Bathroom Makeover

The guest bathroom got a whole new face! We replaced the toilet, vanity, lights and floor in the bathroom. Because of the small space only one of us could do the work at a time so most of it was accomplished by Alex. We ran into a lot of problems on this simple renovation, but we pressed through them to finish up in less than a week because we had to have it ready in time to host a guest.

The most amazing deal was the floor. We bought the boxes of tile from a flea market for $5 a box. The originally sold for $35/ box. We used 2 boxes of the tile on the floor. While perusing our local Habitat for Humanity resale store we were able to score a $26 bucket of grout for $1. I couldn’t believe it!  Excluding the price of the glue for the tile – we bought a large bucket we plan to use on our master bathroom and hopefully part of our kitchen – our bathroom floor cost us all of $11!!

In went the tile. 

Alex did an amazing job of cutting the tile to fit the circular part of the toilet opening.

Tile Dance. I was instructed to walk on the tile in order to apply the needed pressure. Naturally I turned on the music and instead danced on my tile.  

The toilet was the next thing to be installed and it had some minor complications. Being environmentally conscious I was excited to purchase a toilet that used less water in each flush. So we purchased a dual flush toilet! After putting it together we turned it on and found we had a leak at the old shutoff valve so we quickly learned via YouTube how to replace the shutoff valve and how to find and turn off the main water supply to the house.

Excited to buy my dual flush toilet 

New shutoff valve 

Lastly we installed the vanity. The vanity, bowl, and faucet were sold as one complete set from Lowes. Our first issue was the baseboards. Because you can see under the vanity we had to put in the baseboards. The vanity needed to be bolted to the wall but the baseboard prevented a snug fit. Alex fixed this by attaching a strip of extra baseboard to the wall where the vanity was to be bolted.  The screws then went through the vanity and the “spacer” into the wall for to secure the vanity.

Baseboard spacer

A perfect and secure fit!

Our next issue was the faucet. The one that was supplied leaked from the base no matter what we did. We went to Lowes to see if it could be fixed. It couldn’t so Lowes switched it with their display model from the same vanity set. When we got home Alex discovered that this one had been manufactured incorrectly and could not be installed. So we went back to Lowes where they tried again to fix it before giving up and allowing me to select a faucet of my choosing to replace the broken ones. I selected a $140 Delta faucet – a nice upgrade for free! 

Last but not least the before and after pictures 

"Before" 

"After"

The Shower curtain is Izola  purchased on Fab.com for only $12! Fab.com is an amazing way to find unique items. 

"Before"

"After"

"Before"

"After"

I saw this toilet paper holder idea on my favorite blog Young House Love. Its such a chic way to store toilet paper. 

 

Da Flo'

Wow, it has been a long time since our last post! It’s partly my fault as I just finished 10 weeks of training in Ohio to become a Civil Engineer in the Air Force. It was not as boring as it sounds, though it was difficult for me since I come from an Environmental Engineering background. It was actually educational, eye opening and fun, and I got to do some pretty cool things like this.

I left Alex with a few projects to do while I was gone. He did accomplish his honey- do list, but everything on it was a portion of bigger projects to come. I had him paint the kitchen cabinets so that when I got back we could order new counter tops and install backsplash (I got the backsplash while in Ohio.) He painted the smaller pieces of furniture in the bed room, but the larger items had to wait. He also created a bedframe from the headboard/footboard we got a while back.

So you can see we have things accomplished, but not much is show-ready yet. However, the biggest news is that we have the hardwood floors down!! Finally! The receipt for the purchase shows we bought these floors at the end of March and we now have them installed. We originally thought that we were just going to do the living room and hallway, but have since decided to add the foyer into the mix. We didn’t have enough wood to finish so we are waiting on that. While at the store we both fell so in love with the Natural hand-scraped Acacia engineered hardwood floors that it only took us a day to decided that this was the floor for us we were back the next day for the purchase. That’s a pretty fast move for us because this purchase was very permanent and pricey.

Here it is!! Our floor adventure through pictures.  

Alex took the day off work to rip up the carpet and start prepping for laying the floors down. 

I totally helped after work by removing the baseboards.

 Remember that I said our house sat empty for over a year before we bought it. Well it seems that it was used by some lizards as a place to lay their eggs. They snuck in through the dog door and I found these tiny eggs behind our baseboards. Lots of empty shells, but three were still intact. Alex is keeping them to see what hatches.

Be prepared to clean like crazy when replacing floors. I swept and swept and swept!!

"Dramatic" setting on the camera.  

Our granite tiles installed at the base of the fireplace 

The start of the floor! You can see our old textbooks being put to good use. 

