Home improvement, take 1 :)

Both of our bathrooms are in need of new flooring....hey who am I kidding, our whole house is in need of new flooring.  We needed a good place to start since we don't have the money to do the whole thing right now.  So we decided to start with the bathrooms.  We spent a few weeks tile shopping and final decided on one.  We bought all the rest of our supplies and demolition started Saturday.  Here is our before picture....

Our shower door frame needed some re-calking done so that was part of this project as well. 

Doug told me to take a picture from behind the toilet. His mom helped me paint the bathroom and he said she missed a spot ;)

Of course during any home improvement job, as you fix one room, another becomes a mess...I had to take a deep breath on this one!  LOL

 When you watch videos on how to tackle this project, they make this job of taking up old press board so easy!  Maybe it is in some houses, but ours was glued and nailed down.  

We finally got the majority up, but had to use a tool to get up the glue and stuck pieces. 

All set and ready for tile....

...and here is were our project came to a screeching halt.  Some of you may know that we have in-floor heat in our home.  Doug (and I) were both concerned when we first started researching flooring with puncturing our pipes.  We had 3 choices of underlayment options for the tile.  Durock cement board, Hardiebacker Cement board and Schluter Ditra.  The first two options recommended a 1 1/4 -1 1/2 inch screw for securing the board to the plywood.  That made both of us nervous.  The Schluter Ditra is a role out option that you put a thinset of mortar under, lay the Ditra, and then put another layer of mortar before you lay your tiles.  It came highly recommended to us and calmed our fears of hitting our in-floor pipes since we didn't need to screw anything.  In the end we were really happy with our decision.  Once we pulled up the old underlayment, the tips of our hangers from our pipes were poking through the plywood just a tiny bit.  So Doug went down and measured the screws and we didn't have enough room in flooring depth to use the recommended length that we were told.  Praise the Lord for impressing on Doug and giving him a gut feeling!  So anyhow, after we got everything cleaned up and demolition was done, we laid one of our tiles on the floor to see where we were sitting for depth.  Our old underlayment was ridiculously thick.  We were lacking quite a bit in height now.  The Ditra is relatively thin, even with the thinset layers.  Our two options were find a way to make our new underlayment thicker, or repaint the bathroom so we would be able to move the trim boards down.  I hated the thought of repainting so I was all about the first option.  In the end we found out that we could get the Ditra in a thicker version.  So I ordered it, since Amazon had it for $85 cheaper with free shipping than Lowes or Home Depot and Doug will take our other stuff back to Home Depot.  So our project is on hold for a bit and hopefully the Ditra will come in by Friday and we can start tiling Saturday! 

In the meantime, Doug caulked our shower and put everything back together for me.  He also moved all the supplies into the bathroom so I could have our bedroom back and not go crazy all week.  He is pretty awesome!  

Stay tuned for more on this project!