Adventures in Remuddling

The Boston Water and Sewer Commission has a cool feature on their website; it graphs out our daily water usage. For fun, we took a look at April’s water usage under the previous owner.

Now compare to after we closed on our house:

Continue reading “Our water usage” »

Last week, the waste management company came and took our dumpster away. Let’s take a peek at the contents…

Continue reading “Ode to Dumpster Part 2″ »

For Unit 1 Bathroom, I decided to take the existing medicine cabinet in Unit 2 (that’s our friend Carl singing while taking the picture)

For the past few weekends, I’ve been sanding off the awful gold paint and green blotches off the medicine cabinet with a wire brush and sandpaper.

Continue reading “Medicine Cabinet Makeover” »

I’m actually getting excited, because I can picture the finished bathroom in my head.

Yesterday all the walls in bath 1 were put up. Which is not an easy task for 1 person. Just think about lifting 4′ x 8′ sheet of wall, fitting it through a door, then into a 5′ x 8′ room, then propping it up.

Continue reading “Getting Ready to Tile” »

On Saturday, we did a dry run of the first floor bathroom, just to see if everything would come together as we imagined. Seeing the sink, medicine cabinet and light together was encouraging. The toilet will go to the left of the sink.

Continue reading “Tiling has begun” »

Tiling is definitely a much slower job than expected. Maybe we should be using the large 12″ x 12″ tile. It probably would not look as good, but would be much faster.

Our wall tile size is 3″ x 6″, and it’s staggered between rows. For some reason, people call this “subway” tile.

Continue reading “Tiling Day 2″ »

Enquiring minds probably want to know why we are attempting this task, and why we’re so slow at it . So why not pay someone to take care of this tedious task? Because:

1. We plan on tiling our own bathroom (2nd floor unit) with subway tile and wanted to test out our design plan
2. It is a skill that we would like to learn. Although economists argue the merit of specialization and relative competitive advantage, we think having a broad array of skills makes for a happy and productive life. Specialization is for insects.

Continue reading “Why tile? Why so slow?” »

We got our electric bill the other day. $63!!!!

To put things into perspective, we have never paid more than $30/month for electricity.

Continue reading “Shocking Electric Bill” »

It’s actually not a tiling issue, but a grout issue.

We finished tiling last Sunday. I waited at least 24 hours before grouting. So Tuesday I grouted. All the books I’ve read, is to push the grout into the joints, blah, blah, blah. Then with the grout float at a 90 degree angle, wipe off excess grout. But then they say to wipe with a clean cloth or sponge. But only wipe once because you don’t want to remove the grout. Blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, apparently I left too much grout on. And it showed. I thought it was OK, but my “second opinion” said it was not acceptable. So I spent more time fixing the grout than applying the grout. Oh well. It’s a lesson I’ve learned for our bathroom.

One of the best features of our house is the back porch. Tig and I try to eat breakfast and dinner as much as we can outside. Today, I washed down our vinyl siding on the back porch with water - it was pretty grimy, with occasional little black dots of mildew that needed to be scrubbed out. The vinyl looks brand new now. Only on our back porch, though.
Tig strung up some globe lights that we had bought two years ago. I cooked up a meal of pasta and poured a glass of wine. Dining al fresco is the best treat between work sessions.

Continue reading “Outdoor living” »