Deadlines are made to be broken, right?

After meeting with the tile installation guy last week we decided to shoot for Monday as a start date for him. That meant we had a lot of prep work to do over the next 6 days. We were planning to crank it all out this weekend, but my grandparents were in town so we spent Friday night and most of the day Saturday with them. They are fun people! :) We had a great time, but then it was back to work!

First, we needed to add a little more mortar under the back of the tub. After the mortar dried the first time, we realized there wasn't quite enough in the back and so it made noise when you stood on it. We originally thought we'd have to go through the subfloor to get to it, but I had the brilliant idea to go through the wall in the master bathroom. Go me for using my brain. :)

Andrew then created a ginormous "decorating bag" of sorts to squeeze mortar under the tub. Ingenious, no?

It worked like a charm! No more noisy tub for us.

Then late last night Andrew started mudding the walls (joints between sheetrock and cement board...). The walls in our bathroom are textured, so we needed them to be a little flatter before mudding them so the mudded areas wouldn't be raised after a layer of mortar and new texture. The texture obviously wasn't done correctly (like SO many other things in this house) cause there are a lot of uneven areas, paint drips, bad taping/mudding jobs, and weird sharp specks all over the walls. It was awful, so I decided to sand ALL the walls lightly, and sand the areas near joints more heavily. 

I did all this with a power sander, of course. Sand paper is lame and feels awful. I have a serious aversion to touching anything dusty, powdery, too dry (like paper), scratchy, chalky, etc. Makes reno work quite difficult cause EVERYTHING is dusty. Maddie, you would hate it!

After all that sanding, my hands still feel like they're vibrating as I write this. But my walls feel much smoother which makes me sooo happy! As I sanded and smoothed out bumps on the wall, it revealed spots of the previous yellow paint color. Now the bathroom walls are speckly. It has to get worse before it gets better, I suppose. Hopefully now we're in the "getting better" phase? One can hope.

We still have a lot of stuff to do before the tiling can begin. We need to mud the walls and all the edges and sand them, texture the parts of the wall that were replaced/mudded (and therefore not textured), and paint the ceiling. May not sound like a lot, but when you account for dry times of each step it adds up!! All that to say Monday probably isn't gonna happen. So...how about Tuesday? 

We also found out that my family is coming up to visit the weekend of March 16 and they'll be staying with us. While they said they wouldn't mind having to share one bathroom between 6 people, I want everyone to be alive at the end of the weekend. This means we now have a deadline of March 16 for a usable shower and toilet, at least. We probably won't be able to have everything done by then cause we might have to wait on the granite countertop, but I think we could all stand sharing sinks and not having any artwork in the guest bath. Only 12 more days and so much left to do!!