So. I had a reasonable surf this morning, some brekky, a drink and a sit down, a good walk with Max, some lunch, er … another drink, um … a quick trip down the shops, fiddled with the boat, and finally I stopped procrastinating and set to work on the tiles.
Mum’s comment on the previous post was remarkably similar to the warnings in a DIY book we have, i.e. removing tiles is not as straightforward as you might think. Well, so far it has been. (Straightforward, that is.)
I started off the proper way by trying to remove the grout between the tiles with a grout saw, but that was taking far too long so I just had a go with the hammer and chisel instead. Good decision. The 10 tiles around the sink took me less than 30 minutes to remove, the first layer of the plasterboard paper is coming off with the tiles but there are plenty more layers underneath so I’m not worried about that.
A few pics (note the “safety goggles” in the last shot).
I think it’s funny that it’s taken me 30 years to enjoy this sort of stuff. I guess it’s because we finally have our own house to tinker with. Jayne says that all I have to do now is train myself to finish jobs that I start, but that would be no fun at all, would it?!
Last week I decided to take this week off to have a little break from work. Since Friday evening I’ve surfed, walked, tidied and relaxed. Fantastic. But unless I achieve something this week I know I’ll get to Sunday and think it was a waste of leave (even though it won’t have been). So on Saturday night I wrote out a could-do list.
High up on that list is “paint the ensuite”. Sounds easy enough … it’s just a repaint, not a total reno. Changing the floor tiles, toilet, bath and basin unit is not an option at the moment (well, the basin unit is a 30% chance, actually), but that makes it much tougher to pick a colour scheme that looks fresh and modern AND as if it’s been there forever (like the fittings).
However, Jayne and I discussed every colour under the sun over the last few days and we concluded that there simply isn’t one that will spruce up our old, tired wall tiles enough to make the paint job worthwhile. So today I decided that we’re retiling too.
Hmmm.
This afternoon I went to Bunnings and spent an hour in the tiles section trying to match up colours. I found a floor tile that matches ours and a wall tile that’s the same colour as our fittings, sat them up against each other, then played around with different wall tiles until I found some I liked. I bought one wall tile and one detail tile (so that I could double check them in our bathroom before we shell out for the whole lot) and they look great. In fact I reckon the paint colour is almost irrelevant now. We could go with plain white and the room would still look good.
So here are the “before” pics. Watch for updates later in the week. I’m off to remove the old tiles now.
Just a quick post to say that I’ve started a personal site to complement jayneandmarty.com. It’s at martinjy.com.
We won’t be neglecting jayneandmarty.com - the idea is that we’ll use this site for regular news about us, and I’ll use martinjy.com for things that are more specific to me and my interests. At the moment I’m on day 2 of an attempt to surf for 10 days in a row - I’ve taken next week off from work to give my brain a rest.
So, one more blog for you to read!
(And you should all check out Facebook, btw. It’s like Friends Reunited on steroids. Good fun.)
