Bathroom is Officially Done

I can't even begin to express the joy of having a full functional toilet.  The entire time we have had to drive down to the Co-Op and it has been a huge inconvenience. With this little house luxury we can now stay overnight.  My lovely husband poured us glasses of bubbles to celebrate.  After a long day of working on renos you can see he wasn't really up for having his picture taken.  But that never stops me. ;)

As the actual tile work was all done, we needed to just finish the grout.  William took a grout remover to get rid of any excess tile glue.

While he was doing that I did the grouting on the tile around the tub.

And here is what it finally looks like!  The one tile that is missing is actually on a magnet so if we need to access the tub's motor we won't need to break tile to do so.

After that the last thing that needed to be grouted was the shower floor.

With all the grout done the shower doors and the vanity could finally be put in.

The issue now is that our hot water heater is not working.  Although I have my tub up and running I can't sit and soak till I can find someone to find out what the issue is.  It's always something!...

A VERY Busy Four Day Weekend

This past weekend was a 4 day weekend for us.  William had his scheduled day off on the Friday and Monday was a holiday.  I made sure to get a ton of stuff done so we could both dedicate the whole weekend to our lovely "little" renovation.  We were so lucky as the weather was perfect!  We have really enjoyed watching the changing of the seasons.  Looks like the farmer's crops are almost ready to harvest.

Other than taking the Saturday off to be with family, we spent the entire time working on as much as we could.  We finally finished the doors we stripped and sanded.  Other than waiting for the blacksmith to finish some hardware these babies are ready to be put up.  And if I do say so myself they look amazing!

Bare wood

With the varathane

We also sanded and varathaned the wood for the pass through.

We also had dirt delivered for the yard.

But the BIG project was sanding/painting the front windows and power washing the siding. 

Sanding off the old paint.

Replacing old calking and filling up holes.

Painting the window sills.

Scraping paint off the windows (this is like popping bubble wrap if you have never done it.  Satisfying!!)  This picture is the inside of the window.  I didn't want to take pictures from atop the ladder.

Power washing the siding.  It makes me really sad how this building had received no real TLC for AGES.  There were huge clumps of spider webs, dirt, bugs and just years of nastiness washed away.

In this next picture the first two sections have been washed and William was about to start the third.  It's a little hard to see just how dirty the building was and the difference it made to wash it.

We also began to rip off the parging/stucco that is so cracked it is really just falling off.

 

We haven't finished this job yet as when we started it, it was end of day on Monday and we were both exhausted and decided it was something we could come back to.

And here is a picture of the front of the church with everything done.

An extremely productive long weekend.  The next big/messy job is the hardwood floor from the front door to the stairs going into the basement.

Kitchen and Laundry Cabinets

I suppose the title of this post is self explanatory.  After weeks of the kitchen cabinets taking up a ton of space upstairs they have been installed into our kitchen!  My lovely father-in-law came out to help my contractors.  Good thing as with some of the pieces it took two to hold and one to screw it into place.

We are still waiting for the countertops for the kitchen but even without I think the cabinets look great!

If you have ever shopped for cabinets of any kind, I'm sure you also had a moment of "Really?!!  They want how much for cabinets?!!"  We have a very large laundry room and have wanted proper cabinets in there too.  My lovely husband William was checking out the buy/sell websites Kijiji and Used Regina and found people who were reno-ing their kitchen and were selling their old cabinets.  For $100 (really just priced to get people to move them out of their condo) we got a ton of cabinets that ended up looking not half bad!

We were also lucky that the countertop was in good condition so for a great price we have everything set up for laundry cabinets! 

Upstairs Hallway

If you have been keeping up with my blog you will know that not only are we renovating the basement but also the hallway from the front door down to the door leading into the basement suit.  We have tin ceilings that we have wanted to try to keep as close to original as possible.  We were a little worried since there was some missing in the foyer with the church bells. 

You can see under the access to the attic there was about 3 feet of tin trim missing.

Rick never ceases to amaze me.  He explained that he could just climb into the area that we kept with a lower ceiling and take some of the trim from there.

When he came out he had pulled off more than enough trim to work with.  I tried to help with the cleaning and bending the trim to what we needed but really, Rick gets all the credit for how fantastic this ended up looking.  If you don't point it out to people there is no way anyone would see it was ever missing.

The next issue was what to do with how badly the paint was pealing from large portions of the ceiling.

We really liked the look of the gray but since the ceiling was already painted white at the front door, we would paint this ceiling white too.  First we needed to scrape off the flakey paint.

Once that was done the painting could begin.

We also decided to freshen up the ceiling at the front door.

Once the ceilings were done, we began to work on the walls and windowsills.

All the guys tease me because I always seem to take pictures of them up on ladders.  William finally got me back. 

I really enjoy the last picture.  It is a good contrast of how small I look compared to how big the church actually is!  I am procrastinating with this blog post as I should be working on some thesis work.  The plan is I will pick William up and we are heading out tonight right after work.  We are hoping to have the painting officially finished tonight.  We really only have one more coat of paint in the windowsill on the right in the picture, and scraping paint off the windows in the other two.  From there, this weekend is going to be all about sanding and refinishing the hardwood.  THEN we can finally put up the chandeliers.  Soon!  I will have completed pictures soon!