Mid-Century Remodel

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2009: Year of the Home Spa

Posted by Holly on January 02, 2009

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Ipe Shower Floor

All this talk about Ipe and finally we get to putting in the Ipe shower floor! It took most of the day Saturday, but we we got half the deck done. It looks like a deck, so I am calling it a shower deck. It took a long time due to all the measurements and fittings that had to be done. You may recall if you're a regular reader of this blog that Ipe is not only very water-resistant (a great decking material), but also very hard and very heavy. So hauling the pieces up and down the stairs many times eventually took its toll and we had to stop, rest, and have a beer. Thus, this is as far as we got by about 6pm yesterday: This is half the shower floor and we hope we can do the rest today, although we have some shopping and other errands to take care of, so it's not a done deal. The ipe planks shown rest on ipe struts and are held together with screws. The power drill got a good work out as ipe has to be pre-drilled. The struts are then resting on 1" rubber feet at various, custo...

Molding, Part 3 (and sort of 4)

Once the door molding was up, we could do the floor molding. The floor molding was made from the floor boards - bamboo. We cut off the lip where they would fit together and then rounded the edge. Once they were made, they were pretty quick to put up. Looks much better not to see where the drywall ends and the floor ends. Before that, we did another bamboo modification - heating vents in the floor. We first had to cut out the hole in the floor (pictured), which made a terrible mess. Used the router to edge it out so we could fit a grate on top of it. Then we made the grating also out of bamboo floor boards by gluing two together, cutting to size, and using the router to drill out the vent slots. Again, fairly messy job, but at least that part was done in the basement workshop! The grates fit into the floor nice and flush. We finished that last weekend! Hoorah! This weekend: hooking up the heating ducts - fun!

Back-butter

Back-butter. Sounds like it should be some tasty kind of porcine-related spreadable treat, doesn't it? Ah, but that's for my *other* blog. No, this back-buttering is actually a technique used for laying tiles, typically large tiles. So, even though we cut our 18x18 inch tiles in half, they're still pretty big. And 1/2" thick. So heavy, too. Thinset is spread on the walls and then also onto the back of the tiles - hence the term "back" butter. Here you can see Dave back-buttering a tile: Here's where we started this weekend (once all our tiles were cut): Part way through... And, here's where we finished up the weekend: As you can see, the tile on the outter wall is up to the level of the window and we also tiled the tub-front and part of the horizontal layer on the tub surround. Woo-hoo! It's almost starting to look like a bathroom now.

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