Ketchup

Ok, last post of the day, I swear.

Here's a picture of the tile when its dry and ungrouted. I like to think of this photo as capturing the tile's last few carefree moments before The Darkness.

 

The grout I picked is, indeed, black. I think it might be as black as my heart. The thing with grouting is that its a lot like frosting a really disgusting cake. You press the stuff into all the cracks and generally make a huge mess. This is the closet, so its a little messier than the rest.

 

 

Once all the cracks are full, you let it dry for a bit, and then wipe off the excess with a sponge and water. This is pretty easy except there's no immediate water source in the bathroom right now, which meant many trips outside to dump buckets of what can only be described as sandy, black, deathwater off the porch. 

 

It also meant I left a few blackish footprints on the destined-to-be-the-next-project carpet between the bathroom and the front door. Did I mention this stuff is really really black?

 

The final (still wet) product looks pretty good though, I think I'm happy with it so far. Next up, I have to work on the "backsplash" round the edges of the room, which will hopefully prevent any future sewage spills from entering the walls. I never want to redo this bathroom again.

 

 

 

 

And here's what it looks like dry: 

 

Tile-o-rama

The tile is officially laid (lain? layed?) thanks to tons of help from my dad. He helped me work out the layout that had me completely frustrated, and made many cuts. If you look closely in this picture, you can see his head as he puts the tile down. We had some issues trying to figure out what kind of mortar to use, and finally wound up taking the advice of a guy at Home Despot who told us to not use the pre-mixed kind that I prefer. Apparently because of the size of the tiles (12 x 24), the pre-mixed goop doesn't dry correctly.

 

That meant we had to mix up our own mortar, which is thick and dusty and cementy and gross and I hate it. I hope to never use large-format tiles again ever. I was mostly on clean-up duty during the process, and here is how they look when still wet from me washing off mortar:

 

 

 

 

Overall, I'm happy with the way they match the walls, and the crazy-stripey texturing on them.  I also have glass tile that's going to fill the space that used to have ugly moulding at the bottom of the wall. That'll go on once the floor is completely done. Next up though: the grout! Which may give my mother a heart attack, because its BLACK!

 

 





Post-Pax Post

Ok, so I was kinda MIA last weekend because I was at PAX Prime, which is a huge video game convention. It's a pretty cool gathering of 70,000+ nerds, and its exhausting. It's loud, and full of people.

Mostly this means lots of standing in lines....

Looking at crazy giant statues and cool booths...

 

And trying out weird games. I'm pretty sure this game was just about Rain. I didn't actually play it though, so maybe it has some other weather in it too.

The most interesting game that I saw all weekend (read: not a League of Legends Clone, a Disney remaster, or about weather) was Crypt of the NecroDancer, which is an old school dungeon crawl controlled by a Dance Dance Revolution pad. You have to move on the beat, and can import your own music, so it was pretty fun to watch people playing.  Here's a video of a random stranger playing it.

Go give these guys money, because they're doing something fun and different. 

 

 

Some of the other indy games looked cool too, especially Apotheon, which had amazing art.

 

There's also tons of (mostly) girls in crazy cosplay, but my bah-tastic friend James takes better pictures, so here's a link.

Hooray for tape!

I decided I hated the tile I bought, so I went out and found some new ones. They're stripey, and match the walls better, and I hate them slightly less.

Well, I DID hate them slightly less, until I tried to lay them out. I'm having trouble making the layout work with the size of the tile, and I think I am going to need a lot of cuts. There's also way too much mathing involved for me right now, so I'm waiting on some help from my dad. 

 

Since there's not much else I can do in the bathroom until the tiles are figured out, cut, and laid, I found something else to do. This morning, my cat was hell bent on making as much noise as he could to try to wake me up, and in doing that he broke the fancy cardboard penthouse he got for his birthday.

So I taped it back together. At which point I decided I liked it better black anyway, and it got a thorough gothing. Pharaoh approves, and has decided to be batman.

 

 

 

Tiles

The walls are all painted now, and I'm working on a tile layout. Now that I can see the tile up against the color of the walls instead of just a paint chip, I'm not wild about the combination. The tiles wind up being a much warmer colour of grey than the walls, which look like more of a slate blue.

 

I'm not sure if I can get used to the combo, or if I'll need to go on another tile search. 



 

The other vote in favor of returning these tiles in favor of other ones is the layout. I measured incorrectly when I went to get the tiles, and forgot that the bathtub was set back 2 inches from the closet, so I'll either have to cut more tiles, or figure out how to be creative with the smaller mosaic tiles.

 

The paint is looking decidedly nautical with the white and khaki tile in the shower. Maybe I'll hang anchors and stars everywhere.

Paint it whiteish-black

So I started painting the bathroom using the leftover paint I had from my kitchen cabinets. I used the lightest of the two colours I used on the cabinets, which is Behr's Silver Hill. The reason I have an extra gallon of this is that I was suckered in to paying extra for the Paint + Primer version, which still took 3 coats to cover bare wood, and even then was scratching off easily so I called and complained and they bought me more paint. That wasn't extremely helpful, and I wound up sealing the cabinets with a poly just to keep them from being scratched up. They also told me I needed to let it cure for 4 weeks before I could seal it, so it took almost a year to finish my cabinets.

This gallon hasn't proved to be any better in terms of coverage. The first coat came out... super thin. I got it free, but I kinda want my money back. I definitely don't recommend this paint.

 

The second and third coats came out slightly better, now I just have a few touchups and some trim to do tomorrow. It's not as dark as it looks, but its hard to get a good picture of it. The crazy swoopy lightness is thanks to the heat lamp in that area, which is casting neat shadows now. 

The tile is a charcoal grey, so the room will be a lot darker than its previous pinkish incarnation.  My mother, who is a white-walls supremacist, won't like it, but I like it a lot better than I did before. Hopefully it hides kitty litter well.

Vanity



 

Anyone who has ever stayed (or peed) at my house will recognise the downstairs bathroom as the super-butch Hello Kitty room. I don't have any good pictures of it in all of its pink glory, but I think I'm going to go in a different direction this time. Most of my HK paraphernalia is destined to be rehomed shortly.

The decision to change up the design is causing me a bit of delay, which is why I haven't written for the last week or so. The floor has all its screws and is ready to receive tile:

But I haven't found a tile I like. And before I buy a tile, I have to figure out what kind of vanity I'm getting so that I know whether I have to tile underneath it or not. I've looked at more than a thousand vanities and so far only found a handful that I like, most of which are out of my price range. I'm currently trying to figure out other options, but it leaves me with not much progress. In the same boat with tiles, all of the ones in the stores right now are HUUUUUGE (16 x 16 and up) and I think that'll make the bathroom look small. This has taken about eleventy bazillion trips to home despot and lowes to check and recheck tile, and a bunch of smaller local places. I've seen so many vanities that I'm having dreams about them.

Since I can't work on the floor without making some decisions, I decided to start on the walls. The former vanity left big splotches of goo and gross on the walls, so the first order of business is sanding it down and filling holes.

Once that was done, I washed the walls using my grandmother's secret wall-washing formula of vinegar and water. Once that's dry, I'm going to spray it down with antibacterial gunk (again) because when sewage has touched stuff, there's just no such thing as too much antibac. Then comes the spackle, tape, and paint. I haven't fully decided on a color yet (blame the vanity again) but I have a gallon of a grey colour that is left over from my kitchen cabinets that I might use. I'm not wild about using the same colour as I have in the kitchen, but it's practically free.