Framing!

Saturday it was framing day!!! It was time to frame in basement bathroom!!! The boys worked at it all Saturday and are just about finished!! It looks fantastic!!!

Here is Dave working on the frame of the shower.



They had a good system going, Dave would measure the piece, Ryan would cut the sizes needed and Dave would attach them. Other than the odd disagreement they flew through this task!!! I was working on other projects but came down in time to see that they had made a disaster of the floor in basement! haahaa!! Nothing a good vacuuming can't fix!


Here is Ryan 'washing' his hands where the sink will go!

Yes that is where the toilet will go!!

And here Ryan is adjusting the 'shower head'. We left the opening to the shower large enough but not too large, we put a foot of space on the far left side where we will hang the toilet paper holder. We opted to leave a foot of space closed off in the doorway and not more because the tiles we bought are a square foot. Instead of having to make a million cuts being able to use just one tile wide up that portion will help.

VERY exciting!!!!!

LOVE IT TUESDAY: Sunrooms!!!!!

I'm not sure where my recent obsession with sun rooms has come from... I just absolutely LOVE THEM and totally want one!!!!! I love browsing through the MLS listings in our area looking for future houses (not that we have any desire to move anytime soon). And lately there have been a lot of super cute houses on the market with AWESOME sun rooms and I WANT A SUN ROOM!!!! haahhahaha!!! I told Ryan that our next house will have a sun room!!! (that's if I can't convince him to build a sun room off our house now!!!).

I wouldn't want a sun room at the front of the house because realistically I know I'd never use it.... I'd want one in the back where on a cold winter's day I could curl up with a book and watch the snow fall. Oh did I mention that my 'ideal' sun room would have a fireplace in it to keep it warm in the winter!!! heeheee!!!! It would be like an additional living room that looked into the backyard where I could successfully kill all of my plants for lack of watering them. :-)

I love this sun room that bloggers Sherry and John from Young House Love have at their house. Its just so fun and airy!!!

Photo source: (www.younghouselove.com)


Or even this sun room!! Mind you I would add curtains to cheer it up a bit!

My dream would be to build a sun room off our backdoor where our current patio area is. But realistically that will never happen. In fact I also have a dream of building a garage there and building a loft bedroom above the garage.... OHHH if we did that we could transform our current bedroom into an awesome sun room!!! HAHAHAHA I have so many ideas... none of them will probably materialize with our current house though. I don't think we would see the money back in that type of investment... oh well.. here's to dreaming!!!!

LOVE IT: Shadow Box

So I know normally its love it Tuesdays... but I am a little delayed this week... I was sick on Monday and in the office Tuesday for part of the day and left early because I felt like crap.. so that delayed me 2 days... SO HAPPY FRIDAY!!!! haahaa!!!

Anyway, I saw this awhile ago and absolutely love it!!! I have every intention of making one of these some day.. for now my poor little house may cave in if I squeeze anymore pictures on the walls!!! I may have to mix up some of the art work though to make room for this!!!

Photo source: http://www.chiccheapnursery.com/2010/do-it-yourself/butterfly-shadow-box-diy-wall-art/

You can find a full tutorial on Chic Cheap Nursery, here.

Now this isn't limited to a nursery project! You could do this anywhere in the house with any shape you can find. They make the paper punches in MANY different shapes!!! I just love this butterfly one!!! But a dragonfly shadow box would be pretty amazing too!!! Maybe some hearts... actually it would be super cute to put a picture in the middle and have hearts popping out all around the edges!! Just a cute idea!

Anyway that's my two cents for the day... this weekend it is our anniversary so we may or may not get around to any projects... we'll see!!! Have a GREAT weekend!!!

Super Dave to the Rescue

Last weekend Ryan and Dave worked on the concrete forms in the basement. You can see that here. This weekend Ryan was away all weekend and I'm nursing a nasty cold. So I didn't actually plan to have any progress on the basement bathroom. However, Dave (our super human friend) is determined to help us get this bathroom completed. He stopped by Saturday around noon to finish up the concrete... ALL BY HIMSELF!!! He's honestly a super hero!! 3 hours later I ventured downstairs to make sure he didn't need anything to find this.

Isn't it a beauty???? I've never been so excited about cement before in my life!!! He did an amazing job at making sure the floor was level!!! I'm sooooo excited about it!!! THANKS DAVE!!!!!! We owe him HUGE!!!!!

