Our New Home- A Year Later

Has it been a year already? 

We moved into our house one year ago on July 15th. The house was 2 1/2 years old, but since it was the owners 2nd home, it was hardly lived in and no upgrades had been done.

Lets start at the beginning...Here's the MLS photo of our Carolina Cottage. I love how it looks small, unlike our last house, which was all brick and 3 floors!

MLS photo

Make Your Master Bath Your Sanctuary

Your Master Bathroom should be your sanctuary.

It should be pretty and functional;

A place for relaxation and a place for a little luxury.

Master Bath Update

I shared the frameless shower and tile surround awhile back and promised I'd share a few other changes in the room. The tile and the frameless glass shower cost a pretty penny, so we wanted to minimize the cost of the additional changes, but make a big impact.

If you remember, our bathroom looked like this several months ago and it needed to be updated since we are selling soon.

We were really lucky to find a tile that went well with our existing flooring and a nice mosaic accent tile.

Our faucets were chrome and brass and we wanted to take as much brass out of the bathroom as we could. I looked and looked for nice, but inexpensive faucets, shower faucet and garden tub faucet without a plunger, but the least expensive suite that included all of those was $900+. That was too much! Finally, it dawned on me that this particular faucet handles, plunger and spout cap were interchangeable and came in many finishes. We quickly ordered chrome replacements for all and that only came to a little over $300. 

Score!!! 

We saved about $600 on that choice!

We also found a more modern looking vanity light and replaced the dark oil rubbed bronze knobs with chrome.

I was worried that the wood vanity and mirrors would be too dark with the new light paint and all the chrome and we'd have to paint the cabinets a light color, but we ended up really liking the contrast.

The last large amount of brass we had in the bathroom were the mirrored closet doors. We had considered replacing them with white painted doors, but we saved some time and money by just painting the large brass top track cover white. The little bit of brass around the edges isn't so glaringly outdated.

I'm really enjoying the bathroom now and I love the light paint. (Silver Strand by Sherwin Williams cut 25%)

We spent around $3,000 updating the Master Bath, with the frameless shower and tile being a big chunk of that. (It would have cost a bit more had Mr. DIY not done all the prep for the shower and set all the tile. I think it was well worth the price because we couldn't have sold our house with the worn and outdated shower the way it was.

If you've stopped by here often, you know we're working on our "get the house ready to sell" list and I can tell you we're in the home stretch and should be finished by Tuesday. We're down to the final cleaning and decluttering and we'll be listing next Thursday or Friday!

 Eeek!

Things are moving fast now and there's a lot to do.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Pam

PS: you can read more about our trials and tribulations with the frameless shower HERE.

Updated Master Bath Shower Reveal

Don't you just feel good when you finish a big project?
I mean completely finished...no little things left to check off the punch list.
I mean COMPLETELY finished!

That's how I feel about our Master Bath. 
I was dreading having to update the Mater Bathroom because it has a lot of little and not so little details and lots of molding to paint.
I was also looking forward to having this big project checked off of the "get the house ready to sell" list because there are still a lot of things on that list.

So here's how the shower looked before. We could not put it up for sale looking like that! The brass framed shower was soooooo dated, plus the brass was coming off and the faux marble surround was cracked.

A few weeks ago I posted about the process and told you how Mr. DIY, despite coming down with the flu on his week off, finished the tile for the shower surround and the glass company was able to come out and measure for a frameless enclosure. If you'd like to see that post, you can find it HERE.

We were finally able to paint the bathroom after that, but we lived with our bathroom like this for about 2 weeks before the guys came back. The paint colors are listed down at the bottom.

So happy once this was installed. We couldn't even open the door (per the instructions) for 24 hours.

Mr. DIY installed a new shower head and shower handle/escutcheon.

Here's the before:

And here's the after:

So much better, don't you think?

Next time, I'll show you a few other updates we did in the Master Bath.

Hope you're having a good day!

Pam

PS. the wall color is Sherwin Williams Silver Strand  in an Eggshell finish, mixed at 75%.
      The trim paint color is  Valspar Ultra White in Semi -gloss

Master Bath Shower

How did your week go?

You know the phrase, "the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry? 

Well, our week went kind of like that, only without the mice.

Mr. DIY took the week off to work on reno-ing the shower and guess what happened?
On Saturday night, he said that he felt like he was coming down with the flu.
And he was right... 
Mr. DIY is rarely ever sick, but he stayed in bed all day on Sunday.

