Now we're talking...

Hi all!

If you follow me on instagram (interiorgroupie) or twitter (@interiorgroupie) you have seen that we had some exciting grout progress last week. This is uber exciting as it means the bathroom is kind of getting close...to looking like a bathroom again...

 

Loving the dark grout...

 Loving the floor...

Loving the future home of our double vanity...(which is proving to be a challenge since the vanity placement won't be lined up with the studs...right...)

 

And now the hard part - to choose the perfect paint colour. We have to do the painting before the plumber comes back so we have a chance to paint properly behind where the rad is going and where the toilet is going...but what colour? 

Currently Benjamin Moor Distant Gray (2124-70), American White (2112-70), and Paper White (OC-55) are in the mix. Bathrooms don't get a lot of light, so I'm thrown by how light / white to go, or if I should go with a touch of grey. I'm also a bit worried about the gray being too blue (I don't want that)...what do you think?

Bathroom progress {subfloor, drywall and tile oh my!}

Happy Monday!

How was your weekend? Ours was good - dinner with friends on Friday night, errands and some relaxing on a chilly Saturday, and then more relaxing and some clean up on a sunny Sunday. Overall, a pretty great weekend. Since the bathroom is now well under way there's not much for us to do on weekends - this is very "new" for us. We're used to being part of the progress instead of watching from afar. I have to say, it's pretty amazing to come home from work and see progress every day! If we were doing this on our own we would be nowhere close to where we are now, and we would have made more than a few rookie blunders along the way.

Before the drywall went up, the Mr. and I did some finishing touches on the framing, including framing out the spots for our recessed medicine cabinets:

Last week marked the subfloor being completed (the mr. did most of it, but our carpenter came in to finish off the tricky parts around the toilet), drywall going up, and tile going up! The ceiling also got fixed (from where we ripped out the wall), and some taping and mudding happened.

Well hello there, future home of the double vanity.

Sneak peak at my pretty new bathtub (we tried to protect it with plastic and tape...we'll see what happens :) ). We are going to have glass put as the third "wall" ontop of the pony wall (or knee wall) for a clean finish to the bathtub area.

On a non-construction note, I did some baking this weekend and tried a new muffin recipe for apple spice muffins from Smitten Kitchen.

They are delicious.

What did you get up to this weekend?

Birthday and a (non-bathroom) update

I know that ALL of my posts lately have been about the bathroom. Are you sick of it yet? I'm not...so excited to see it moving along :) It's interesting - I can be totally indecisive with little things (what should I have for dinner tonight??) but with both the kitchen and the bathroom I've had a good idea of what I want (white and marble....pretty simple :) ).

I have a bathroom update, but believe it or not we have had other things going on in our lives the past little while...on the weekend we helped a friend throw a surprise welcome home party for her husband who was returning from a 3-month work stint overseas (and it worked - he was very surprised!). Then on Wednesday, it was my birthday...27 AGAIN....funny how that number keeps on coming up year after year...

{via}

Other than that we're planning a getaway / vacation with some friends for the summer...anyone have any tips / thoughts on St Lucia (renting a house, not the all includsive route)? 

Bathroom mood board

I finally put together a mood board for my bathroom so you guys can have a peek into what I envision for the space. Well...at this point it's more than what I invision, it's basically what's happening!

Sort of different from my initial run at it, but I'm loving it all coming together. The white subway tile will be on the shower/tub alcove wall, and the marble herringbone will be the floor tile (I will have HERRINGBONE in my house!!).

The only things I have left to decide on are a shower head and paint colour. For the paint, I don't know whether to leave it all white and air-y, or to do something a bit darker on the wall (grey)? I'm leaing towards a very light gray so it isn't white on white on the tile. I am unsureof doing something dark because we don't have any tile on the walls to break it up. I also may re-think the lighting, but will keep the same style and will have the lights on top. I like the idea of lights on the side, but since we are doing 2 separate mirrors, we would have to have 3 lights and they're pretty bulky so we opted for top lighting. We will also have 2 potlights so the over-mirror lights won't be the only light sources in the bathroom.

So far the electrician and plumber have been in (and will be back to finazlie all the hook ups), and our drywall / tile installer started today! I know that finishing takes a while...so I'm not banking on it being doing very soon, but it's still some great progress.

