Birthday Party!

We had Violet's 2nd birthday party last Sunday, and it was a really fun time.  She was living it up and seemed like she had a blast with some of her friends and family.  We really lucked out in that Marn's grandma called a few weeks ago and said she wanted to come down for a visit because her condo was undergoing renovations.  It just happened to coincide with Violet's party so she was able to come and celebrate with us, which was great.

The bathroom hasn't seen much action since I painted the first coat, or since the party.  It's basically done now.  We hung a new mirror, and I touched up some of the mudding on the walls, so it still needs a finish coat and floor/door/window trim, as well as ceiling paint.  It looks good and we got a lot of compliments on it at the party.  :)

 Tickle trunk full of dress up clothes from Mom and Dad

 Great Ganny checking out the 3D book from a grab bag  :)

 Checking out the Bathtub Toy Scoop with her helpers

 Blowing Candles

 cake smile!

The kitchen saw some updates recently too -- we bought Marn's parent's appliances from them when they bought new ones.  They look great and really update the kitchen, but the fridge was a little too big for the space. I had to cut out about 8 inches of the cabinet above it, and then when we slid it into place, it didn't quite fit width-wise either!  We knew it would be tight as the dimensions were almost exactly the same, but we were hopeful.  It's about 8 inches from going back all the way to the wall, so either the floor is not level, or the cabinets aren't.  So, the plan is I'm going to sand the side of the cabinet down a bit to make it fit.  lol  I'm hoping to do that today.

The car situation has changed recently for us as well, and we've decided to sell my 2-door Accord instead of the older van (did I mention that we bought Marn's parents old van?)  :-(  It just makes sense.  It needs a lot of work - as it always seem to need these days - and it wouldn't work for us if the van had to go into the shop for repairs.  A rear-facing car seat will not work, and even it if it did, it definitely wouldn't fit two car seats.  So, for a short while, we're a two van family.  I say short while, because we're actually considering buying Dads BMW from him as he is trading up to a new one.  Depending on the price (I haven't looked up prices on used ones yet), and the condition, I think it's a good move.  It can still fit car seats in a pinch, will probably be better on gas than a van, and lets face it; it's not another van!  He said it has less than 120,000 kms on it which I think is great.  If we do that, we should be set for cars for a few more years.  We aren't having much faith in the older van these days either, so it might make good sense to dump that now.  We'll see.

New Video Camera

We decided recently to go ahead and get a new video camera and since we've been piling on the Air Miles recently, decided that it would be a great thing to get with those instead of cash.  It's probably a much higher end model than we "need" and if we were buying it with money, we likely would not be getting this one... it retails for +$700!  But "free" with Air Miles (no tax, no shipping)?  Yes please!  It's an older model (last year?) and when it came out, it was over $1000.

We decided to get a flash memory model instead of the hard drive or tape based ones.  It's super light and small as a result, but of course limited in memory (recording time) compared to a hard drive one which is common to see 120 gb or more.  Ours has dual SD memory slots, and we bought two 16gb cards which gives us 5 minutes shy of 3 hours at the maximum HD resolution.  At medium resolution it's 5 hours 45 minutes which should be lots.  SD cards can be had at 32gb, and more recently higher, but they get quite costly above that.  Two 16 gb cards were a good compromise for cost and recording time.  And it's easy to expand later when prices for those cards get cheaper.  So all in out of pocket was $90 for the two memory cards.

Looking forward to using it and seeing the picture quality!

We had another tape camcorder that Den gave us to use that he found around the office and was being unused.  It came in very handy as we didn't have one before and we put it to good use.  We have about 10 cassette tapes laying around now about 1 hour of video each.  I'll need to get them on the computer and at the very least archive them onto DVD.  When we sell it, we'll send over the profits.  ;)

It's getting there!

Today was bathroom day - again! Paint, toilet, faucets, lights... We have a fully functioning bathroom again!!

complete-ish

It's really just the small stuff now.  Things like trim, cabinet handles, possibly another coat of pain, floor grate (might re-paint the one we have white), some more caulking and cleaning, and she's DONE! I'm not sure what I'll do with the window because the frame of it sticks out too far from the wall. They were built for the thickness of the plaster, and now that there's drywall, there's about a half inch gap between the sill and the wall.  You can kind of make it out in that picture above.

Violet likes... her new hat.

Edit:

Oh, we're also missing the mirror (obviously) -- Marn doesn't want the old one back again.  Or least if she can find another one for not too much money.  That would have been nice to know before painting so that I could have filled in the holes in the wall that held the mirror!

Also, you can't see it, but there's a hole in the wall above the light switch (you may have seen it before).  It's still there because we're not sure (yet) if we want to put in a light above the shower.  We're leaning toward yes.  The hole was put in when we ran new wire to install the fan, so I left it open in case we need it again.  Need to decide on that soon.

