Bathroom Project part 7

Progress marches on!! In this post you will find we have tiled the walls and floors as well as grouted. If you have been following someone else's blog too then you will find mine is lagging behind, plus I plagiarized a few pictures. We used white grout on the walls and black, yes black, on the floor. I was initially against the black grout but I think it makes sense because it highlights the pinwheel design. If we had used white then I think all you would see are the black dots. Any other color was never really in consideration because then there would be too many colors competing and we wanted a black and white bathroom. Any color we can add or take away with accessories. Good call "A". Grouting using black is an interesting job that I am not sure I would want to repeat. White grout is very forgiving but with black you have to bring your A game.

Bought a 7" tile saw.

Test fitting.

Black hole in my bathroom.

OMG what have we done?

Rain....July...San Diego???

Yes we had rain in SD tonight. It has been so hot lately, 94F when I got home at 3pm. We had monsoon moisture that built up over the mountains and usually it stays over the mountains but today the rain moved toward the coast and we got a little water. But the more important is that it cooled the air and currently as of 8:15 pm it is 76F, very nice. Yesterday at this time it was mid 80s. Keep in mind we don't have air conditioning. But then again we are wimps in SD and if the temp swings 20F either way then we complain. I did get another nice sunset, sorry but I can't help myself. Kinda like someone else I know who always took pictures of ducks...you know who you are :)

Summer Sunset

Tonight I think this is the first real nice sunset that we have had in a long time. We had May Gray; June Gloom, and the first week of July it did not get out of the 60's F and was cloudy all the time due to the marine layer. But now the temp is rising along with the humidity as the monsoon moisture starts to make its way up from Mexico.

Enjoy!!!!

That shiny thing next to the tree branch is suppose to be the moon. I just had the exposure set wrong for the picture.

Bathroom Project part 6

I have been a little behind in updating the progress but that is just because we have been so busy making progress. We are in the final push and hopefully will be done very soon. Earlier this week after framing out the shower we installed Durock and it went easy. The next step was to use the fiber mesh tape and thin set to seal all the seams and corners. This wasn't too hard either, just messy.

In my part 5 post I mentioned using Redgard and I think this was the easiest step so far. If you can paint, then you can waterproof your shower with Redgard. It goes on pepto bismol pink, and I mean florescent pink. You know it is dry and cured when it turns a deep red. It also doesn't smell too great either :(

I did make one mistake, but like I say it is not so much that you make a mistake it is what you do after you make the mistake. For some reason I did not trim the edge of the durock properly near the step and there was a major lip. This was a big problem because tile could not lay flat. If I had been using a typical water proofing membrane, major problem. With Redgard, no problem. I just took a blade trimmed back the excess durock and repainted to seal the wall, EASY!!!!!

You could see this stuff from the space shuttle.

Kuuipo is not impressed!

Outdoor Project part 1

We recently hired a landscape designer to plan the entire perimeter of our house. I had been procrastinating this because of the cost but I am glad that we finally did. I think we had the overall design in our heads of what we wanted but putting it together is not easy.

We knew that we wanted a wall to enclose the side yard.
We wanted to replace the back porch overhead structure.
We wanted an outdoor kitchen.
We wanted beautiful plants.
We wanted lighting to show off the plants.
We wanted a fountain.
We wanted a great courtyard.
We wanted more privacy.

We wanted a lot!!!!

The hardest part of all of our wants is the plants. There are so many factors that go into plants.
1. What kind of sunlight do they require.
2. What kind watering do they need.
3. How to place them where they would go with other plants. (believe it or not that is actually important).

We plan on taking this in stages since it will be quite expensive and we do not want to borrow money to make it happen. No equity loans for us.

We turned to Steven Letz of Letz design. Below you can see the results.