I guess it was about time that I remodeled my utility room, it has only been 30 years! My friend said that it definitely had that 80's look! I was going to paint my cabinets, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, plus it was SO much work! I figured, paint and new tile would be enough to make a big difference! They say a picture says a thousand words, so here are lots of pictures!
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| OUT WITH THE OLD! |
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My washer went out over a year ago and Tami
and Ryne were good to loan us an old one they
had in storage. |
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After 30 years, we never did put linoleum in the clothes drop,
or base board behind the washer and dryer. |
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| My old toll paintings were still hanging on the walls. |
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| The back door looked really bad. |
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So this is the color--aqua, I guess. Its a lot darker than the little
1x2 inch sample I thought was not quite so bright! |
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| This back door had never been painted. |
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| After I got it painted, we started on the floor. |
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Wow, all I can say was this was HARD work! We were told that
tile layers charge $4 a square foot to remove old flooring and this room is 160 sq. feet. It took us, mostly Dad a full day of scraping to remove this stuff! |
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| After Dad removed the washer, dryer and hot water heater, (we were without hot water for 3 days!) we discovered when the floor got wet, that the other layer still left, also had to come up! So we scraped for another day to get it all down to cement! |
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| Finally--- CEMENT! |
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| Then we started laying the tile. We decided to 'off set' it, so that made it a little trickier! We started with two chalk lines marking the center of the room, then we laid the first row of tiles. This is without thin set, we were just laying it out and making the cuts. |
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| Dad's friend told him to make the thin set about the consistency of peanut butter, so he did! That first batch was stressful because it was drying so fast and hard to spread. |
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| The next batch he mixed was more to the consistency of pudding, and it was much better! Dad couldn't find his knee pads, so both our knees were killing us! We started at 8am and finished after 8pm. We were BEAT! I could hardly move the next day!! |
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We thought we'd just do this area, so we could at
least get the hot water heater put in the next day,
but we just kept going. |
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| I had to take a picture of Dad's pants! What a crack up! |
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| After 24 hours Dad started grouting the tile. It was drying fast so I started helping sponging it off. Before this we had to clean out all the hardened thin set, which was just like cement in all the cracks. That was a pain. Live and learn, we'll clean that out as we go next time, before it hardens! |
Messy and scary. We hoped we were doing it right. We had watched several videos and had done the tile at our place at Roosevelt, but still, I had to wonder when it looked like this.
Would this mess ever come off? Part 2 to follow...
