Welcome back, y’all!

In case you missed the earlier updates, click below to see them:

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3

This week’s update is all about some in-between work that’s important, but not very glamorous. We ended last week with a demoed shower, and this week we’re coming back with some serious progress!

After demo, we were waiting on a couple back-ordered valves from Signature Hardware to get the plumbing rough-ins started. Signature has been amazing to work with, and as soon as the parts came into their warehouse they overnighted them to us. As soon as they came in, our plumbers got to work installing them. I meant to take photos of the valves in the wall, but somehow completely forgot. You’ll just have to trust me–they’re in there.

Before we can install the pretty part of the plumbing, the trim, we had to have tile done. Luckily, we were able to get a tile contractor in on short notice to tile the shower. I originally wanted to go for a more unique tile option, but considering that 1) this is not our forever home, 2) this is not our primary bathroom, and 3) this will be behind a shower curtain 99% of the time, I opted to go with a budget subway tile.

I chose this subway tile from Home Depot. I normally order tile through a tile distributor, but the prices at Home Depot were better for this project, and we can return any tiles we don’t end up using, so that’s a bonus as well.

You may remember that the original tile looked like this:

Nothing fancy, but the grout was a weird color, and the cuts weren’t all straight. Then again, neither are the walls. The house is 95 years old, after all.

Then after demo, it looked like this:

And finally, here we are today!

Simple, but clean, new, and leaning towards more of a historic look as well… and almost identical to the old tile. But the grout lines are thinner, there isn’t any cracked tile, and even though the walls and ceiling aren’t straight, the tiles are straight-er. I’ll take it.

Between subs, Jonny got to work on the window trim and baseboard patch. Behind the old vanity the baseboard was cut out, so Jonny patched and sanded with an extra piece of baseboard he had in his tool shed. He used wood putty to cover the gaps, and sanded the edge to match the routed corners of the baseboard that was already here. We’re pretty sure this room wasn’t a bathroom originally, so the baseboards are newer and easier to match than 95 year old ones would be in the rest of the house.

On to the window trim–originally, the window trim in here could barely be called trim. It was just 1x2s brad nailed around the window, and it didn’t match any of the craftsman trim throughout the rest of the house. In an ideal world, this would be a regular craftsman window, not a glass block window, but it just wasn’t worth the cost to us to replace it.

We decided this renovation was the perfect time to help the window fit in with the rest of the house, so Jonny removed the old trim and started in on some new craftsman trim. He used a router to curve the corners to match the other windows in our home. he used 1x4s on the top and bottom, 1x3s on the sides, and for the detail he used a space piece of crown from our Ruby project windows. You’ll have to excuse the iphone photos–it’s hard to take a picture of a bright window in a dark room without using my good camera, and even then…

I love how it turned out! It’s been puttied and sanded and now just needs to be caulked before paint.

That’s this week’s update! It’s been a busy week, and we’re excited for painting to start. Once the painting is done, the vanity and top will be installed, and then the plumber can come back to add all the trim.

Tools used:

• Sander
• Circular Saw
• Miter Saw
• Router
• Router Bits

Thanks for joining us! For videos, more in-depth and real time updates, and more photos, follow along on Instagram here. See you next week!

♥

Grace

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