Day 936: Welcome to our fabrication shop

Let's take a walk down memory lane. This is how the upstairs bathroom looked when we first moved into this humble abode:

January 2012: Because who doesn't want to step out of the bath and onto a balcony...???

Then we did a little smashy-smashy and turned it into this and then this:

May 23, 2013

May 27, 2013

Insulation went in at the same time as the kitchen and then we had the big burst of progress I mentioned in the previous post thanks to our magic help:

July 2013

April 2014

As you can see above, we went with the all-time classic white subway for the walls. The next thing to figure out was a sill for the window and storage niche in the shower. Back when we had originally planned to bring in the pros to fix this bathroom when we first moved in, we picked up a piece of marble from kijiji. The seller had a big stack that had been reclaimed from the walls of a restaurant and we thought it would make for a nice vanity top. We were going to get a local stone yard to cut the 3' x 5' slab to size and clean it up but when we changed gears to focus on the bathroom downstairs instead, the marble sat idle in the garage. Two and a half years later, their prices have gone way up so we decided to try our hand at some simple fabrication for the sills in the shower and skip the vanity top.

We bought a diamond blade for the circular saw to do the rough cut and used the wet tile saw for the final cut.

June 2014: Cutting off a more manageable piece

Trimming it down to exact size

Then Garrett spent hours hand sanding the pieces moving up and up on the grit, all the way to 6000. And here's the window sill in place, waiting to get glued down.

Buffed to a thing of beauty

Not too shabby, even in the shabby light

Meanwhile, we had to make some more tile decisions. We were keen to get some contrast against the white subway with a dark grey floor but also wanted an accent tile that matched the floor. Most of the wall accent tiles we could find incorporated glass tile, which was vetoed for the space. There are also lots of accent tiles designed to match floor tiles but they're made to be installed on the floor so they are way too thick to sit on the wall beside our subway tiles. At the end of the day, we had to set up our fabrication shop once again to get the look we wanted. The winner for the floor was a gorgeous slate. Because it's a natural stone that looks the same throughout (unlike a glazed tile with colour just on the surface), we could cut the slate into strips to use for our wall accent.

Stacks and stacks

We went with two rows of the accent strips

With the accent in place, we had some fun with a nice herringbone pattern on the upper wall in the shower. Since we were using a white grout on white tile, I though a pattern might add a bit of interest where the colour wouldn't.

We went with white grout but this pre-grout photo makes me yearn for the white tile with grey lines look.

Finally it was time to get the floor in place. With the in-floor heat installed (you can see the cables in the photo above), we set up the saw in the tub again and went to town.

Making art with the toilet cut-out

7-month old kaiser bun is hidden well by the baggy shirt...

Starting from the closet beside the tub and working our way out of the room, we were quite pleased with the final product.

July 2014: Putting in the last few tiles

Cleaned and ready for grout

We managed to get the toilet and a temporary sink installed before a lovely house full of family arrived but the tub wasn't operational until just in the nick of time for another arrival...