The 4-letter "D" word

The last two remaining items in the bathroom - now that I've hung the Restoration Hardware towel bars - are to remove the old towel bars, do the requisite wall repair & paint touch-up, and paint the trim.

I found a little time to do everything but the trim paint last weekend.

Thanks for the action photo sweetie! I particularly like how it makes me look like Quasimoto!

But perhaps none of us are looking our best when doing home improvement tasks. I give you Martin in the Bunny Suit as an example.

Since everything's complete except the trim paint, I've declared the bathroom Done. I don't have that all-important fisheye lens that could capture the entire room in one shot, so I will present the finished product from multiple angles:

It's Over

The Tiling is Done. Caulked, too.


Will I ever, ever, EVER use chair rail again on a wall with an outside corner like this? Why no. No, I won't.

The wall doesn't meet at a 90 degree angle, you see, so my Tiling Toy doesn't work.

I destroyed 3 pieces of chair rail trying to get this aligned correctly, and finally settled for "good enough" rather than perfect.

Next up: towel bars, wall repair, and paint.

Going the Distance

After weeks of working in Portland, the Project List has been suffering from extreme neglect while my weekends are spent on laundry, repacking, and catching up on the rest of my day job that I didn't get done because I was doing my day job.

Which leads to lack of progress, and of course lack of blog entries about progress.

Since I've officially returned - well, except for that little matter of Detroit next week and Chicago in August - progress can continue.

And I've decided to Go the Distance.

I didn't count on running out of pencil liner. Argh. So close.

Well? What do you think?

Tub enclosure is done.

Of course, there's still the little matter of the rest of the walls. And grout.

The importance of good communication skills

This is what happens when you and your partner/spouse fail to agree on the appropriate shower tile height in advance of the project.

You get Regress instead of Progress.

The Road to Hell is Tiled with Good Intentions

....Because paving it would be FASTER. And then how would we spend Eternity?

I had to interrupt this weekend's tile-a-thon for some social events (woohoo! I have a life!), and make one Goat Cheese and Onion Tart, which I will not make again. It was fairly yummy, but the ratio of yumminess to prep time and calories was not really worth it.

But despite the distractions, I almost tiled myself out of the tub enclosure, and had some new fun with Chair Rail.

The last time I did chair rail, I had only one mitered corner to deal with, so I held it in position on the tile saw with my fingers, and I'm still feeling rather lucky that I finished that job with all digits intact.

This time, I have 8 45 degree angle cuts to make, so a cutting guide of some sort seems like a good idea. MK Diamond sells an angle guide attachment for my saw, so for $21, I can make my nice precise cuts. But I am too cheap or too impatient to wait to mail order it, so I've experimented with the $8 carpenter's square. It works surprisingly well, though I'm sure I wouldn't want to do this if I were a Tiling Professional (NOOOOOO!!!!!)

Perhaps another day I will post a close-up of the perfectly angled corner. But for today, be content with the big picture.

What exactly is the point of this product?

I need to put up chair rail, and it seems like having something super sticky - stickier than my normal thinset - would be a good idea. So after a visit to my local Home Despot, I picked up a little tub of Ceramic Tile Adhesive. Very sticky stuff.

After I got it home, I took a closer look at the disclaimer in fine print. It says "Not for use in areas of prolonged water exposure". Now I ask you, what does one usually tile? Oh yes, backSPLASHes and TUB surrounds and SHOWER enclosures. What do those things have in common? Let me think. Oh yes, PROLONGED WATER EXPOSURE.

So what EXACTLY does one tile using ceramic tile adhesive where there ISN'T 'prolonged water exposure?

The Chair Rail Height Dilemma

As you can see from the "before" photo, the bathroom in its original incarnation had wood trim supporting an inexplicably large quantity of towel bars. In this picture, I'd already removed 2 bath hooks and a towel bar in the interest of not losing an eye while showering, but you can see the residual mounting hardware.

Naturally, I removed trim and towel bars alike prior to beginning this project. Which brought me to my next design struggle. Do I put the Chair Rail at the same height as the former trim, thereby allowing me to skip the wall repair step?

It's quite tempting, but the former trim location is too high, and I'm concerned that the equivalent subway tile wainscot will leave the wall with that fashion-forward look of an old man with his pants hiked up to his armpits.

I think I will just buck up and do the wall repair, and put the trim where I want it.

And this conveniently lets my tiling progress as far as putting up some gratuitous trim today, even though I didn't work as diligently on it as I did yesterday.

Maybe I can even get a bit of chair rail up during the week.