New bathroom floor

The last home improvement project for the season (if you consider October part of the spring/summer season) was replacing the floor in the front bathroom with, you guessed it, tile. In the process, I managed to break the old toilet and thus turn a $200 project into a $450 project. As you might guess, breaking the toilet was not a high point of the project for me.

Just like tiling the kitchen and dining room, under the carpet I found vinyl on particle-board subfloor. All of it had to come out....

and be replaced with plywood.

Once the new plywood was in, the Ditra was laid on top (shown here prior to mortaring onto the subfloor).

I spent several hours cutting all the tile first which is a bit risky as it is hard to keep the tiles from shifting and the cuts consistent. Once all the tiles were cut, they got mortared in and let set for a day or two.

Grouted.

The new toilet gets installed and everything gets caulked and prettied up.

New Backsplash

Fulfilling a promise to my wife when we redid our kitchen floor, we finally got around to doing the kitchen backsplash. Mainly due to size, the backsplash went a lot faster than the floor. We tore the old tiles out in a few hours (a few weeks before), set the new tiles in four or five hours one day, and grouted in a few hours a week later. Though she had trepidation about her choice of tiles, Katie is very happy with them now that they are installed.

Original, boring small white square tiles:

Fancy new brick tiles, prior to putting in the grout:

Backsplash after grouting:

Completely cleaned up and finished.