Upstairs Progress

It's been a while since I posted anything, but we have been busy on the bathroom and the upstairs in general.  

Bathroom
The entire bathroom now has cement board where all tile will be installed as well as drywall in all the other locations.  We plan to have subway tile all the way to the ceiling in the tub/shower area and five foot high around the rest of the room.  Joints have been filled, sanded, tapered, caulked and whatever else to make them look good and waterproof.

I was able to get started on the subway tile in the bathroom as well.  I have done a little tile once before, but never wall tile and not subway tile either.  It was slow getting started (mostly because I mixed the thinset to watery), but once I got  the hang of it, I started to get some momentum.  It is definitely not perfect, but a good start and I have learned a lot in just this little bit to help later.

 Since the thinset was a little loose at the beginning, I started by putting the thinset directly onto the tiles and, to be honest, it helped me keep things moving slowly and be able to double check things as I went.  I stopped short of the shower niche because I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do that.  I now have a plan and will move forward on that tomorrow.


Upstairs Floors
My wife has chosen the upstairs heart pine floors as her project and goal for the last few weeks.  We started by sanding the floors, but with the finish still left on the floors, we were eating through sandpaper.  We decided to chemically strip the floors first and get most of the finish off then go with the floor sander.

So, she spent about a week applying stripper and then removing it with a putty knife, mineral spirits and lots of paper tower.  What a mess!  But, the results were great and did just what we needed.  This is the stripper that we used.  The main bedroom was covered in some sort of glue and looked terrible.  The stripper took all of that off and the sander took care of the rest.

Next steps are to finish the tile in the bathroom (lots of work left there) and now that the floors have been sanded to 100 grit, we can go ahead and put the finish on the floors.