Prepping the area between the kitchen and the living room. New kitchen floor (tile) to be added in the next few months. 

Sometimes a piece just would not fit so a little persuasion with a hammer was needed.

We had to work around watching Le Tour de France sometimes. 

One website said it would take 2 days to lay a hardwood floor down. So we got some coffee and worked into the night 

The cat doing what she does best.

This was about as far as we got with the coffee for the night. The website lied it took us a whole weekend and five days after work to finish. 

Laying the floor around the granite squares 

A new fan! We were in the market for a new fan since ours was original to the home and looks outdated (not to mention it didn’t work well.) We were shopping for supplies at Lowe's and just fell in love with this one. The new fan looks modern and moves tons of air, which is great for hot Florida summers.

Old Fan

New Fan

The cat has no thought for her safety! She just loved to nap on the tools 

Ripping up the foyer. 

Scrapping up the glue 

We are looking into thicker base boards so that too will be added soon. But here are the finished shots.

View from the kitchen 

View from the foyer 

View from the hallway 

The fireplace is not a finished project yet. We went out and bought all this granite for $50 (Alex calls it a Craigslist win). We are going to use a small portion of it to make a granite mosaic around the fireplace. We will certainly find other projects to make use of the rest later on.

 

Nook Transformation

If you paid attention to the photos I posted of our house you may have noticed the large nook in the living room. I hated it so much because it seemed like a waste of space where nothing could really go. I wanted to make it a built-in bookcase but didn’t really know how to do it. So, of course, I turned to Pinterest. The tutorial that I found for a DIY bookcase on Pinterest can be found here.

Our nook was a little on the large size: 8 feet tall, 32 inches wide and 21 inches deep. The shelves were going to be large, perfect for displaying large items like the porcelain horse head! We decided to make 5 shelves which divided the space into four 1.5’ tall shelves (including the bottom space) and two 1’ spaces at the top. We went to Home Depot and purchased all the need supplies.

Supplies:

¾” Particle Board

Chair Rail Creations 8” white (2)

1x2x8 Furring Strips (4)

Wood Filler

10x2.5 Screws

2.5” Finishing Nails

An employee at Home Depot was extremely nice and cut our particle board into 6 pieces that measured 32” by 19.5”. We kept the depth of the shelves shorter than the 21” nook because we were going to add decorative chair rail to the front (which added another inch) and we didn’t want the shelves to protrude from the nook.

I had already painted the nook green awhile back when I was painting the whole house. Alex painted all the wood pieces white and was ready to get to work.

At this point I think it is safe to defer to my husband on how the shelves were built.

This is now Alex speaking, taking over from Silvey. I was also responsible for documenting the process, which is why a lot of important information might be missing. This first picture shows the nook before we began installation of the shelves.

The particle board shelves had been cut at Home Depot and were a very snug fit. I cut the furring strips to fit underneath the back and sides of each shelf, ensuring that they were long enough to reach two studs each. I used a stud finder to determine the location of the studs and made sure to screw the strips into those studs the shelf could have simply rested on these supports with no additional connection, but I decided to hammer a few small finishing nails through the shelf into the supports just to keep things feeling solid.

The following image compares a completed shelf with a shelf in progress. Notice how the chair rail really gives the shelf a nice finished look. I applied the chair rail with a small amount of Gorilla Glue and three finishing nails. I had to cut a small opening in the back of the bottom shelf to allow room for the electrical and cable outlet.  

Each shelf had a gap in the back of about half an inch. This enabled the depth of each shelf to be set exactly the same as the others. I used wood filler to fill in the gaps, which actually took quite a while. I don’t think the wood filler putty was meant for large applications like this…but it did work.

I also used wood putty to fill in the small gaps along each side of the shelves and along the edges of the chair rail. Once dried and sanded, the edges looked seamless.

Once all of the edges had been filled and sanded it was time to begin painting. I first taped off the edges of the shelves and painted the walls, shelf undersides, and support strips green. I used paper bags to keep paint from dripping onto the shelves.

Here is a view from underneath. Once the entire underside of each shelf had been pained to match the walls it really made the supports disappear. 

And there you have it. A fairly easy project that took a bit longer than anticipated (Silvey thought I could do it in a day!) Here is the final product…Silvey gets credit for the decorations.

Cost Break Down:

Furring Strip 4 at .75 = $3.00

Particle Board = $18.98

Chair Rail 2 at $8.49 = $16.98

Wood Filler = $2.98

Screws = $8.91

Finish Nails = $3.47

Paint (already had) = Free

Total: $54.32

Because the people at Home Depot are amazing supporters of the military after a 10% discount our final total was = $48.88