Bathroom floor

I grouted tonight.... waiting for it to dry before one last wipe before bed.  As I was prepping the floor I noticed something with the mortar in between the tiles that I didn't like.  I hope it's nothing, but I can't help but think that it could be a big problem down the road.  I ended up using two different bags of mortar because I had a bunch left over from previous "jobs".  2 half bags, one was white, and the other grey.  They were both the same "type" (Polymer Modified Mortar), but different brands, which wouldn't matter.  The grey bag was much older than the white mortar.  I think about 2 years, actually, when I did the kitchen floor in the old house, or possibly when I did the back splash.  I didn't think it would be a big deal.  It was never wet, or anything, and it mixed up ok. It trowelled on fine...  but tonight when I was cleaning up the grout lines, the grey mortar was very soft compared to the white.  In some cases it seemed to just fall apart and turn to dust when I scraped it, or if I smashed a little ball of it on the floor.  This should NOT be happening, and it's making me very nervous that all of the grey tiles are going to pop off some months or weeks down the road.  The mortar should be very hard, like cement.
I suppose I should Google mortar and shelf life, but I don't want to see the answer I don't want to hear right now.  Maybe tomorrow, or next week.

This is what it looks like after two wipes.... a few more to go!  But not tonight.

Hopefully everything will be fine, and I won't have to go back and redo it. THAT would SUCK!!  Time will tell....

Long Awaited Bathroom Pics

Well, this bathroom reno turned into a much larger project than I thought it would.  Anyway, it's not 100% done, but done enough that I can show some pics now.  :)  It will be another few days of doing little things to fully complete it.

Originally I was hoping to just "pop" the tiles off and tile over them for the new shower, but that clearly wasn't going to happen once I took one or two off for "inspection"...

Yah, that's about over an inch of plaster under the tiles.  Ugh!  Not going to be a fun process taking all of that down!  You saw the 2 car loads in a previous post.  About 650 KG of garbage.  After 4 days of demolition, this is what we had to work with;

The remaining plaster was taken down, plumbing moved to the left side wall, the new tub put in place, and cement boards fastened and dry wall up on the other walls!

Next was to start tiling the shower.  Here's the progress and finished product:

The colour isn't right in this picture because I couldn't get the flash working on the camera - I tried to edit the pic, but it didn't come out so great.

Once that was done and grouted, we could start using our shower again -- About 2.5 weeks without it was a bit of a challenge!
After a lot of dry wall patching, mudding, taping, sanding, etc.  I primed the walls, painted the cabinets (because we're reusing them) and the granite counter was installed.  Looks sweet!  We also have new knobs for the vanity, but I don't have them installed yet.  I also want to fill in the "decorative lines" in the middle panel below the sink, but didn't have the time, or stuff to do that.

So, we're feeling pretty good about the state that the bathroom is in at this point. Install some faucets, paint, mirror, toilet and it's ready to go! Except the floors, of course! That was next.
First the substrate layer, 1/2 inch plywood, screwed down a ton. Yes, it does need that many screws!

Next the floor tiles! Done just this afternoon, so not cleaned, or grouted just yet. Tomorrow, hopefully that will get done, and won't take very long.  They look like they have a blue hue to them... they're supposed to be black.  We think they still look good, but wished they were a little darker.  It's really more noticeable next to the black granite counter top.

So, after MANY days, 6 weeks, to be exact (!) we're very close to finishing this "small" project... Yeah, it turned out a lot bigger than we expected, but isn't that always the way? The only thing that's hanging over my head at this point is the toilet's "closet flange" (the part that attaches the toilet to the floor and drain. I'm not sure how that's going to go because the drain pipe is not in the best shape, so we may need to call in a plumber to replace some old pipe.

Here are some before shots:

Quite a change, eh?
I'll get some more pics when it's all done and cleaned up.

Bathroom counter

The new granite counter should be getting installed as I type (Actually, just got a phone call, he's not there yet... should have been there at 12 noon)
I primed the walls on Tuesday night but didn't get to painting them because the prime really lets you see spots that need more attention - there are a few.  So I painted the cabinets white last night as I figured it'd probably be easier to do when the counter wasn't there.  They look new again, with really old crappy handles, which we'll be replacing at some point.

We don't really know which black they ended up getting - we picked a nearly pure black counter, and then as a backup, a black with a little more white flecks in case they couldn't get the other in time.  He called last night and said that it's ready to go, but didn't say which one he got in?  I didn't think to ask.

So after today, I just need to touch up and then paint the walls, and install the floors and toilet, and we're done!
Well, hopefully it'll get installed today...