Our New House–Bathroom Tiling

First of all, many thanks to all my loyal followers and visitors who have commented recently on my blog posts – I have a stack of them to go through and I promise I will publish them all as soon as I can.

Today my hubby dropped me off at the new house and I had an extremely busy day, trying to prepare the place as best as possible for the removal men on Monday. It is a problem having the builders still around, but as they say, there have been a lot of extra jobs we’ve asked for, and having to make a start on the garage to make the perimeter secure for the cats has meant delays on the work continuing indoors. They also didn’t start very promptly after we’d completed the purchase and the whole thing has been delayed.

The bedroom is a mess. All Paul’s tools are still in there while he works on the bathroom. I accept that we have to use other rooms till they have finished (it’s a good thing we’ve got plenty of space and can even use the annexe as Mum won’t be down till the end of the month) but the furniture has to go somewhere, and they can hardly leave the double bed on the landing… I am sure everything will be OK in the end. The removal men are coming here at 8 a.m. on Monday (they wanted 7 a.m. but I drew the line at that – 8 a.m. is still too early in my book!!) and hopefully by the time we all reach the other end, Andy and the team will have had a chance to tidy up a bit more.

Today I unpacked about 16 boxes, including all our stuff from our old dining room – lots of china and other things, which are now all in the dresser in the entrance lobby. I unpacked a lot of kitchen stuff, too, but there are still quite a lot of boxes of stuff for the utility room that can’t be unpacked until the builders have finished. Andy gave up on B&Q in the end and bought the smaller unit we need for the utility room elsewhere, and it’s now installed, but he’s still got to fit the sink, and finish off the other two small wall units in the back passage, and complete the work on the airing cupboard before we can finish unpacking. I’ve already filled the two wall units that are up.

I told Andy at the end of last week that a few days after we move, I shall need to be doing some washing and will need the airer to be up, and also the airing cupboard operational, and he understands that. I hope it will be OK to plumb the washing machine in despite the absence of the sink… He can always pull the machine forward when he needs to access the plumbing for the sink.

The boxes I haven’t managed to unpack, I have stored in the annexe sitting room. It struck me that since Mum won’t be down for 10 days, there is nothing to stop us putting things in there temporarily.

I did manage to clean the sitting room this afternoon, and took great delight in getting rid of the cobwebs festooning the walls behind where the previous owner’s bookcases had been – they were offensive to my eye! It is all dusted and swept, and I washed the floor. I repeated the process in the hall, although that will soon get messed up again with all the traipsing in and out and the builders still in the house, but at least that part of the house is now ready to receive our furniture. I really don’t know what is going to happen upstairs!!

I also got things ready in my hubby’s bathroom for the arrival of the kitties. We have decided to keep them shut in the bathroom while the whole process of the move is going on – we don’t want them running out into the road, and the whole thing is going to be pretty stressful for them as it is. I have run an extension lead into the bathroom and installed a Feliway plug-in diffuser which should have a calming effect, and we’ve got the litter tray and cat litter, and some food ready over there. We have decided not to give them any breakfast before travelling, so that Phoebe especially is not sick in the car (although she is better with her travel sickness than she used to be), and also it will give them something to think about on arrival, to get stuck into some food!

There’s still a huge amount to do in order to make the place habitable for us all, and I just hope we manage it before Mum comes down! Part of the whole idea of not having her down immediately was so that I could have a rest and recover a bit, but I really don’t see that happening now.

Tomorrow my hubby will be going over on his own to do a few jobs. I have far too much to do here, on our last day in residence in this house, to be able to go with him, and I am so tired tonight that what I really want to do tomorrow is have a complete rest, but that is quite out of the question!

As a result of all this, this will be my last post for a while. The phone and internet are going off on Monday until 24th September, and tomorrow I shall be packing up the computers and disconnecting the network. I shall be continuing to compose draft blog posts as and when I get time and there’s progress to report, and I will publish these as soon as we are back online again. So for the time being, it’s goodbye from me. See you all on the other side!

Here are a few photos I took today of the bathroom. Paul has started tiling the walls and it’s looking absolutely great.

Here is a detail of the mosaic tile band. Andy and I spent some time choosing this when we had our famous trip to B&Q several months ago. You can see that it incorporates not only some beautiful natural stone-effect tiles, but also some sea glass – I have fiddled with the colour balance on these pictures to try and get the colour just right, but have failed to do it justice – this glass is a beautiful shade of subtle pale green. You can see the plastic spacers still in place.

The arch with the tile bead fitted. Paul, Andy and I had a long discussion about the best way to tackle the tiling of the arch – my brilliant idea of tiling the inside with mosaic bit the dust as being too labour-intensive and expensive, and eventually Paul hit on the idea of applying a tile bead about 4 inches in from the edge of the arch, and tiling up to this – with the curve there was the problem of what to do with the cut edges of the tiles. The tile bead provides a beautifully smooth finish to the edges of the tiles. The inner part of the arch will remain untiled, and will be painted first in while emulsion to seal the plaster, and then we are going to paint it with a brown shade to match the floor tiles, using shower paint as it will be exposed to heavy moisture on the other side. I like this idea because it finishes the arch beautifully, and gives a focal point to the room, and the colour will provide continuity with the floor.

A detail shot of the tile bead. Note one of a series of small ties to keep it in place. You can see what a neat finish it provides. To follow the curve of the arch, Paul has clipped into the perforated base of the bead so that it flows around the curve without buckling. This part of the bead will be covered by the tiles, which, as you can see from the photo, fit perfectly against the raised part of the bead.

So that’s it, folks. See you in a week or so!