The dark side

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

I may be getting ahead of myself, but the other night I did this.

Work continues on the drywall in the basement, but we’re all done in the bathroom. So before I put the tile on the walls, I decided to put on some paint.

Yes, I should be sanding and pasting, but it’s so much easier to open a can of paint and brush it around a small room. Never underestimate the power of instant gratification when it comes to renovations.

In fact, I was so pleased, I may not have stopped with just the prime.

I decided to go really dark with Matt’s bathroom. It’s a pretty small room, and there are no windows, so my first instinct was to choose a really light paint. However, between the built-in shelving, tile and a big mirror, only one wall is going to be painted. Therefore, there’s room for some drama. Plus, everything else is going to be white or mirrored, so there will likely be enough lightness that the room doesn’t feel like it’s closing in on you.

The colour I chose is Wrought Iron from Benjamin Moore. It’s a really dark grey that reads as black at times.

I’m hoping that it will play well with the grey tones in the tile.

And that’s another benefit of painting at this point in the project: no spatters or drips on our beautiful new tile.

This is my first time choosing a paint colour this dark, and so far I’m loving how it looks. If it turns out that I don’t love it later on, it’s simple enough to repaint one little wall.

Anyone else a fan of the dark side? What are your tricks for dealing with a small window-less room?

A peek of pretty

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Amidst the dust and the upheaval and the tired muscles and the very, very, very long to-do list, I need a little reminder of what we’re working towards. The stack of tile piled in Matt’s future office provides some good encouragement right now.

Here is a little sneak peek at the various pieces that will eventually make up the basement bathroom.

I think the white balance is a little off in this photo, as there is much more white than grey in real life

The white subway tile in the centre is going to be the main feature in the room. It will cover the three walls of the shower from floor to ceiling and the bottom half of the wall behind the toilet up to the height of the vanity. I chose a 4 inch by 8 inch tile, rather than the standard 3 by 6. It’s going to take a lot of tiles to cover the walls, and I’m hoping there will be slightly less labour with the larger tiles.

The white tiles will be accented by a narrow band (probably a strip 3 or 4 tiles high) of the grey and white marble mosaic mini subway tiles at the right. These will run at about eye level in the shower area only. Not an original design feature these days, I know, but hopefully a pretty timeless look.

The marble mosaic hexagon on the left is the shower floor. And the square (pseudo marble) tile at the bottom is the floor in the main area of the bathroom. They’re all sitting on the piece of marble, which you’ve seen already. This slab will top the bench in the shower.

Not pictured here are two more pieces of marble that we’ll be using for the top of the shower curb and the base of the niche.

As a reminder, the inspiration for the basement bathroom is Aubrey + Lindsay’s beautiful bath.

From Aubrey + Lindsay’s Blog

We managed to find tiles that were very similar to theirs. Although there were times that I joked that tile sourcing was going to break my enthusiasm for renovating.

The original tile that I picked for the accent band were back ordered until the end of August. They were another beautiful white and grey marble, but longer and more irregular lengths rather than an even subway shape. I really liked the irregular lengths for the contrast with the regularity of the white subway tiles. At the rate we’re moving now, August might have worked, but at the time I didn’t want to delay the project, so I found another option. Ultimately the colour is what will be most noticeable, and the overall feel of the bathroom will likely be pretty much the same with the tile that we ended up choosing.

For the main floor area, my original vision was to have large format white subway-ish shaped tiles. These were incredibly hard to find. Floor tiles seem to be square for the most part. And the ones that I was able to find were more creamy than I wanted. I nearly placed the order for the off-white tiles, but decided to take one more look at other options and found the square tile in the grey and white tones that work well with the colour palette that I’d established.

Ultimately, we ended up sourcing tiles from three different suppliers plus Home Depot for the marble sills and plus our stone supplier for the bench top. Fortunately, everything works very well together and it looks beautiful, even when it’s just sitting in a pile on the floor.

The bathroom is actually ready for tiling, but a couple of other projects (okay, slightly more than a couple) and the universe’s dogged persistence in only putting 24 hours in the day continue to delay installation.

For now, ogling the cases of tile–and remembering how far we’ve come already (psycho shower, anyone?)–keeps me going on this renovation.

Where do you find your motivation?

Change of plans

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

You’ll recall that one of the things we needed to do in the bathroom renovation was to increase the storage. This is Matt’s bathroom, and he’s a pretty basic kind of guy who doesn’t believe in a lot of lotions and potions.

However, he is the type of person who changes what toothpaste, deodorant and soap he uses each day depending on how he’s feeling. Some days it’s about the Irish Spring. Others, he’s Ivory all the way. And don’t get me started on the difference between the blue bar and the green one. As well, my husband can’t pass up a deal, so when something comes on sale he stocks up.

We needed somewhere to stow all of his toiletries (that word sounds too delicate for a man’s bathroom stuff) and the small single vanity was not going to do. The original plan was to tuck some built-in shelving into the one end of the shower.

The original floor plan for the bathroom reno showing the shelving unit tucked in beside the shower.

Once we started actually working in the bathroom, though, the space started to feel a bit tight. We were concerned that carving out the storage area would make the shower too small. The bathroom is not huge. However, the hallway outside the bathroom is fairly generous–in fact it’s about seven feet wide.

So Matt came up with the idea to borrow approximately one foot from the hallway to make the storage unit.

Ahhh… much more roomy. The revised floorplan for our new basement bathroom.

