Sunday, February 5, 2012

2011 recap

The year 2011.
Celebrated my first year of marriage with my wonderful husband.
Built a pond on our property.
Husband and I both took on new roles at work.
Started Clayton into his senior year of high school.
Bought a boat.
Bought another boat.
Sold the first boat.
Lost my engagement ring.  (Sunk it in Kentucky Lake)
Celebrated the legal union of one of my uncle's and his partner.
Ran a 4 mile race.  Longest distance I had done yet.
Lost a very special piece of our family.  Rest peacefully Austin Nau.
Cheered Clayton and friend on while they ran the Men's Health Urbanathalon.
Tried to grow our family in the traditional sense. 
Had surgery to aid in above.
Initiated fertility treatment.
Braved the failure of said treatment.
Revisted our options...again.
Decided to begin the licensing process for foster parenting.
And so the story begins...

Friday, February 3, 2012

A new Master bath, for the Master (me)

Sidenote:  Before I let a whole year pass before posting, better get to typing!....

Last Fall (2011) we decided it was high time to gut the Master Bath.  Anyone that has been to our house knows that the bathrooms were definitely next in line for overhauls.

The before pictures are horrific.  Seriously I think I saw our bathrooms in the last Saw movie...  Yikes!
Behold, the before...
EW!

Gross!  Those lights look like Viking weapons!

Blech!


So now that you see just how necessary a full gut was you can understand why we took it down to the studs.  The tile came up, the shower stall came out.  The wall of mirrors= gone.  Nasty sink and vanity... Bye Bye!  Creepy warrior lights...See ya!

I wanted this room to be crisp and bright.  There are no windows in this room... yet.  (I have a future vision of either a window or a sky light in here)  I wanted everything to be easy to maintain and clean.  And in true Becky fashion it all got done on a dime.  Every step of the way was cost effective without settling for something I didn't really love.
Initially I had planned to put pebble tile as the shower floor, but when I went to the home improvement store to buy the shower pan (over $500, not including the tile and other miscellaneous materials) I re-thought that plan.  Instead I spent $120 on a fiberglass shower pan, and let go of my pebble tile dreams.
The tile that I used through out  ranged from $1.08 per tile to $1.28 per tile.  About as cheap as it gets!
I got the sink for $30 on Craigslist.  The mirror was a thrift store find for $11.
Ready to see it??!!
Door still needs a coat of white paint
 Once the room was down to the studs, hubs replaced all the plumbing.  It was all copper pipe and some had started to rot out.  It made sense to replace it now before we closed the walls again.
My tile handy work.  Yeah that's right I did all the tiling myself!
 Once plumbing was done we were ready to tile.  I stopped at Menard's to buy a tile saw that we had seen advertised.  It's appeal was that it could be used to cut tile, wood, metal, etc by just easily switching out blades.  Got it home and got it set up.  Jeff mixed the mortar and I grabbed a box of tile to get set up for cutting.  Jeff came out to the garage and started to cut.  Never got any further.  It would have taken us 8 days to do the cuts that we were going to need to do.  Back to the store we went.  We rented their wet tile saw and got home with it around 8:30 pm.  At 2 am we finished tiling the shower walls.
 The next day I tiled the floor in about an hour.  Floors are so much easier to tile than walls!
 Grout was laid the next day, followed by setting the bead board, afixing shelves, caulking, hooking up the sink, hanging the new door, setting the new toilet, putting in new bath fan, new light, new switch plate, towel hooks and hanging some decor.
 Whew!  Sweet success!
That's our crisp, clean master bathroom.  We are in love with it.