As we wait on tenterhooks to find out whether our flooring material will arrive before our bedroom floors do, we’ve continued to work on a variety of projects. Kathryn’s been busy up making our skylights more pretty – waxing them with a substance which is meant to be low VOC and air-quality friendly, but which instead smells like a thousand oilpaints compressed into one tiny can.
It’s all, apparently, plant based. But 2 days after coating it, it still stinks to high heaven. I actually turned the heating off today and opened a bunch of windows to get some air through the house. We’ll see how it is tomorrow.
However, it’s worth it. The skylight looks awesome.
That is of course only one of two, so there’s a whole ‘nother one to be sanded, fettled and coated. Yay?
I, on the other hand have continued my quest to tile everything in sight. At least, in the bathroom. And finally finished putting down the floor tile today. I’d got to a point where there were 6 partial tiles left to cut on Saturday (we had a social day yesterday!), and rather than attempt it when I was tired I declared I’d do it today. And lo, with very little drama it was done. Incredibly there was only one miscut – and that was out of a tile scrap, so it didn’t cost us any usable tile. I need to grout the whole lot tomorrow, then when that’s dry I can silicone the corners of the bathroom floor and the base of the bath / floor join.
I did, however, break out the grey silicone to seal around our bath which, if you ask me, is looking positively resplendent in it’s new coat of white pseudo-enamel.
I still need to gunk the corners of the shower with the hateful stuff, and the corners of the shower shelf. That’s because I don’t trust grout to hold the water out of those areas. I also need to treat the floor in the bathroom with tile protector once I’ve got it good and clean and the grout’s in. So much fun!
But I’m super-pleased with how the bathroom’s come together. It feels luxurious despite being mostly salvage or very cheap (the white subway were the cheapest home depot had on a special offer, the copper tone tiles were clearance (albeit not cheap once we factored in shipping), the marble tiles were salvage, the bath and sink were salvage… only the toilet and shower were bought new).
It was a little close on tiling the floor. There were 6 tiles left over – and they were all somewhat stained with rust. I did actually use a few rust-stained ones, where the stain could be cut off. We thought we had much more than that. Actual off-cuts were pretty small, too. So…
I spent a lot of time staring at the problem of “we don’t have a date for the floor coating arriving yet” and “in theory the bedroom floor could be here tomorrow”. My conclusion was that we could paint the anti-fracture paint in sections: the hall and lounge area tomorrow, then when it’s dry we can move the kitchen units into the lounge, and we can do the kitchen/dining/laundry area. This is not ideal, but it does mean it can happen without moving everything into the bedrooms and… if we’re lucky and the bedroom flooring (a floating engineered wood affair) does arrive soon, it’s something I can quietly put down while we’re waiting for the main room’s flooring material to arrive. So the afternoon was cleaning up the floor in the main room and hallway ready for the anti-cracking paint which was endless fun. I did discover that it’s relatively easy to sand back our self-levelling flooring compound which has allowed me to ‘fix’ a few of the most obvious issues.
I continue to wait with bated breath for a date for a garage door, or them to turn up and fix the incorrect roof.