We’ll still get floor-to-ceiling built-in storage, so Matt gets to keep all of his different flavours of soap and toothpaste. And making this little bump-out into the hallway allows us also to have a fairly generous shower, complete with a bench.

For your reference, here are some of the measurements for the bathroom:

Bathroom itself: 5 feet by 7 1/2 feet
Storage area: 20 inches wide by 16 inches deep
Shower: 3 feet by 5 feet
Shower bench: 32 inches wide by 16 inches deep by 18 inches high

Planning is an important part of renovating. You should take the time to think about your project before you pick up a hammer and go to town. However, you have to be prepared as well to make adjustments as you go along. Sometimes you have to compromise. Sometimes you can improve on your original plan. I think this modification is an improvement on our original plan.

Mystery marble

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Thanks to everyone who weighed in on what they thought was the answer to Friday’s mystery photo. Most people recognized pretty quickly that it was stone of some kind and guessed they were looking at tile or a countertop maybe. Close, but not quite.

Dave got it right: this is in fact marble for Matt’s bathroom shower. More specifically, it’s the slab that will go on the top of the bench in the shower.

It’s a beautiful piece of white and grey marble.

This was my first time buying marble, and finding the perfect piece was not as easy as I expected. We needed one solid surface for the top of the bench. No seams or joints minimizes our risk of leaks. However, none of the tile or home improvement stores that we visited dealt in large (but smaller than counter-size) pieces of marble. The top of the bench had to be 18″ x 32 1/4″, and the best I found was 18″ square tile. That would have meant a seam, so that was a no-go.

As well, I was picky about the colour and veining on the marble. I wanted something mostly white with smooth grey veining (not too speckled). Granite suppliers are common in our area, but in my experience they tended to have a very limited selection of marble. Plus, understandably none of them wanted to cut into a countertop-size slab and end up with a leftover that was too small to use on another project.

Finally, we found a granite supplier that had a larger selection of marble and a good collection of remnants. They let us go through their warehouse and pulled out many pieces for me to examine. In the end, we found a piece that was just the right size and just the right colour. They gave us a good deal on the price and cut and polished it to my exact specifications.

Here’s a sneak peak of how it looks with the marble mosaic we’re going to be using for the shower floor.

Marble slab with hexagon marble mosaic tiles

The slab is a great match to the hexagon tiles.

I love marble over any other stone, and I’m really happy that we’re going to be able to use some in Matt’s new bathroom.

Our tile order should be arriving shortly, so stay tuned for more updates.

Any other marble fans out there? Anyone have tips for sourcing natural stone? And looking ahead to the next stage, any advice for installation?

Progress

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Greenboard and cement board in the bathroom

Greenboard and cement board are up in the basement bathroom

I’m a little bit excited to finally be at the drywall stage in the basement reno. It’s going to be a huge job though, so we’ve decided to break it into smaller projects to make it more manageable. We started with the bathroom.

We used cement board in the shower and then moisture resistant greenboard on the ceiling and the rest of the walls. We’ve also patched the floor where Matt broke up the concrete for the drains and put the new concrete pan in the shower.

Our new shower comes with a storage niche as well as a bench

Next step is taping all of the joints, and then we’ll move on to tile. It’s amazing what a difference the drywall makes. The room is already starting to feel more finished.

Things I love:

the niche
the bench
the precision cutting we were able to do around the electrical and plumbing–less pasting for us!

Hopefully the progress continues this weekend.

What are your plans?

Psycho shower

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

In previous posts I mentioned that our basement bathroom is deserving of its own feature. Well, here it is. The promised post on our basement bathroom.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Hey, that looks pretty good. Shower, toilet, vanity, sink, mirror, light. All of the parts seem to there.

Let’s look a bit closer, shall we?

Psycho shower! No, this is not a crime scene. We have some issues with iron in our water.

Psycho shower on a grody platform (and yes, some demo has taken place between the first two photos and this photo)

Decent sink, but ugly faucets and some spray issues

Decent sink, but ugly faucet and some spray issues

Off-centre light (and random vent… don’t know what it’s covering yet)

Exhaust fan issues (we haven’t touched this yet. This is actually how it was when we bought it.)

Cushy toilet seat with colourful hunting scene on the lid

Lovely, isn’t it?

We knew from the first time we saw it that we would be tearing out the basement bathroom entirely. Here’s the vision for what it will be.

Decidedly not psycho shower. Source: Aubrey + Lindsay’s Blog

While most of the key features of the bathroom are in place, the one thing that we’re missing is storage, so the reno will have to include space for extra soap, toilet paper, towels and all of the other stuff that is part of a bathroom. Something like this will be perfect.

Source: Houzz

Here’s the floor plan before.

Source: floorplanner.com

And after.

Much larger shower (hopefully not on a platform), with a ledge at the one end for shampoo and soap. The other side of the ledge will be floor to ceiling storage. Source: floorplanner.com

Like in the rest of the basement, we’re not making major changes to the layout, but everything will be coming out and the walls will be opened up and the insulation will be upgraded. We’re probably going to reuse the vanity, albeit with a new faucet. There will be a new toilet, new floor, new lighting and lots of nice, clean, new tile.

After growing up in a house with only one bathroom, Matt now requires his own bathroom. So I will be the main user of the upstairs bath, and this one will be all his. Somehow it doesn’t seem entirely fair that he gets the nice new bathroom all to himself. Don’t you think?

For more inspiration images, including ideas for fixtures, see my basement bathroom board on Pinterest.