New Year, New Projects

Kevin and I have been a little slow to start on our home improvement projects since we moved in, what with the weather being freezing, Kevin being out of town, and then the holidays hit! Well, yesterday we decided to bite the bullet and get working on a project. When we had our inspection done, it was recommended that we fill in some of the holes in the grout in the shower where it had come out. Seemed like an easy project to start with, and we could feel good knowing we did something that will help maintain the integrity of the house structure.

Easy, right. Well, when we started really cleaning and inspecting the tiles, we noticed that the wall underneath the window in the shower moved when you pressed on it. That didn't seem good. We are assuming that the caulking around the seam of the window had come loose, and water had gotten inside of it, and now the plaster or dry wall is water sodden and likely covered in lots of mildew and mold.

The Main Suspect: Missing caulk around the window
There's a lot of mildew in these here parts!

Using a hairdryer to maybe dry it out a little. We don't really know what we're doing! :)

What were just a couple little areas to patch has now become an entire wall that we need to take the tile off, cut out the old wall, put in new wall, and then retile. Retiling the bathroom had been one of my projects that I had hoped to do, in like 3 years. After we refloored the rest of the house, painted all the rooms, got our landscaping done. You know, later. Well, looks like we'll have to do it sometime soon now. We're thinking we'll probably just get all new tile and spiff up the bathroom, which will be nice to pick out our own style. We also discovered that some of the floor next to the tub has become lose from the subfloor, so we'll probably that to put in new floors, too! Yikes! Our tiny little bathroom just became the big focus!

So, yesterday we got started on a stopgap measure to not allow any more moisture to seep into the wall. I cleaned the whole shower tile area really thoroughly, then Kevin scraped out the old caulk around the rim of the tub. Then we went to Home Depot for our weekly trip (funny since we haven't done any real projects, yet we have literally gone every weekend since we moved in!) and got our supplies. Then we got busy caulking the tub and the holes in the grout between the tiles of the wall, and around the window. It was a bit of trial and error, but we pretty much got the hang of it by the end. It only took about an hour of actual caulking, so if any of you have any holes in your tile grout or gaps in your caulking, fix it now, so you don't have to redo your whole bathroom! :) Which will be very interesting for us to do, since we only have one bathroom. Oh, let the adventures of home improvement begin!

I have a caulking gun, and I am not afraid to use it!

Okay, maybe a little afraid, but we'll do it anyway!

Smoothing out the caulk, so fun.

We feel we did an impressive job, considering how not handy we both are! We are trying though, getting our feet wet, and trying not to be afraid to making mistakes. It can always be fixed later, right? :)

Today, Kevin attempted to make our bathroom fan more effective, but discovered it is basically worthless because it doesn't pull any air out, and what little does get pulled out doesn't actually have a vent to escape from. So now we are thinking new fan, plus building a new vent pipe through the roof. Fun! We also managed to pick up about one million paint chips yesterday, and have been agonizing over colors for different rooms. We think we have the bedroom picked out, and possibly the kitchen. Progress! Looking forward to a year of learning about all this crazy house stuff, and getting some work done around here! Next up, cleaning out the garage and cleaning up the garden area.