Okay, please send out your happy thoughts!
James has been away for the past 3 days on a CE course vacation in California. Well, I thought it would be fun to have a huge nice surprise for him when he gets back tomorrow night and have the tub/shower in our main bathroom redone while he was gone.
MUCH easier said than done! A friend of ours with experience has come over the past two nights. Monday night, he chipped out a few tiles and things looked good. We definitely need to replace the window anyway, so trying to work around that isn't an issue.
The big challenge Monday night was figuring out if we should just cut out the existing backerboard and drywall or work at chipping out the tiles. Looked like we could salvage some of the backerboard. At that point, I really had no clue as to what all this project entailed so I hadn't been able to pick out tile either. So no tile, no layout - tile up the entire wall? Definitely higher than the 5 feeet that had been the previous height, but how high? Did we want to raise the shower head? So many questions for someone as inexperienced as myself.
Monday night left us with quite a few tiles chipped off - maybe 1/5 of the total walls. a decision to just add a foot or so to the height of the tiles, no style or color of tile selected, indecision about when to remove the window and 3 very tired little kiddos.
***
On to last night.
Well, I woke up much more inspired, albeit exhausted yesterday morning. Bless Bridgette for coming over to watch the kids so I could go get a replacement window and do some more tile shopping.
Here's my unpaid promotion of Tile for Less. Those people are awesome! I walked in, sucked up my pride and showed the lady the tile we had used for the floor and explained my project - I would like 6x6-inch tiles for a tub surround. I wanted to get as close to matching the floor as I could. From across the room, she totally picked it out! Shade and all! Not one to make a snap judgment, I perused a bit, but she was totally dead on!
I took the sample home and Bridgette and I both really liked it. Then we decided to answer the question as well of how high to take the tiles. Long story short on this one, we HAVE to use some sort of rounded decorative edge tile because the back wall is an exterior wall backed by brick. Turns out the decorative edge tiles cost as much for 1 as a square foot of the regular tiles costs. (Yes, OUCH!) Soooo....to the ceiling we go. We think.
Bridgette helped chip out some more tiles yesterday. You may be able to make out in the pictures some of the trouble she encountered. The upper tiles came off right well. As we got lower, the tiles got progressively better adhered where they wouldn't come off so well. So, along with more difficulty in the chiseling off process, we were also losing our smooth surface. Blast!
I'll protect the innocent and not disclose the identity of our friend. But he came over again last night. In attempting to chip out the tiles on the plumbed wall, he was unable to disengage some of the tiles from the backerboard at all. Which then meant we would have lots of holes to patch. OR we could just cut out that wall and replace the drywall and backerboard and start from scratch, costing a little more, but saving us time and effort in chipping off tiles. Okay, done.
So this morning I decided to at least get the opposing wall cleared of tiles so we could at least have one wall done and one section of backerboard salvaged. You guessed it - I found a few more tiles that brought the backerboard out with it. So, more holes.
So much for my quick project. I would definitely say James will be very, very surprised...
(Having trouble uploading pictures lately. I'll try to post some in the next episode.)
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