Let's back up a bit. Our lovely brass framed shower had to be replaced before we could put our house up for sale. It was looking pretty bad. Some of the brass had worn off  the frame and some of it was corroded. It just looked awful. We didn't really want to redo it and spend $2,000+ on it, but there was no way around it. Many houses in our area have upgraded to a frameless shower and they are pretty expensive. Ours is going to cost close to $1,500 just for the glass part and not including the tile.

One of the difficult parts of the reno was finding a tile that went well with the existing floor tile that we installed 6+ years ago. We search Lowes and found the accent tile , but we really lucked out when we found a tile at Home Depot that went well. Here are the 3 together.
Pretty good, don't you think?

Here's  how the shower looked before:

Ew.

Mr. DIY was able to demo the shower on Saturday before he fell ill.

On Sunday, I gave Mr. DIY some of the herbal supplements that I've been taking to heal from lyme disease and on Monday, he felt well enough to put up some cement board that the tile would be attached to. That's as far as he got on Monday as he was still sick and his energy didn't hold up.

He was able to start tiling on Tuesday. 

He was making slow, but good progress on the tiling for the next few days and the company who will install a frameless shower came to template on Friday. 
Mr. DIY continued to tile around the back of the tub. He would have grouted today (Saturday), but decided to replace a few of the tiles that didn't look good on the end of the horribly unlevel, unstraight knee wall. The tile adhesive has to set for a day, so he'll have to grout during the week sometime.

The toilet area in the Master Bath is already painted Sherwin Williams Silver Strand lightened to 75%. We'll start painting the rest of the bathroom the same color and I can't wait to see how it looks with the accent tile. 

That's how our week went and Mr. DIY is still on the mend. 

Hope your week went well.

Pam

Planning For Resale

We are planning for to put our house up for sale soon and have a few makeovers to do around our house. We've been planning on downsizing for several years and we think it might as well be this year sometime. 

The first room is we need to work on is our master bath. Our house being nearly 15 years, old could use a few updates. We will paint and redo the shower surround with tile and have a frameless glass door installed.We haven't quite nailed down exactly what colors and materials yet, but I sure do love the little glass and stone rectangular mosaic tiles we found at Lowe's.

Here's what the bathroom looks like now, with a few years of wear and tear on it. That brass framed shower has got to go as it has seen better days. Besides new tile in the shower, we plan on replacing the faucets, showerhead and vanity light. The Master Bathroom will be our biggest expense. 

Our Master Bedroom needs new paint too. The dark brown paint is showing wear, scuff marks, chips, etc., and it's time for a fresh color. 

Quite a few diy Design Fanatic Facebook followers loved this color in my mock up. I think we will paint the Master Bedroom a light neutral greige and leave the color for the adjoining bathroom. 

Last week I  showed you how we replaced the broken blinds with these Roman Shades and inexpensive Vivan curtains from Ikea. Nothing else needs to be done in here since we just updated the paint a few years ago. 

We've also gave the laundry room a little update, as well. We've painted the room with Rainwashed by Sherwin Williams but still plan on painting the cabinets with Annie Sloan chalk paint. 

I thought it would be good to update our Guest Room since it's the first bedroom a buyer will see once upstairs. The paint still looks good, but we plan to lighten things up by changing out the furniture and add some Vivan curtains instead of the black ones. I figured that if we sell the existing furniture, which we found at an estate sale and Craigslist and use some existing furniture we have in other parts of the house, this makeover will bring in $400  when we sell the furniture! 
Sounds pretty good to me! (if you deduct what we paid for the furniture, curtains and supplies, the net amount might be closer to $0, but at least the sale of the items will cover the cost of the reno)

The last space we would like to paint is the basement Family Room and Bathroom. Basements can always benefit from lighter and brighter paint, even if it is a walk out basement with lots of windows. We may or may not get to this room.

Along with all the painting and redecorating, Mr. DIY is caulking all the windows. making repairs and replacing a few window sashes. The list is LONG! Of course, we won't be doing all of these projects ourselves and will be hiring others to help us out.

While we're doing all of this, we will be working on the kitchen reno at the Mountain Cottage, which we are starting this weekend. I'm pretty sure this reno is going to take many months, especially with all that needs to be done at our home.

I guess that's our project list for the year, until, of course, we find another house that needs some work! 

Pam

Steps to Tiling the Master Bathroom Floor

So you probably have seen the  Master Bath Reveal and know that our bathroom now looks like this and we are enjoying it.

But before our little (ha!) project, our bathroom flooring was vinyl & since it had to be replaced, Mr. Fanatic took a week off from work. By the end of the week he was definitely ready to go back to work! Here's what the vinyl floor looked like.

