shower door up, and was screwing this panel in.  I drilled a hole for a screw in the upper left hand corner, but it seems it was just a tiny bit to close to the glass, and when i put the screw in it shattered it.  If it had just been regular glass it would have probably just put a little chip in it, but it was tempered glass, so the entire panel instantly shattered, with no piece being bigger than 1/4″.   Hopefully it won’t be to hard (or expensive) to get a replacement.

After realizing that the Purple wasn’t gonna cut it, we quickly ran over to Lowes and grabbed some nice blue paint (that’s actually blue!) and threw a few coats of that up.   Initially I was quite happy with it, sadly Jess was not.  She thinks that while its a lovely color it doesn’t match anything.  After looking at it a few times, I’m beginning to agree with her.  We’ll have to see what I think in a week or two, but we may end up painting it a third time.

Picking out a paint color is always hard.  You only get the tiny little paint chip to go by, and it always ends up looking different when its on the wall.  We picked out what I thought was this nice blue-gray color.   As soon as we put it up I quickly realized that it wasn’t blue, it was purple.  This made me none to happy as I really don’t want my fancy new bathroom to be purple.  Guess its time to head back to Lowes and see if we can pick a better color.

I hadn’t wanted to do any more spackling without the grout being done, for fear that the spackle would get into the grout lines.  Now that its all finished though, I finally got back to spackling.  The biggest challenge was the transition from the cement-board to the sheetrock.  The Durock was about 3/16 higher than the sheetrock so I had to feather that out with a significant amount of joint-compound.   I also had to tape up the corners, which although it went a bit better than the first time I did it on the wall in the bedroom, it still was tricky, and didn’t end up looking that good.

The guy came from Westwood Tile and Stone  today to install the granite countertop for the vanity.   The vanity looks great now, and the guy did an excellent job installing it.  However he was pretty much the only part of our dealings with Westwood that I was particularly pleased with.  Although there weren’t any huge problems, there were a bunch of minor issues that would prevent me from using them again.   In addition to the granite, we also bought the tile from Westwood.  On our first trip to the store, we worked with a very nice gentleman who was very helpful and informative.  However when we went back the second time to look at the granite, he wasn’t there so we worked with another saleswoman, who was much less helpful.   We spent alot of time being concerned that they weren’t gonna get the granite to be the right size.  It wasn’t until the next time that she mentioned that they would come out and make a template.

When we went the third time to make the final decisions on the tile, and to pay for everything, we once again got a different saleswoman.  We picked out the tile we wanted, and also the trim tile.  She never mentioned that the trim tile was a eight of an inch thicker than the field tile.  (Fortunately I was able to put a thinner coat of thin-set on and it looks alright)  When the tile came in we never got a call about it, I had to call and find out that it was waiting for us.  Lastly with the granite, the holes for the faucet were not countersunk, so the fittings for the faucet didn’t fit through. 

 It all ended up working out ok,  and perhaps most of the stuff is things I should have already known.  However the tile and granite cost a small fortune, and I felt that for that price we should have gotten a little better service. 

Been extra busy this week, trying to get ready for the granite counter-top to arrive on Friday.  We  finished up most of the grouting today.  On the floor we choose to use a ‘latte’ colored Spectralock grout.   We were quite scared when the grout first went it, as it looked very light, and rather pink.  However it darkened as it dried, and although I think it might be a bit better if it was a shader darker still, I’m still quite happy with how it looks.   For the floor we mixed up two mini-units of grout, and then put half in the freezer while doing the first half.   After I finished the first half, which was getting difficult to work with, I pulled the second out and it was still nice and soft.  After finishing up, I took the remaining lump and put that back into the freezer, in case I found any spots we missed.

With the tile all laid, we started doing the grout.  We’re using an epoxy grout, specifically, Laticrete SpectraLock Grout.   I was quite nervous to do the grouting, as I’d never done it before, and really didn’t want to mess up our wonderful tile.   After reading about the SpectraLock all around the web (especially over at the John Bridge Tile Forums) it seemed like the best choice and sounded pretty easy to install.   It went  up pretty easily, all though it was a very time consuming process.  I pretty much followed the instructions, although I used a micro-fiber cloth to clean up the grout haze.   I did end up dropping alot on the floor while doing the walls, however I had laid down some clean cardboard, so it was easy to salvage what had fell.  I suspect someone with more experience could do it faster, however you still need to go back twice to clean it up so you need to leave a good chunk of time to do it.

I’ve done two of the ‘mini-units’ they sell at Lowes so far.  I was very happy to find that you can’t see the joints between each day at all.  I’m a bit disappointed with the coverage, although its pretty much in-line with whats on the package.  I originally bought one for the walls and one for the floor,  but its going to end up taking five for the walls and two for the floor.  Not to big a deal, but the stuff is like 25 bucks a unit.  The end result however, looks fantastic.