Ramen Noodles are my Future

Damn, travertine tile gets real expensive when you buy enough for a kitchen/dining room, bathroom, and entry way all at the same time! I guess I know what I'm going to be doing for the next year.

The plan is to do the full bathroom floor and entry floor in the same way we did the half-bath - 2 rows of 2" tile around the perimeter and 8" turned 45 degrees on the inside. The same 8" tile will be run straight up the shower walls, with an accent row of the 2" tiles worked in somehow to keep it interesting. The kitchen & dining areas will be 12" tile run across the whole area, approx 200 square feet.

This is what I put in for the half bath, which convinced us to go with it in the other rooms (shown here before I painted the walls - not bad for my first attempt at travertine if I do say so myself!) :




Eventually (if we have money left over) we'll go with some granite tile for the counter tops in the kitchen and bathroom. Unless we save money somewhere along the line, plywood is more likely in our future!

Renovating the Half Bath

I posted another "before" picture of the half-bath a few days ago, showing the original toilet and nasty old flooring. Those were bad, but the cultured marble vanity, crappy base, pitted and leaking faucet, really complete the picture of an outdated bathroom. There was also an old-style medicine cabinet/mirror and 60's era light not pictured here. Overall, the only thing worth saving in this room was the oak trim around the door and window.




The vanity was easier to tear apart than I could have hoped for. The top wasn't glued down at all - only gravity held it in place. While tearing it apart (and I'll admit that I wasn't careful at all about how I did it) I broke the P-trap where it goes into the wall. This was actually a good thing, as I found that the drain line was about 75% blocked. After tearing it apart, I found out a little about the history of this bathroom. The first color on the walls was that light blue you can see little bits of in the following picture. You can see a lot more of it where the base molding was in the following pics as well. It's a pretty nasty color, in my opinion. After blue came an avocado green and then a layer of off-white. Next was that beautiful wallpaper. After the wallpaper was on the walls, the original pedestal or wall-mounted sink was replaced with the vanity I got the pleasure of destroying. Eventually the wallpaper not covered by the vanity base was removed and more off-white was applied. 20 years later, I get to ridicule it on the internet. Yay for me.




I had to break into the wall to replace part of the drain line. At this point, the wall is ready for drywall to cover my destruction and the hole left by the old medicine cabinet. I've also sanded the walls where the vanity was to try and even out the ridges left by the layers of old paint. New shut-offs were added to the supply lines for the faucet, as there previously were none.




The old linoleum was covered with a 1/4" layer of cement board, held in place with thinset cement and about 100 screws. On top of that was laid travertine tiles in two sizes for some interest in this small room. In this picture, I've got the tiles installed and have just finished pushing grout into the joints. 20 minutes later and the floor would be finished.




A couple of days later and the trim is back in place, the walls are painted, and the new toilet and sink are installed. I went with a somewhat classic style and tried to keep everything with the same look. There are still a few details to take care of, such as cutting the extra material from the toilet bolts, but it's essentially ready for action. We're extremely happy with how the flooring turned out, and plan on using the same tile in the kitchen, full bath, and entry of the house. For the full bath we'll probably use a heat-mat under the tile to take the chill out of it on cold winter mornings.