Water closet

Because I promised no more posts about the bathroom... this is a post about our water closet.

*ahem*

When you were updated last, we had started the shower tiling and were about 1/3 of the way done the walls. This weekend we pushed through and finished the walls.

Day one had us starting the top half of the third wall, where all the knobs and spigots live. The captain managed to successfully bore a hole into a tile using our little tile boring bit. Boring tile bit. Bit boring tile.

He made a hole where the shower head will attach.

Then we started the lower tiles on the previously tiled walls, after which it looked something like this. Oddly, following the recommendation of The Book, the tiles are all suspended using masking tape. This works quite well. We used up quite a bit of tape, though.

Fast forward a day, once these walls have set, and we started work on the lower half of the final wall. What an exercise in frustration that one was. The captain started cutting the holes for the taps around 10 a.m.

By 1 p.m., he had partially cut a hole through a tile before he killed all battery-powered drills in the facility. He ended up mooching a corded drill from a neighbour. We are going to branded such terrible mooches on this island. MOOCHES.

And then.... distaster.

He said things like "Oh my goodness gracious, would you look at that!" and "Fiddle dee dee, that's disappointing."*

*No. Not really.

And then he got another tile.

It cracked at 3:30. I know this because a primal wail erupted outside the cottage and the red-headed kid turned to me and said, "I think dad broke another tile".

Awash in frustration, we decided the next-best plan would be to cut the tiles lengthwise with the tile cutter, bisecting the location of the hole, and use the tile nippers to notch out each half of the cut to form a circle. It wouldn't look as nice when all was said and done, but at this point we were out of options. The captain had completely given up and left me to the job of making holes in the tiles. I still have blisters on my left hand from the danged nippers.

So... full steam ahead, if a day behind schedule. We got the tiles on the bottom half of the wall after Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. Again, they were held in place with tape. I think the mortar this time was a bit runnier than on previous walls because the tape attaching the first row of tiles to the top half of the wall kept getting pulled loose, and the tiles would start a slow descent to the bottom of the shower.

After repairing the world's slowest landslide several times, we gave up and used a lot more tape. A ridiculous amount of tape. But at least the tiles weren't shifting anymore.

With the wall tiles staying put, we started on the shower floor. I thought this would be a snap: smaller tiles would be easy to cut in the tile cutter, and the 12x12 sheets of tiles would make laying them fast.

This was only partly true. The tile cutter didn't work worth beans again, so we had to resort to cutting them all down to size with the tile nippers.

Here's an idea of how much cutting the captain got to do. These are the off-cut ceramic shards.

Had I known about this beforehand, I definitely would've spent the $50 for a wet saw. It's making me a little choked up knowing how much grief we endured because of those stupid tiles. Learn from me! Stick with the cheap little 4x4 or 3x6 tiles: they're WAY easier to cut and apply.

OK. So back to the floor. Things were going swimmingly with the first row of tiles, however once the floor started to slope because of the pitch we had engineered into it to allow the water to drain, things got gummy. The spacing of the tile sheets wasn't lining up, and we ended up having to cut apart the sheets and lay the tiles individually for almost half the shower. *sigh*. By this point it was well past midnight.

And we still needed to work on the curb. Here's the curb with the tiles set on it. I'm not super happy with how it turned out. I think it would've been better with a marble plate across the top, but that would've cost some big bucks. It's not perfect, but it will do. By the time this was wrapped up and we cleaned up the bathroom, it was 3 a.m. Yes, there's a 3 o'clock that happens in the morning. I was not pleased to become acquainted with it.

Because Monday was dedicated to packing up and closing the cottage, we weren't able to apply the grout as I had hoped. This makes me sad.

Here's the shower as we left it on Monday. It's not pretty. I'm hoping some like-coloured grout will make the slight irregularities in tile placement recede. (Isn't that a pleasant way of saying "hide my mistakes"?)

It's frustrating to be this close to finished and have to walk away from it for six months.

Arg.