A weekend of trials

This weekend was an interesting one working on the bathroom. Thursday night I put the Heat Weave down on the floor and did a dry layout of the tile to finalize the pattern. Things at this point were still going well. The heat mat adds about 1/16th to the height of the floor. However, it doesn't do this uniformly. In other words there are some dips between the wires. No problem. Thinset should take care of this issue. Well not so fast. At least where the little hex tiles are concerned. These tiles have to be the toughest tile I've worked with. Granted they come in nifty little mats, and they do look cool, but this outward show of convenience and coolness are just a show. The tiles are truly the work of a sinister force. Lets just say there is a fair amount of thinset on top and in the joints of these tiles that I have to clean off before grouting. In retrospect I should have poured some leveling compound over the Heat Weave and then applied the thinset. A couple pictures of the electric mat and the final tile pattern (I'll be cleaning that).

Item number 2, lighting. My wife bought a nice light for over the medicine cabinet and I went to install it today. Guess what? The electrical box for it is not centered over the cabinet. And no I can't center it over the cabinet without cutting out a stud. Guess I could have gone there, but just didn't want to. Return the light and find something else, not quite as nice, but still pretty good.

What went well? Well I got the medicine cabinet in and the molding around it and the top of the wainscotting. A little action with the scumbuster this week to clean off the thinset frosting and there'll be grout down by the weekend.

Flooring, cabinet and sink...almost a bathroom
After breakfast today, KT convinced me that it would be better to work on the bathroom today than go play in water in my kayak. Something about working now meaning I wouldn't have to work later was mentioned and combined with no caffeine today I immediately agreed this was a good idea. Actually it turned out quite productive. Originally we were planning on putting a built in cabinet in the bathroom complete with laundry chute to the laundry room directly below. Unfortunately, there is a 220V power supply for the dryer running right in the path of where the chute would go. Not good. I decided I didn't want to deal with rewiring electrical and that we've been making do quite well without a chute for some time so no laundry chute. Consequently, a quick stop later at our local furniture place (Village Woodworks) and we had a very nice mission style cabinet. I'm going to make it look built in anyway. Additionally, we picked up a pedestal sink at Rejuvenation, very nice, so now all I need is a faucet with porcelain cross handles. That's turning out to be the difficult item. Ahh, but that's 2 out of 3 items of the title you say. I started in on the flooring as well. Backer board is down and the heating mat is going down tomorrow with tile to follow shortly thereafter. Warm floors in the winter are going to feel decadent. I'll take some pics of the bathroom after everything is in.

Tile issues

So this is my fault for not getting enough tile when I started this job. However, I got the amount of tile I could get at the time, figuring I'd need less than a whole box to cover what I didn't have, and could get that easily. Fast forward 6 weeks (yep that was my original estimate to complete everything) and I'm still tiling. Or more to the point not tiling because I ran out of subway tile. So I stop by the local big orange box. No subway tile. Go to the other local big orange box. No subway tile. Find someone to help me out (this can be an adventure). Am told, "Oh yeah those 3x6 subway tiles weren't selling at all so we sold them back to the supplier. If you want some accent tile we sell a lot of that." I try Lowes. Yes they have the tile, but it's a different supplier. I take a chance, buy a box and nope it's not quite the right shade of white. I need something with just a whisp of gray in it. So now I'm going to try the Daltile store and see if they'll sell me a box even though I'm not a contractor. I'm hoping they have it in stock.