One Month and Counting...

This was all I was able to do myself...pathetic.

Remember way back at the beginning of July when I blogged about the tile work we'd be doing in our walk-in closet and living room?  That ended up being far more work than either of us imagined.  If you recall, we had planned to do the prep work for the tiling ourselves, but after chipping away no more than about one square meter of 45 total, we caved and paid the brick-layer to do it.  I may have inherited the Wilbanks frugal gene...but I also have my mother's practical, good sense in these situations--the time and pain (literally: Angelines couldn't raise her arms after one day of helping the guy we hired) just weren't worth the money we'd save in this case.  As it was, the brick-layer took a full week of seven hour days just to chip the walls!


In the living room we discovered that part of the reason there was so much humidity seeping through was because the walls weren't covered in cement.  It was just plaster on brick...usually they put a layer of cement in between as a humidity barrier.  We still aren't sure of the origin of so much moisture, but it's nice to know that now we've got things a bit more under control.  That was extra work we hadn't counted on: cementing over the brick in the living room before tiling!

Notice the bare brick?  ...and see all that dust?  Every day we had to finish up the morning by sweeping and mopping. :p

...Another three days of work.

See what I mean?!  Yuck.

Finally, we got down to the "easy" stuff--tiling.  And yet again we ran into a small hiccup in the work.  The decorative tile we'd chosen to go along the top of the work in the living room looked beautiful in the showroom, but was absolutely horrid when put up on the wall.  We had thought it would look nice because it had darker shades than the wall tiles and would look nice with the dark wood furniture and window frame... WRONG.  It completely took away from the elegance of the clay-colored wall tiles and especially clashed with the three, beautiful, smaller tiles we bought at a Moroccan emporium.  It looked nothing but busy and created an atmosphere that was far from relaxing.

Thankfully we decided we just couldn't live with those tiles while the cement was still wet.  We asked our patient worker to please take them down and then dashed off to see if we could find something better.  At the very least we'd decided we would just end the wall without any deccoration, a far better option in light of the hideous alternative.

We ended up finding some very nice, blue and white tiles for the deccoration.  The design is much more simple and I think you'll agree that the end result is light-years better than our first choice.  The blue brings more color into the room and ties nicely with the moroccan tiles.  It also contrasts beautifully with the reddish tiles and the red grout we chose.  I am very pleased with the final outcome, but there was a moment when I was worried we'd made an irreparable mistake!

The finished living room wall.  Only the couch is missing from the picture.

Close-up of the wall.  The tile below is one of the ones from the moroccon emporium.

At the back of the picture you can see the closet.
The tiles in these front nooks are the same as the
living room, but set square instead of on end.

The tiles in the closet are different: long, rectangular, cream-marble. They have a glossy finish as opposed to the living room, which is semi-glossy.  It looks very elegant finished and so I'm a little sad that we've decided to go with Ikea pre-fab closet units (purchased Monday, delivered Friday) which will completely cover the tile!  We could have saved ourselves the money on the tiling, you say?  Yes, perhaps, but the main purpose was to keep out the humitidy anyway and regardless of what kind of shelving we put into the closet, once all our clothes and things are in it, you wouldn't see much of the tiles anyway.  That's also why we chose the tiles we did, they are beautiful, but they're best asset by far was the 6 euro/meter price tag. ;)

This weekend we've run into some issues with the Ikea furniture; it doesn't seem to be quite the right fit.  But thanks to their awesome return policy, we can exchange everything, even the stuff we've already put together!  I think with the exchange, we might even end up saving ourselves some money--hooray!

Bela supervising Angelines's work as she puts together one of the closet units from Ikea.  The color is nearly the same as the tiles!  That was completely unintentionaly, but it looks great in there. :)

In total the guy worked three weeks to get the job done.  He did great work and, all things considered, I think he did it pretty quickly, too.  Now one month has gone by since we began with all this and only this week did we finish all the clean up--so much dusting! moping, scrubbing, painting (walls and ceilings)...  Angelines has done virtually all that by herself.  My sister-in-law came over to help a few days this week too.  I'm being told I can't partake in such "heavy" labor and so I'm off the hook! ;) Now the living room is all back in place and looks more beautiful and homey than ever!  Of course, the closet has yet to be finished...and so our bedroom continues to look like a disorganized thrift-shop, but we're getting there... little by little. ;)