Tile Borders and Grouting

The great tiling project is nearing an end. We have finished tiling the kitchen, 1st floor bath, living room, mudroom and front hall. We will be finishing up by doing the master bathroom floor and the kitchen counter tops and bar early next week.

Here is the wet saw station in the shop with the cheap tile saw from home depot we bought back in Golden Valley, arguably the best $80 tool I've ever had.

(Lorien showing off the hallway into the living room)

We had a lot of fun thinking about a tile border around the heater, something that would be attractive but not detract from the heater itself. We made this border out of leftover tile from the kitchen.


(Heater surround from another angle.)

On Friday we installed the bar base cabinets and butcher block top, note to all future users ...

"Feel free to cut right on the top, everything except meat and berries and anything else you think will stain or stink!"

Cheers,
Ross and Lorien

Tiling

A local tile guy, Mike, is helping us tile the tub surround and the master shower...


And a friend we met when we were building the masonry heater, Stefan, is coming up from Portland for a few days to help out with the great floor tiling project.
Stefan doing some of the dry layout for the living room.
(The living room tile from above on the stairs landing, it has been dry laid but not mortared down yet)

As you can see there is no small amount of tile going down and it is certainly nice to have extra hands on deck. For Thursday and Friday of last week Stefan, myself and Dave (an upright frameworks guy) laid out/cut/mortared tile all day.
(The living room from siting on the masonry heater)

It was no small amount of cutting and piecing together to make the decorative border separating the kitchen and the living room tiles.



(The border up close)

We will be laying the tile for the living room, the front hall, the pantry and the mud room this week. With luck we'll have it all laid and grouted by next weekend.

Outdoors!

We had a pretty good rain storm a few weeks ago that turned into an ice storm covering all of the trees and bending birches to the ground.


The weather is finally starting to warm up and the first signs of spring are here. Lorien and I went out for a snowshoe on Liselle and Austin's place today and it was a bit muddier than anticipated...

More pics

Here is the floor/entry way from our bedroom into our closet and bathroom (bathroom is on the right, closet on the left... no doors only archways!

Standing at the top of the stairs, looking at what will be our office space... the octagon looks into our closet.

Here is Ross rockin' his old sleeveless city high tennis shirt building the bar.

And here is the first floor shower, ready to be painted tomorrow.

Getting it done

Lorien here again. Things are starting to look, if not finished, at least a bit more that direction. We're done with most of the interior painting, the cabinets are in (we love them!), the utilities in but not all hooked up, downstairs shower in, upstairs bath in and the bar is being built. We've picked all of our tile and tiling upstairs is set to start tomorrow or so. Floor upstairs are finished too.

Some of our recent trials: because we didn't plan our plowing well, our garage is flooding. Ah well. And someone accidentally tried to raise the garage door that was iced down and it...er...well, broke. And Kaiya ate the greenhouse wall. Bad dog.

A few more pics

Finishing the trim!

The hot tub- our best investment yet.

The ill-fated "looks like cream on the tiny color swath, turns to mint green in sunlight"- we'll be re-painting this one.

Drywall and painting

Lorien here- So a long time since the last post, testament to how busy we've been with house things. :-) The drywall is (finally!) done and we're on to painting, which I'm finding to be the most challenging from a decision-making standpoint. Turns out that after we spent 6 hours poring over 47 different shades of green, finally choosing the perfect one, the one we picked turns an entirely DIFFERENT shade of green in direct sunlight on the wall. So, back to the....er....choosing board. We're also working on our master bathroom and will be starting to tile the shower soon.

Pictures above are: Our greatroom looking up towards our bedroom, the front hall, Ross painting greatroom, the pantry (complete with wine) and the den (with our buddy Mike Johnson helping out). We've given the paint colors a few names of our own: Troll Skin Green for the greatroom, Gandalf's Grey for the shop, Human Flesh for the front hall and Fairy Blood purple for the den. Soon to come: Vampire's Feast Red for our room and Cyanosis Blue for the guest bedroom. As you tell, we're a bit sick of choosing paint colors.

In other news, Ross has built a sweet shop workbench (currently buried under crap so no pic posted), the outside trim is almost done, the greenhouse is holding temps above 50 (or so) at night and up into 70s during the day (there's no heater in there so this was a big question) and the masonry heater is kicking ass. Oh, and our hot tub is nearly buried in snow, which makes it really neat to sit in.

Next on the docket: Installing downstairs shower, upstairs bathtub and shower, installing cabinets then appliances then starting in on the floors. More to come....

Move-in date: end of April!