Where have I been???

It's been a while since I posted. Way too long, so where have I been and what have I been up to? It all comes down to one thing. This spring I've been given a wonderful opportunity to work with the flight test program back in Seattle until sometime in mid-April or so. It's been an enlightening experience learning a part of the program and company I've never been involved with before, and being around live aircraft every day (as opposed to building them) is loads of fun. So during the interim I've been planning and learning. LOTS of planning!

For the master bathroom we'll need more or less everything. Flooring, shower tile, cabinets, doors for the hamper, something for the walls... everything is going except for the mirror and the jetted tub. Even the tub will need work since there's no access panel to the pump and whatever else makes it run. Fortunately the layout will remain the same. Danielle and I have put a lot of time and energy into figuring materials out, and I've worked hard figuring out exactly *how* to demo and rebuild a bathroom.

There's a lot of stuff out there you never think about. Like the shower pan - I had no idea what was under the tile, but it's a complex system built and designed to keep moisture from getting to the cement board. My biggest concern with the project is removing the existing tile. It's not original like the stuff I removed about 6 months ago that was a total nightmare, but that was a bad enough experience so that I'm going to try farming that part of the job out. The shower tile shouldn't be a problem since on the floor there it's installed on a mud bed that sits on top of a plastic barrier. Pull up on the barrier after you remove the tile from the walls, and out it comes!

Enough about the details - here are some pictures of what the materials we're considering look like. The marble is already on order so that's taken care of. The pieces arrange in a pattern and are of several shapes and sizes. It matches with the cultured marble in the bathtub much better in person. The two materials will not be next to each other anyway since only the actual bathtub part will remain. The front is seen in this picture which will be replaced with a wood panel.



Cabinets - we both like the dark wood look from an earlier post. The walls will be blue (to match what the bedroom) venetian plaster. Glass mosaic, countertops, shower tile and accessories are up in the air. Here are the samples for the shower tile and glass mosaic.



To be honest I'm not completely happy with either. The bottom set of samples look nice, but may be a bit too dark (but might give a good contrast with the walls...) For the top one the shade of blue seems odd. We will continue looking at tile after I get back in April.

In the meantime I'm going to be on the John Bridge Tile Forums a LOT because there's tons of knowledge to be gained there and I want to have a good plan for moving forward with this because after the bathroom is done we're moving on immediately to the kitchen!