Remember that day, weeks ago, when we tackled our bathroom renovation with renewed gusto and I nearly declared it would be done within a day or two? Well, it didn’t quite happen like that.

It all started off well. After optimistically gathering all our flooring tools, organizing a few bundles of wood by size, and rolling out the underlayment paper, we started in on the first row.

You may recall that we weren’t sure if we would have enough wood to complete our project. We’re always conscious of avoiding waste in our lives but now even more so; we make every flooring cut with the next row in mind. As in, when we cut a piece of wood to complete the left part of the row, the cut edge of the ‘wasted’ piece could be used to start the right part of the next (or a future) row. Smart, I know!

In the hallway section of the bathroom, which is just about 3′ wide, we realized we could use the full lengths of our wood – with not even an inch of waste – by putting them down in a certain pattern. Because ipe is such a dark wood and the pieces were lining up pretty well, I think it’s hard to even see the pattern. Can you see it below?

You may be saying, I don’t see the pattern (or if I do, it doesn’t look bad), but I do see some pieces that stick out like a sore thumb! There are two reasons for this: The ipe has a lot of color variation – which we like – but there’s another reason they look so different from each other. By the time we got as far as the photo above we had already run into issue #1: We were inconsistent with sealing the flooring with tung oil. Some pieces had been sealed with two or three coats, and had dried out for weeks. Some pieces had only been sealed with one coat and hadn’t dried long enough for another coat. In fact, they were still sticky and smelled like citrus (our tung oil is cut with citrus and thus our bathroom smells like an orange grove). Some pieces were entirely unfinished and we figure we’ll just seal them once we’re done. So, really, this isn’t such a big issue in the grand scheme of things. Just keep in mind when you see photos that the unfinished wood typically looks lighter and doesn’t have the sheen of the sealed wood.

We had also run into issue #2. Gaps. Lots of them. Turns out we weren’t the only ones being inconsistent. Surprise, surprise, the flooring pieces weren’t always the same widths! Sometimes one piece would be shorter or longer than its neighbor by as much as a sixteenth of an inch. A sixteenth of an inch may not sound like a lot, but believe me, it’s visible to the naked eye, and can mess up a straight line of flooring very quickly. We later developed a workaround for issue #2 (which simply involves measuring the flooring widths before putting them down – can you say duh?) but we hadn’t yet discovered that technique at the time.

Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s talk about issue #3, shall we? The bathroom closet. Take a lookey here, at our beautiful bathroom closet.

I’m being sarcastic in case you can’t tell. Doorless, trimless, open-faced plywood shelves. I sort-of painted it white a year ago in a half-assed sort of way, knowing that one day we’d get around to deciding how to pretty it up.  For the past year, the yellow color that I didn’t quite paint over at the bottom (and top) served to remind us of how gross our entire bathroom used to look.

Here’s another look at the closet, back when I thought using cabinet doors we picked up for free would be a good idea. Mark vetoed that idea pretty quickly.

Once we got our flooring down to where the closet began, it sparked a bigger conversation about the function and aesthetics of the closet. With any home renovations, our goal is always to keep in mind the words “value added”, since we know we’ll sell this house one day. So, even if the closet had trim and a door and it was fully painted, would these cheap plywood shelves ever look value added? The answer is no. I mean, can you even use the word value in the same sentence as plywood?  We briefly considered drywalling over the closet so as to not have to deal with it. But there wouldn’t be much fun in that, would there? So we decided to demolish the shelves and build something from scratch.

So, the closet quickly became Distracted Side Project Of The Day! Time to put the flooring on hold and do some demolition.

Out came the shelves. And the strips under the shelves.

The demo wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t made easy either due to this gross gluey substance used to hold the shelves in place.

With all the shelves out I could then mud the closet walls, (which I later sanded and re-painted entirely white).

We couldn’t make any more progress on the closet that day because we needed to let the mud dry. Also, we’ll need a trip to a hardware store as we need materials for building the new shelves. Oh, and we need a plan. I’ve determined that those are good to have, too. I’ll give you a hint and tell you that we have a fun idea that involves using leftover flooring for the shelving but I’m skeptical we’ll have enough leftover for that.

We also didn’t make much more progress on the flooring that day because, well, we were both feeling pretty done with all the issues. Mark’s expression sums it up pretty nicely.

So, day 449 of the bathroom renovation was a wrap. Why am I calling it that? That was the number of days we had been in our house, and, if you recall, we started renovating the bathroom from pretty much Day 1 by removing the carpeting (and putting in a window not too long after).

In the next bathroom post I’ll bring you up to speed with days 455 and 464 of the bathroom renovation. Here’s a spoiler: it’s still not done. Hang in there with us!

PS – You may notice some changes going on around here on the blog. Subtle ones at first, like a new WordPress template and header image. One day soon there might be some bigger changes, too, like the name and even the focus of the blog. What? Is nothing sacred anymore? Stay tuned…