Workcation - Day5!

Saturday 

This was our last day of working without the kids. We really wanted to get the tile done before they got home. That had been our goal the whole time. This tile thing is stressful though! The first thing I did that morning was drove to Home Depot to rent a wet saw. We had bought one of those score and snap saws, but after we used it twice and it broke both of the tiles we were done with that. 

We had originally laid out the tiles with this pattern. But then by happenstance Michael started dry laying the tiles in a different pattern and I loved it.

Our plan was to get all the tiles laid out and cut so I could return the wet saw so we didn't have to pay for a whole day. Plus after using the mortar the day before we knew how fast it dried. There would be no way we would have time to measure and cut tiles or the mortar would be rock hard. 

When I was off renting the wet saw Michael wasn't sitting around doing nothing...he painted the wall where the cubbies were going. 

Here is the tile floor all dry fit and cut out. This was extremely time consuming and mentally exhausting. After already having days and days that were both physically and mentally exhausting Michael really hit a wall. He was having a hard time with just basic cuts and getting them right. The pattern was also confusing him at some points. See the second to the last tile on the far right..the nice square tile. That one threw him for a loop. He kept thinking it should be a 12 inch tile and I knew it only needed to be a 6 inch tile so after seeing him struggle with it for a while I actually got a little forceful with him so he would stop and listen to me. Like I said he hit a wall and his brain had just had it!

I decided to go around and take pictures of all the tiles so if we ran across a problem we could look back at the pictures and see what we were doing wrong. 

The plan had been after taking the pictures we were going to immediately lay the tiles, but while I was taking these picture I just knew Michael's brain was not going to be able to handle it. He just honestly needed a break! 

I felt very strongly about this and knew I was going to propose that we work on something else. 

After snapping these shots I basically told Michael what we were doing. I'm not normally that forceful when it comes to this sort of thing. After all he is the one with more experience working on houses, but I knew that we needed to postpone this. 

  

I let him know that we could just work on more mindless things like painting. Michael was a painter for years and years so painting is something that requires no brain power at all. It's just nice and repetitious! 

I ultimately left the decision up to him, but I made a pretty strong case and he agreed. 

In order to not mess up the tiles I decided to remove them in rows. The tiles are sealed so when I removed them I just wrote directly onto the tile the row number. 

Since we were taking a step back from the tile we were able to finish some other things around the house....like getting the cubbies into there home. 

This was something that Michael was super stressed about. He knew he measured correctly, but it was also going to be a very tight fit. I thought we were going to have to shave the drywall down a bit, but Michael was able to use the rubber mallet to knock on the cubbies to get them to move. 

It was a slow process. He had to knock on the lower left corner then the middle, then the lower right corner, then the upper right and then the upper left. So on and so on....until they were in. It was definitely a praise Jesus moment for sure! 

Hallelujah...they fit!

We were also able to paint the bathroom! I was so excited to see the color on the walls. It's so pretty!! I think it looks blue and Michael doesn't like blue, but he says it's green and since I'm a little colorblind it works for us! He also was able to get the light up....it required a bit more wiring because he mounted the electrical box a little too far to the left. You know you can only account for so many things. 

On that same note...here are my cabinets. They look a little different though. This was the only time I almost cried during the remodel. When we went to mount them we realized that we were a half an inch off in order to be able to mount both shelves. See I had told Michael they were cabinets that fit directly over the washer and dryer and they do, but for some reason the washer and dryer are 27 inches wide and these cabinets are 28 inches wide. Boo!!!! I seriously got in a funk, but I knocked it off after about an hour and then I started looking on Pinterest. I found this picture and told Michael that I wanted something like that. 

He was able to alter the cabinets so they would work and I really love them. In fact now that there was more wall space that would mean my back splash tile would be more center stage than before. Since we weren't able to finish the tile Michael called my mom and asked if they could keep the kids for us the next day until after dinner...they were planning on bringing them up around noon. We figured it would be better for us to come get them anyways because they were going to have to come in two cars to bring back all the stuff we brought with the kids. Mom was more than happy to do that. That meant we were going to be able to get the tile laid like we wanted to before the kids came home.