Wow, the days are just flying by. It’s now been 486 days since we first ripped out gross, nasty carpeting in our bathroom.

And as you know we’ve been renovating the master bath ever since.

About a week ago the bathroom looked like this from the same vantage point.

Astute observers may notice three things. 1) The ipe flooring is in! 2) The back wall is finally blue. 3) Umm, where’d the toilet go?

Well, to answer the last question first: we were toilet-less in that bathroom for a few days while we finished installing and sealing the flooring around it. Thankfully our roommates didn’t mind us using their bathroom for a few days. We couldn’t even shower in ours since – yet again – our shower doubled as a storage unit.

A few days later Mark and his friend installed the new (to us) low-flow toilet that we picked up at ReBuild. The new one is a huge improvement over our old toilet which had a bad habit of running all the time. (Insert corny running humor here.) Plus, it only cost us less than $50 as compared to $100+ for a brand new one. (I’ll post pics of the new toilet soon. Spoiler alert: it looks like a toilet.)

Back to your other observations. The back wall is finally blue!

If you recall, for a long time the back wall was a pinkish hue – or “sand dune” if you ask the paint company.

The sand dune really didn’t “go” with the blue paint (called “babbling brook”) in any way. Really, I should have known they wouldn’t go together based on the names alone. Since when do you find sand dunes next to a babbling brook? Here I was, thinking we would be all fancy and modern with an accent wall and instead I was committing a faux paux with my mixed up ecology!

Plus, not only did we not like the sand dune color, it was also was a matte finish, not semigloss like the blue, so it wasn’t quite appropriate to have in a moist bathroom environment. Speaking of not liking our color choices, we don’t particularly love the blue color, but at least it’s all consistent now.

Oh well, our modern design attempt failed and now we’ve got a bathroom that screams “it’s a boy”.

Sometimes the back wall sort of looks like an accent wall anyway, depending on how the light hits it. You’ll see what I mean in the the last photo below. It’s an optical illusion (brought on by the camera’s flash) because those two walls really are the same color!

But the big news of course is that we finished flooring installation! You’ve already heard about many of our flooring struggles along the way, but I wanted to mention some more of the fun things we had to do to complete this project. When I say “fun” really I mean “extremely tedious and frustrating.”  And when I say “we” really I mean “Mark”. If it were up to me I would have just continued the flooring as we had been doing. Line up the rows of wood, cut them to size, and nail down. Floors are squeaky? Eh, no one will notice. There are gaps in the wood? It’s okay, it will look aged. A little bit uneven? No worries, it’s just a bathroom.

But that’s just me. Mark wanted to do it right. Apparently doing diy home improvement projects brings out Mark’s perfectionist side. Who knew? Plus, he’s really been the brains behind the whole flooring operation and I’ve been mostly the assistant and flooring organizer. We are well suited for our respective roles.

Well organized piles of flooring

One task that Mark tackled along the way was replacing a bit of plywood subfloor near the shower that had been weak from years of use. He reinforced the supports underneath with additional wooden braces and cut a custom piece of new plywood to fit the space (in the photo below this new piece of plywood looks different because it actually has a rubber coating to make it water resistant).

Once we got the flooring to that section, he also decided to add shims to reinforce (and raise) the floor further as it was still a little uneven.

We figure there are a few ‘hot spots’ in the bathroom, like in front of the sink and toilet, and this one, where everyone will step when getting in and out of the shower. Even if nothing else is perfect in the bathroom, we’d like to at least get these spots right!

For uneven floors, we’ve been told there’s some kind of floor leveling product you can buy – I’m envisioning a thick goo that spreads itself out and acts like a glue. We opted for the less expensive route of using shims that we already own and they seem to have worked out great thus far (fingers crossed).

To encourage you to “ooh” and “ahh” a little more, here is another shot of the floor before the toilet was re-installed.

In this photo, the final row of flooring had yet to go in. Boy did those last few rows give us trouble! In fact, many rows were time-consuming stress-inducing and expletive-causing. Especially the last few. Because of the uneven floor issue, and our ongoing problem with mismatched flooring widths, and our interest in precision around the toilet, it took us over 3 hours to complete the final few rows of flooring.

Yes, you read that right. In what has become our motto during diy projects over the past year: Everything takes longer than expected.

But it doesn’t matter how long it took us. It’s finally done! And it’s beautiful! We love it. And it actually makes the baby-boy-blue walls more bearable.

Next steps. Here’s what remains to be done in the bathroom that will undoubtedly take us at least twice as long as we expect:

-Stain trim pieces including window and mirror trim
-Cut new trim pieces to size if we can’t find the old trim
-Attach trim
-Re-attach bathroom door
-Build thresholds
-Stain and install thresholds
-Build shelves for closet (remember the closet?)
-Finish mudding wall that was patched
-Prime and paint patched wall
-Reapply tung oil to entire floor

Will be back with more updates soon!