Now you might be starring at this going what the heck is the plan here. So here it is in a 'I'm not a computer genius" way. The shower will be at the back of the bathroom, it will be a large shower (I know the picture is deceiving!). The toilet will be next to the shower and then the vanity. Then my favourite feature.... HEATED FLOORING!!! Yes that's right... we splurged a little bit and got some heated flooring!!!! Isn't that super exciting!!!

The entire bathroom will pretty much be tiled. We picked up tiles similar to the ones pictured below about a year ago at Home Depot for a wonderful 50 cents a square foot!!! Then last weekend while browsing The Restore we picked up some 3 by 6 inch white tiles that we plan on using as a border around the bathroom (not in the shower though).

The tile will go all the way up the walls in the shower but in the rest of the bathroom it will only go up about 4 feet. Then we will have the white tile at the top of the 4 cream tiles. Then the plan is to paint above it a pale green. The same green that is in our spare bedroom which is Behr's Monet Moonrise... a very subtle pale green. We still have an extra can of paint from painting in there so we figure we'll just use it up. It isn't bathroom paint but we figure we can use bathroom paint on the ceiling and the walls should be ok. We still have left over bathroom ceiling paint from the upstairs bathroom which is perfect!!! I love having things lying around so we don't have to spend more money!

As for a toilet, we still have a spare one that was given to us by a friend who upgraded the toilet in her old house to a taller toilet so her mom (who is in a wheelchair) could use it. So we got their practically new toilet for free. I have a big project planned for the vanity... BUT I know realistically it won't happen until long after the baby is born so in the meantime we have a pedestal sink that we will be using. Eventually I have a plan to transform Ryan's moms old desk into an awesome vanity!!! For now the pedestal sink will do.

That's the plan!!! Next weekend we will be framing the bathroom back in and Super Dave will be finishing up the electrical work in the bathroom. The pot lights are installed but we have to fix up the light switches and install a fan and possibly the heated flooring. Then the weekend after we have the plumbers coming to finish up the plumbing! VERY EXCITING!!!!

Fab Find Flooring!!!

This weekend I made many trips to Rona (as previously posted) and during one of my trips I found some fabulous flooring at an AMAZING price!!! Now I believe I have previously mentioned that when we bought the house we temporarily put stick down tiles throughout the hallway, bathroom, 3rd bedroom (now nursery) and kitchen. We knew this was a temporary solution until we found something better. It has held up ok for the past almost 3 years but a few of the tiles have cracked and the nails are slowly showing through others. We knew it was about time for an updated flooring. The big problem is that our floors slope (being an older house this is common) and without leveling the entire floor we can't put in ceramic tiles. To level the entire floor we would lose about 3 inches (if not more in some spots) of space and that is a HUGE deal. So we have been advised that leveling the floor does not make sense. Enough of the history of our floors... we decided laminate would work out wonderfully as long as we somewhat level the floor. Where there are dips in the floor we can use self leveling cement and the laminate will withstand the dips just fine (or so I am told).

So while at Rona we came across this lovely laminate. Now it isn't as lovely as the laminate that is in our living room which I thoroughly LOVE but its pretty nice regardless... plus what makes it even nicer is it was only 79 cents a square foot.. plus we got 10% off that!!! WOOHOOOO!!!


This baby set us back a measly $300 plus the cost of the under padding which was about $50 so a total of $350. The plan is for this flooring to run through the entire hallway, kitchen and nursery. Since the bathroom floor is the only level floor in the house we do eventually plan on doing ceramic tile in there. This is what our hallway looks like currently with the stick down tiles.
Here it is again looking from the living room to kitchen, cutting laminate should be 'fun' ... don't you love the twisted hallway... its totally not straight at all!!!

I wanted to see what it would look like next to our existing laminate floors and I'm impressed!!!
So this is yet another project that we have to undertake hopefully before the baby is born. The only problem we have now is with the baseboards... the baseboards in this part of the house are the original baseboards so taking them off and reinstalling them after the flooring is laid MAY lead to problems and more costs because we may have to get new baseboards... so we haven't decided if we should just install the flooring against the baseboard and risk the small funny looking baseboard that remains after losing about a half inch of it..... We'll see.

Happy Concrete oops Thanksgiving Weekend!

