800 Subway Tiles

We are taking a much needed break from tiling to watch the Michigan State basketball game tonight.  Greg has been feeling under the weather and my fingers are still sore from pushing tiles on.  Although, we still never take a night just to relax. Tonight we took advantage of the 58 degree weather to grill chicken and then went for a nice 2 mile walk.

I thought I would take our night of rest to walk you through our master bath remodel up to date.  We scored some great deals on the subway tile and bathroom floor tile by shopping around and pricing things out online. We ended up finding the best deal on subway tile from Lowe's for only $1.32 sq/ft!  The shower only needed 100 sq/ft... you do the math.  We also applied our $50 gift card to this purchase that we received for winning yard of the month (thanks for all the votes!).  It's never a good feeling when you go to pick up your tile and find out there are 800 individual subway tiles.  My back, knees and hands hurt just thinking about all the tile work that was ahead of us.  I know saving so much money doing it ourselves will pay off when everything is done!

Things started off with demolition of course. First goal was to remove the tub/shower insert.

 Success. Next up, removing the wall next to the toilet. Our first idea was to make it a half wall, but then we decided to just knock the whole thing out.

Now time for pipes and plumbing. We wanted to move the shower handle up so it looked like it was always there. We also needed to move the shower drain to the center of the floor.  This involved cutting, prepping and shoving lots of PVC pipes together like a puzzle. Then we needed to solder the copper piping together, which you can tell from the pictures, made me very nervous!

All in all, everything was going smoothly. I was very happy to see the flooring go back down.

The PVC pipes definitely proved to be a challenge, but we did not give up! Next came building a shelf for shampoo, installing a light over the shower and the start of the floor.  Greg's experience laying cement for the city definitely paid off. 

Next we installed the shower liner and checked for leaks. Everything looked good to go :) 

Murphy supervising...

Time for the pitch kit and last layer of the floor.

Bring on the HardieBacker!

FINALLY.. let the tiling begin. I did most of the laying of the tile while Greg was running up and down 2 flights of stairs to do the cutting. He said he went all the way to the top of the Sears Tower.

 Very happy with the floor!

 Murphy sure is good at supervising

The above picture is how our bathroom looks as of tonight. We are 300 subway tiles in and have about 500 to go! Sorry for such a long post, but I wanted to bring everyone who doesn't see our Facebook pictures up to date. We will hopefully resume tiling tomorrow. 

xo, Erin