Bathroom update - the demo!

Ok...first off, there is snow on the ground. In Toronto, in April. Less than a week from my birthday. Not cool Mama Nature, not cool. It felt like we skipped spring and fast forwarded to december. Without the Christmas pretty. Bleck....

Onto other things...things that will make my bathroom oh so pretty - DEMO.

This bathroom reno is the first real "reno" we are doing to our house. Don't get me wrong, we have done a lot (A LOT) of work to our house since moving in: painting top to bottom, re-wiring, new boiler, a/c, new closet, and a kitchen uplift.

But besides the closet, we haven't done any other demo. We certainly haven't done any demo that includes a bin.

We can now scratch that off the rookie list!

The bin arrived at 7:30am on Saturday and the Mr. spent a solid 10 hours on Saturday demo'ing the bathroom, while I ran around picking up our tub, vanity, mirrors, etc. We could have had delivery but it didn't work with our schedule so pick-up it was.

Plus, I got the surprise of the guy at the pick-up desk who said "Ok you're picking up a tub and vanity...{looks at me} Are you here on your own? Yes. {looks at me again} What kind of car do you drive???"  I wish I could have been swift enough to joke that I had a Honda Civic with me or something but I had to tell him the truth that I had a cargo van (thank god for Autoshare).

After all the Mr's hard work and some timely help from his cousin towards the end of the day, we had a lot of dust (and a lot of it contained within plastic!) and this:

Our new bathroom!!

OK, space for our new bathroom. I think it's all very exciting. The Mr is a little freaked out about how it is going to be put back together, but I just keep on reassuring him that's why we hired some folks to put it back together for us. (Easier to day since i didn't rip it apart. Let's hope i'm right on this one). In terms of our plan for the work, we have a plumber, electrician, and "finisher" coming in (tile, drywall, etc) so I think we will be in good shape. If the plumber can make everything happen with the radiator pipes and sink moving we should be good (fingers crossed).

 Oh yah...and as a tip...when demo'ing a tile floor on a floor above another one...it's probably best practice to remove light fixtures, or else this can happen:

woops.

Bathroom Update - We have a new (framed) wall!

A long overdue hello again!! We have been pouring our time into the bathroom reno and a couple of other projects we have on the go, so my at-home computer time has been taken up with research and ordering (online shopping with store returns makes my life sooooo easy).  Fortunately "research" tends to involve Pinterest so I've been getting my fix.

Ok now time for the real updates - a couple of weekends ago the Mr and his very handy friend framed the new wall for our bathroom. Our main change to the bathroom is moving the wall into our guest room by 20 inches. 20" is a lot of added space to our teeny tiny principal bathroom.

Exciting, right!??! As you can see, once the wall is down the bathroom will have a nice amount of space for a proper vanity and space for good old moving around. We aren't going to be able to tango in the bathroom but that's a good thing considering the maneuvers we have to pull right now if we are in there brushing our teeth at the same time.

The wall was framed in advance of demo so we could wrap it in plastic in hopes of containing SOME of the mess to come from demo (demo in a 90 year old house with plaster walls will always be messy).

Oh - and an update on the light fixtures - we ordered both the top and side fixtures to see what will work best in real life with all of the other finishes we have (and we can return the ones we don't use directly in store...so easy).

Hoping to put together a mood board soon so you can see where I am going with all of this!

On top, or on the side?

Happy (belated) Easter everyone! Hope the Easter bunny was good to you. My weekend was extra long since the Mr. and I took Monday off as well, and it felt relaxing yet full of family and friends. The Easter Bunny was exceptionally good to me, except I forgot my new pillow covers that my mom sewed for me! Sooo it will be a month or so until I see them in the living room...c'est la vie. We will be in a construction zone throughout our bathroom reno though, so maybe it's all for the best.

Speaking of reno...I've moved on to some light fixture choices (PS - we've ordered the vanity, tub, and fixtures / taps!). I need your help with this one - lighting on top or on the side?

Or

Mirrors (yep, I ordered those too), Top lighting, Side lighting all via lowes.ca

What do you think? We are also still debating whether we need 2 potlights - any thoughts? The bathroom will be approximately 50 sq ft when we're done with it.