Fooled Ya!

Nope - we haven't really done much, but thought I needed to post anyway! We did complete half the domestic water plumbing (as opposed to the already-completed sanitary plumbing) a few months ago. We may have worked on it today, but the torch is at my mom's because we've been working on her house. Hey - that sounds like a great excuse for not having worked on our bathroom! Hopefully we'll have a real update soon - we're almost a year into this project!

Yay!! We made progress!

We now have a door to our bathroom. It looks kind of silly because the adjacent wall is just studs - no drywall yet. So, to enter the "bathroom" you can use the door, or walk between the studs! We did learn that installing a door is a pain in the neck. Next up: soldering the copper cold and hot water supply lines for the shower. Watch out torch, here I come!

We've been gone for the past two weekends, but we've had fun despite being away from our favorite project. We spent a weekend in Gettysburg "cabining" with good friends, including the adorable, 19-month old twins! We usually go camping but considering the age of the twins (and the nasty weather we encountered), a cabin was a smarter choice.

Last weekend we were in Berkeley Springs, WV for our 7th wedding anniversary! We shopped and had a fabulous dinner at Lot 12 (highly recommend this place!) We even purchased some more art for our dining room.

Next weekend we head to Erie, PA for James's cousin's wedding.

Yes, I know, I've been absent for the past few weeks...

Life has gotten in the way of the blog - and the bathroom renovation. We've made some success in the last few weeks - the studs for the wall are in place. We also have all the pieces to work on the shower plumbing, we just haven't done it yet. We started to install the door yesterday, but when we realized that neither one of use knew what we were doing we went to the all-knowing internet. This Old House informed us that it would take 6 to 8 hours to install the door; we had 45 minutes. Needless to say, we did nothing!

We'll be busy the next two weekends, so hopefully we'll get the door installed in 3 weeks!

This project keeps taking longer and longer...

Ahem...

Ahem -- "nothing" apparently includes pulling out tons of staples left from the various floor coverings that have been in that space over the years, cleaning up the mildew that was left on the surface of the existing subfloor due the leak that was the root cause of all this fun (yuck!), and putting lots of screws in the old subfloor to keep it from squeaking.

The Great Wall

Due to tropical storm Hanna, we accomplished nothing on Saturday - it was too wet to cut lumber outside! We spent last weekend in Pittsburgh for James's cousin's bridal shower, so we didn't accomplish anything last weekend.

But, alas, the weather cooperated today and we started to rebuild the wall we had to take down in order to rip up the subfloor (although after church and a trip to our favorite store, Home Depot, it was rather late!) This would seem like a simple task, but nothing in this project turns out that way. The water lines for the shower run in this wall, so we had to shut off the water and remove the valves in order to get the sole plate (the bottom 2x4) for the wall over the piping. Ain't that a beautiful sole plate!

We selected our tile eons ago, and it looks like it's about time to order it as it will take 2 weeks... more on this later!

Oh yeah...

...the floor now has very little deflection - so we achieved our goal by reinforcing the joists. We're still going to put an extra 1/2" of plywood underlayment down to limit it even more.

Woo-hoo!

(ok, so when you're in video mode you shouldn't turn the camera sideways!)