While Eaphis and the boys were having some good father-son time at the 76er’s game yesterday, I decided to tackle an easy project in the master bathroom and put up the over the toilet shelves in our master bathroom.  I had been collecting stuff to fill up these bad boys for a few weeks so I’ve been patiently waiting to put it all together. I usually don’t write up step-by-step blogs but I’ve gotten a few questions from people about the pipe shelves that I built in the boys bathroom so thought what the heck, let’s change it up a bit.  So following is a semi-detailed description of how to…

The weather is getting warmer and the days are getting longer, which can only mean one thing – Time to Paint Again!  Hurrah!!  Eaphis had the great idea to go ahead and finally bust out our Master Bath last night and just like that we’re one step closer to our “Grown Up Bathroom”.  Unlike the other two bathrooms this is going to be a much more gradual process with basically everything except re-tiling the shower and bathub being a “Phase 1” and then the shower and bathtub being a “Phase 2” mostly because I’m still deciding how much I actually want to try to DIY myself and how much I…

One more room scratched off the list before the New Year!  I had finally had it with the Nutella smeared walls and slowly worked my way through the Powder Room between Thanksgiving and Christmas and am finally ready to share.  Since this wasn’t such a huge job I decided not to post on each stage of the project but just share some of my favorite updates – so without further ado… Thankfully Eaphis trusted that I had an end goal in mind because there were no examples that I could show him for what I was going for.  I knew I wanted a mix of hard/soft and wanted it to…

So my powder room has been making me angry lately…angry enough to grab my crowbar.  But before I start tearing up molding (or a few hours afterwards…who’s counting) I wanted to close the books on the guest bathroom blog-wise.  I’ve been holding off posting this (I actually did finish before GOBs bday) because I needed to make some small fixes and thought maybe I would try to finish off all of the last to-dos on my list before I shared….but after a few weeks away from it I realized that the small fixes don’t bother me as much as they used to and things are more than OK enough to…

I’m going to call this the 1/2 way point and give a big sigh of relief that the hard part is over!  6 weeks later and we have a working shower again – TA DA I really fell in love with the over-sized white subway tile / black grout combo after lots of “Fixer Upper” marathons.  Once I got into the rhythm the tile went up super quick;  the nice thing about the wall tile is that I could use pre-mixed mastic so I could work on it at night and not have to worry about mixing a new batch each time.   In addition to the subway tile, I used…

Ahhhhh – now that feels better Just a quick update on this amazingly beautiful Saturday night.  I already had the floor tile in when I wrote the last post, but with Eaphis’ help we got the toilet back in today so we now have a part way functioning bathroom….hooray!!  The boys can stop using mine!!To me, tearing up and laying down the floor was the biggest obstacle that I had to get around in this whole project, so now that that’s done I feel like I’m on easy street.  I laid out and cut all of the tile beforehand, which took a couple of days, but once that was done…

HOLY HELL THAT WAS HARD!!! Over the last few weeks I’ve begun the heavy lifting part of my bathroom redo beginning with DEMO TIME Before I started each part of this, I gave myself a little pep talk and then began to swing away (telling myself that if I really messed up I could always hire a contractor). First the shower came down – once I got the rythm of this it actually wasn’t that bad….even though I slowly discovered that I would have to replace all of the backer-board because none of it was installed properly….even that went up without much of a problem.  I even got my nifty…

Two more projects knocked off the list in the guest bathroom – one big and one small. Let’s start with the big one – creating two light fixtures where there used to only be one thanks to the next course in the Dave Klebba school of electrical work.  The first course was installing the ceiling fan in our bedroom (which besides tripping the circuit and not realizing it for 20 minutes) went pretty smoothly. This time, we faced quite a few hurdles, but surprisingly we were able to get around them really easily!  I couldn’t have done it without my co-contractor (and the lessons that he is passing down to…

Now it’s time to get to hard fun stuff!!  We’re coming up on a year in our house, which means that our house has settled, our drywall is soon to be fixed, and it’s time for the big projects I’ve been salivating over.  I know a lot of people might say that we’re crazy for taking on these large updates to a brand new house, but the truth is that brand new often means “builder basic”.  We could have spent a lot more money up front to get more upgrades, but we’d (OK “I’d”) rather do it myself and get exactly what I want for a lot less money…..plus I…