We got them but now what?

The new thresholds are here but now what we do? I went over to Owen Gray and Sons in Brewer to get the new thresholds milled (a nice maple) and so they cut in a little room underneath to account for the half inch of the cork floor. Now we need to figure out how to cut them. For some reason, I thought this would be easy (which I should know better by now). But I realize we asked them to make them 1.5 inches wider - so where does the 1.5 inches fall now? I think I'm going to get some cardboard and make a template. Any other ideas?

Thresholds in the making

I finally was able to get over to the place in Brewer before they closed and so they say it will be about a week until the new thresholds are done. The guy looked at me like I was crazy so I wasn't sure if I wasn't make sense or if I'm crazy. I guess we'll see how they turn out. I'm excited!

Off to San Diego for a week - hopefully by the time I return they'll be done and our kitchen will be just about done!

The world's tiniest bathroom

Since my threshold-fixing dreams were dashed today I decided to do a little bit more in-depth research on our bathroom renovation plans for this summer. We're going to update the fixtures in the downstairs bathroom and redo the floor and do a pretty major reno on the upstairs (full) bathroom.

As you can see from the photo above, this may very well be the world's smallest half-bath. In fact, it's probably more like a quarter-bath. It measures, literally, 67"x 23" at its widest point. Yes, really. We figure this was once the coat closet that they bumped out into the kitchen to fit the toilet in. Well, given its smaller than small dimensions, finding new fixtures to fit this space has been anything but easy. While the toilet should be relatively easy to find a new sink that will fit is not. Everything I seem to find is just too wide (front to back). It looks like we may need to just the use the one that is there with an updated faucet but, as you can see below, the plumbing runs on the inside of the room. As there doesn't appear much hope in bringing in the wall to hide the plumbing (!) we're pretty much stuck with it as it is. My hope was to get a nice mini pedestal but seeing as that is not doable I was wondering about getting the plumbing re-chromed. Does anyone know if this is possible? Perhaps I wouldn't loathe it as much if it was prettier to look at. As it is now, it's kind of rusted and ugly (and a bit convoluted - while I don't know much about plumbing I wonder about the overly complicated piping under there...).

My pain threshold(s)

I know, cheesy, but definitely at my limit with the threshold ridiculousness. I'm off to deal with it today, following up on a tip from our good friends at Bangor Bungalow. There's supposedly a great place in neighboring Brewer that does wood work of all kinds so I'm going to schlep the thresholds over and see what they can do for us. As I mentioned earlier, we have a gap issue between our new cork floor and the existing thresholds from the kitchen to the the three entryways that exit the kitchen. I'm hoping they'll be able to fabricate new ones for us, probably using the router or table saw that I don't have to make up for the gap. I look forward to seeing what can be done and crossing off the second to the last item on our kitchen list (the last is the molding).

Well, as a follow-up, it appears that the woodworking place is not open on the weekends so I'm on hold until next week. To pass the time this morning, I turned on DIY network and am watching a show called Renovation Realities, featuring people doing actual renovation projects that are nightmarish in scope. I feel my blood pressure going up just by watching this mess. Yikes. I wonder if this is what we look like when we're trying to do this stuff!

Hello, gorgeous!

Old one (aka ugly)
New one (aka shiny and new)

This is a true testament to how boring my life really is: I am super excited about getting my new dishwasher. There is just something really satisfying about having an almost completely new-looking kitchen - especially having the appliances match! I happily paid Sears to install this for me, knowing my dislike of working in small, dark, awkward places. I think the $150 was totally worth it, especially seeing how difficult it was to get the old one out (which we're FreeCycling, if anyone is interested). As you can see, I now need to renotch the cork floor to make it fit but am otherwise happy to see the new addition. On top of all this, I got to chat up the installation guy, who also owns his own handy-person-type business. He showed me some pictures of what he's done and I think it might be a good match to help us with mudroom as well as the garage nightmare. We'll see about some estimates. Goodbye, ugly - hello, gorgeous!

Next on the list: finishing the stupid thresholds. However, the furnace just started making funny noises, which I assume are death pangs. The thing is over 50 years old and it's probably time for it to go to furnace heaven. Sigh.

Grouting = Big Mess

Despite feeling like crud today, I finished up this puppy. Honestly, it was a huge mess and I had way more fun doing the actual tiling than the grouting. I don't know if it's just me but some of these tools are just not made for smaller women's hands and in these tighter spaces - I had a hard time with both the trowel and float. In the end, I just donned some plastic gloves and slopped in on by hand. I suppose this would have been fun if I wasn't constantly concerned about getting it all over the countertop.

Now that it's done, though, I'm pretty happy. I think there are some things I would have done differently, however, if I had to do it again: I would have made sure the walls were plumb. I would have used a smaller grout line (this was Thom's idea to have 1/8" so I blame him). And, while I like the look of the interspersed glass tiles, they were not the same depth as the subway tiles and this made it difficult to grout well. It's all fine though. And, it's done - that's the most important part.

All that's left now is to get the molding up and figure out the thresholds!

Done tiling!

I finished the long expanse this morning - probably in about 4 hours. I took a break in there to run to Home Depot (thanks for the coupon, Sarah!) to get grout and more thinset but I ended up not needing more - I had exactly enough to finish the whole thing! It was definitely easier to do this long wall - very few intricate cuts needed as compared to the short walls around all the outlets, etc.

You'll notice I went back to the 3-3 pattern. When he got home last night, Thom said he really liked that better than the random pattern I did on the adjacent wall. I was more partial to the more random look but I think the pattern works better on the long expanse.

I have a sneaking feeling, however, that I am now going to be quite unhappy with the cream colored outlets and switches. I have no desire to really change them out though. Maybe I can talk my darling life partner to do it for me :)

It's certainly not perfect (come to find out the distance from the countertop to the bottom of the cabinets on this side of the kitchen is actually shorter than it is on the other side of the room and we definitely do NOT have plumb walls whatsoever) but it is what it is. I will grout either tomorrow or Monday - maybe Monday. It will be nice to have it all done. I am inexplicably tired, however. I think I'm just not used to standing up for so long anymore. I guess when you pair that with being hunched over for hours at a time it is perhaps not surprising.