This weekend was the most productive weekend we have had in a long time!!!! We took a summer break from working on the basement bathroom... well honestly who wants to work in a muddy dark hole in the basement when its gorgeous outside... oh wait we did that this weekend....

This weekend Rona had a scratch and save event where you could save 10-50% off your entire purchase. We figured we needed about 40 bags of concrete for the basement... since each bag is 66 lbs and our pour little Matrix could only carry 10 bags at a time it meant I spent my day driving back and forth to Rona to get the concrete. BUT it was totally worth it because we ended up getting 20% off the concrete which put it at about $120 for the concrete which was a LOT better than what we had budgeted for at around $500 (that was for someone else to come and pour the concrete for us). So I spent my day driving back and forth to Rona while Ryan and Dave worked on forming in the basement bathroom.

Since we had dug well below the foundation of the house (something you shouldn't do if you are digging out an entire basement... but when digging out a small room it isn't a huge deal). And since we wanted a shower in the basement bathroom that you didn't have to kneel in without hitting your head. We had to do concrete forms all along the walls of the bathroom for support. Ryan and Dave worked on creating the forms with extra wood we had lying around so the concrete would set in the shape we wanted it. Then it was the hard task of mixing the concrete and putting it into the forms. This literally took them ALL DAY and they were both exhausted at the end of the day! Carrying 40 66lbs bags of concrete is enough of a workout let alone mixing 18 bags of concrete for the forms!!! There was little I could do other than to pick up the concrete from Rona.

Here is the progress we made! I know it doesn't look like much but its VERY exciting!!!

Once the concrete dries we will remove all of the wood so it will just be the concrete forms. Next step is to pour the concrete for the floor and then the plumbers will be coming back out to finish up the drains etc.

It was HUGE progress on this project, one step closer to not having a muddy basement!!!! Plus while at Rona I picked up some new flooring for the kitchen/hallway and nursery which I'm VERY excited about... but you'll have to wait until later on this week for that post!

More Wall Decals!

Last weekend during my laziness I did manage to get at least one thing done... I had fun working on the wall decals in the nursery!! Now just to recap the progress in the nursery....

This is the wall to the right of the door when you first walk in.


This is the corner opposite the crib (the colour is off in this photo).

That side of the room is more or less complete... the other side of the room however was looking awfully bare!!! This is the other side of the room with the new wall decals. No I did not clean up for this photo... you can tell that I've been using the change table as my work station for projects!!! On the left we have my grandma's old secretary's desk that we will be using as a dresser plus when the baby gets older it will double as a drawing station as it flips down into a desk. On the right is the converted makeup table to change table. Ignore the wooden boxes on the left... I haven't figured out where to put my jewelry boxes just yet in the house... well actually to be more correct I haven't even thought about it!! haahaa!! The plan is to put a large shelf across that entire wall to store more books and toys for the blueberry!

Anyway, back to the wall decals. I put together those 4 decals on the weekend.. unfortunately I had some spacing issues and now have to think of one more animal to add to the mix between the elephant and the monkey. Anyone have any ideas on additional animals??

Here is a close up of my lion and giraffe.

My elephant.

And my favourite the monkey!!!

I just used left over material I had from other projects that matched with the colour scheme in the room. To see how I made the decals go here. This weekend I am hoping to get the big shelf primed and painted and installed!!! Oh its coming along so nicely... we're almost done with this room which means onto other rooms!!! :-)

Love It Tuesday: Sliding Door

Ryan and I have been trying to come up with ideas on what to do for a door for the basement bathroom. The problem we were having was that the opening to the basement bathroom is very wide but also short. The original foundation of the house is about 3 inches higher than the new foundation (the addition to the basement) so to get into the basement bathroom you first have to step up and then down over the concrete threshold. To summarize.. we have a short fat entrance to the bathroom. A normal door is much too long and too skinny. BUT while browsing the Internet one day I came across this!!

Photo Source http://contentinacottage.blogspot.com/2010/03/sliding-barn-door-inside-house.html

Its just a door on a track that looks fabulous!!! Now we have an extra door in the house that we think we can use to make the door we want. We don't plan on using a barn door. But we may just go to the restore and get 2 matching doors to have slide into place as the door (both doors would slide into the centre of the doorway to make the door which would then have a latch to lock the door). Ryan loves this idea!! Not sure how we'll make it work just yet but this is the plan for the door for the basement bathroom!!