It was a long week plus a few days, but we finally made it! Our Master Bath & closet is approximately 175 sq ft. so it was a big job. If you haven't installed tile before, I highly recommend a good book on the subject.

Here's what we did:

Saturday:Removed toilet, vanity, doors, closet doors.

              Tore out existing vinyl flooring and sub floor

              Removed baseboards

Sunday:  laid down cement board

 Monday: Attached cement board with 800 screws & taped joints

Tuesday & Wednesday: Installed tile ... making sure that the lines were squared with a chalk line, spread thinset with a notched trowel, then put the tile down. Tile must be pressed down evenly so that the edges are even. The orange spacers keep the spacing even as you are setting the tile. Mr. Fanatic has a tile saw which we've used on other projects. Lowe's will cut tiles for no charge, but if you have angles in your bathroom, it would be better to do the cutting yourself. The tile from Lowes was a closeout at 68 cents a square foot.
The whole project including backerboard, screws, tile, new furniture base molding,& toe kick for the vanity was $407. Not bad!

  

Thursday: Grouted tile. This is probably the easiest thing to do of the whole project. Grout is spread on all the tile & then wiped off. The grout has to be wiped several times to get all of the grout off the tile.

Friday:The vanity was installed-(we wanted the vanity a little higher, so  he installed it on wood 1" higher)

 He also installed tile on the front of the tub. It was attached with mastic. He also started on installing the baseboard.

Saturday: Finished baseboard, filled & sanded nail holes. Touched up baseboard

I painted the molding first, then filled holes after it was installed & touched up the paint

We covered the vanity side where it you could see the shims with a veneer skin that I ordered for another project but didn't use

The veneer toe kick for the cabinet was only 4" high, so we raised it up 1/4" off the floor, leaving a 1/4" gap at the bottom which will be covered by a piece of shoe molding -The toe kick is now 5 1/2" high so the 1" gap at the top that the toe kick doesn't cover will be covered by a 1 1/4" piece of scribe molding.

After putting the vanity back together,the vanity top was put on.

Then the toilet was hooked back up (yay!!!)

We are certainly enjoying our new master bath floor, but it was definitely hard work. I guess we are gluttons for punishment (as my mother used to say) because we are going to be replacing the tile in our upstairs bath starting next weekend! At least the bathroom is much smaller!!!
This weekend we are working on our honey do list and doing a little Spring yard clean up.
Anyone doing any weekend projects? I want to hear about them!

Thanks for stopping by,

Pam

Master Bath Reveal

Well, our Master Bath is finally finished. Ok, I still need a few  rugs and maybe  a window treatment, but I think it is ready enough to show as it is when we put the house up for sale.

I love the way it looks now. 

Here is our Master Bath before:

Lovely

Painting the master bath several months ago made a huge difference. We had lived in our house nine years the way it was. Looking back, when I start to think why we hadn't painted and decorated our bathroom sooner, I have to remind myself that I worked a flexible full time job most of those years, Mr. Fanatic went to school full time for 3 1/2 years getting his Bachelor's Degree, we finished part of the basement, landscaped our property, built a cobblestone patio, etc. Our bathroom was way down on the list.





Here is our Master Bath after it was painted. Looked pretty good. You can see more  on a previous post.

Ahh, but you don't see the vinyl floor.

There it is. Plain, boring and VINYL. About that time we decided we might put our house on the market in May of 2010, but weren't 100 % sure. We knew that tiling our Master Bath floor was a must, so we put it on the list.

Since the vanity had to be taken out, I thought we might as well make it taller, so Mr. Fanatic built it up 1 1/4" higher. The top of the contertop is now 33 3/4" from the floor instead of 32 1/2. If we weren't moving we would have designed new cabinets that were kitchen height, but 33 3/4" is a very comfortable height. I will explain how we did all of this in a tutorial.

 


One of my previous clients had tile put on the front of her marble tub. I thought adding tile to the tub front looked more like a bathroom in a custom home, so we did this too. The grout is darker than the floor because it is still wet :/

So we're finished with the bathroom. I think Mr. Fanatic did a fantastic job, don't you? He took a week off of work - started last Saturday & we finished today. We spent $700 (about $300 on tile alone) including the metal artwork on the wall and included tile flooring in the Master Closet.  The total amount included the following: Painted bathroom walls and trim, added Crown Molding, replaced the builder mirror with 2 separate decorative ones, replaced old baseboard with new, installed new base molding in Closet, installed tile in Master Bath and Closet, painted vanity lights and  changed out the cabinet knobs. 

Yay! One more project on my list. I tell you, this project made me realize we aren't getting any younger. LOL!

Hope you had a great weekend! Thanks for stopping by,

Pam