Renovation Realities - Tub Surround!

If you remember from my March 12th post, Renovation Realities!, our next DIY project on our to-do list was Phase II of our Guest Bathroom renovation...the tub surround. 

Before

Well, I think we started around March 24th (give or take a week - I've blocked the past month out!) thinking we had PLENTY of time to finish before 8 or 9 girls were going to be staying at the house for a bachelorette party the weekend of April 20-22nd.  Mind you, we only have two bathrooms....thus, only two showers....so with 8 or 9 girls in one place, both showers were definitely a requirement.  Wwwweeeeelllll, we sort of underestimated the amount of time and work that would be involved with this and came down to the wire finishing just two nights before everyone got here....phew!!!!

So, as I mentioned, this was a little more time and work than we had anticipated....and by "a little more" I mean "a whole heck of a lot more" like "I never ever ever in my entire life want to do that again more."  First of all, there are about a billion and three ways to re-tile a tub surround so trying to choose the "right way" to do it is super stressful.  As soon as you feel like you know which direction to start heading, somebody says something that totally contradicts what you just thought and you are back at square one.   Seriously, by the time we started, we pretty much just figured we'd jump in, figure it out as we go and hope it doesn't leak when we are finished.  And to the best of our knowledge it isn't leaking so I guess we did ok!  Basically, everyone has a different opinion on the "right way" to do this ranging from the bare minimum [read: contractor-grade] to over-the-top-waterproof-everything-five-different-ways [read: we might consider if we were building our dream home and planned on living there forever]....so we shot for somewhere in the middle.

For the sake of time and in an attempt not to completely bore you with all of the details, I'll briefly list the steps we chose to take, but am considering posting a "HOW TO" post as well for those that may be contemplating a tub surround renovation for themselves.  [Side note:  Consider yourself warned - and by no means am I suggesting anyone should put themselves (particularly their poor hands, back, shoulders, legs, arms....really their whole body) through this.]  If I end up posting a "HOW TO" I'll update this post so you can find the link to it. 

Obviously, step one was to demo the exiting tile....which was actually pretty fun!  We opted to demo down to the studs which was definitely a heck of a lot easier, but it made a royal mess.  Dust everywhere!!!  However, it did give us a blank canvas to start with and made it easier for the plumber to come in and change out the plumbing and raise our shower head (step two).  Not to mention, our "bare minimum contractor before job" left the sheet rock moldy underneath so I'm glad we got rid of all of that.  Pretty gross!

Demo!

No going back now!  Step three and four were to add blocking for the recessed shelves and start reinstalling the sheet rock - we used 1/2" hardibacker board.  Step four probably would have been pretty simple and we would've snapped it out like nothing IF we didn't decide to add three recessed shelves.  Those shelves were almost the death of us!  I'm not exaggerating either.  All the measurements and cutting were ridiculous!  BUT...in the end, I'm really glad we did it because they look awesome and are so handy!!  One other thing worth noting is the $17 cement board saw blade that we decided to purchase - best $17 spent on the whole tub!!  I'm pretty sure it saved Boon his sanity! 

Looking more like a tub surround everyday...

After getting all of the sheet rock back up, it was pretty exciting because you could kind of start to see what it was going to look like again.  It felt like huge progress at this point!  Next...the dreaded, questionable, not really sure how much you need, waterproofing step....which just happens to also be the most important step.  Ugh!!  So even though the hardibacker board is technically waterproof by itself and most contractors stop here, we were shooting for the middle of the range; thus, chose to tape all of the joints with mesh tape [note: buy the gray mesh tape from Lowe's if you do this - the white Home Depot mesh tape sucks!] and then go one step further and paint the recessed shelves and all joints with Red Guard.  Unfortunately, Red Guard is super expensive and only comes in two sizes - huge and gigantic - so we have about 7/8 of huge left over, but if nothing else, it gave us more confidence so it was probably worth the extra expense. 

Waterproofing

FINALLY we get to start tiling!!!!  Boon and I made a great team - I applied the thin set and laid the tiles while Boon measured and cut...we had a pretty good system down.   Although we always thought we were moving along fast and we'd be finished by "tonight", every "tonight" turned into "tomorrow" which really turned into "weeks"....it was crazy how long it took!!!  Seriously, before we knew it five hours would pass and we had to start cleaning up again for the night.  So frustrating!  The pictures below show our progress at the end of each night (not in order (obviously)...I'm still figuring out how to edit in Picasa-sorry!)   Our last weekend (before the girls got here) we were in panic-mode and of all times for me to get a headache, I get the worst migraine and am out for the count until about noon on Sunday.  UGH!!!  Poor Boon was totally on his own and put in a good 13 hours on Saturday alone to finish the top two layers of tile.  He was a rock star!

tiling.took.forever.

So come Monday I was back in the game and since it was now crunch time, I ended up using a personal day so I could start cleaning, de-hazing and grouting! To no one's surprise, this also took longer than expected and lingered over until Tuesday night.   (Are you starting to see why I never want to do this again!?)   But by the end of Tuesday night, we were able to caulk the edges and get the fixtures back on. 

Last step...finally!!!

YAY!!!!!  We finally have a finished tub surround!!!!  Now to clean and get the bathroom back together on Wednesday night before the girls get here on Friday - what a great feeling!  I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty sure Bentley and Bella were just as happy to have us finished as we were - the poor lil' furbabies got neglected the last week horribly.  :(   And with no further ado....

I cannot tell you how happy I am to have this finished...and it looks so good!!!

A blow-up of the final product!

 And of course, I can't leave you without a Before and After picture....

What a difference!!!

And I tried getting a photo of both Phase I and Phase II together to give you an idea of the overall project, but it was a little challenging getting it all in one picture so here's my best shot...

Phase I and II as a whole - I probably should've opened the curtain, but didn't think about it...sorry!

Despite all of the complaining and ridiculous amount of hours we put into this, I am still very glad we did it and am very happy at how it turned out.  (I'll say I definitely enjoyed Phase I of our Guest Bathroom renovation more than Phase II though!)  Our guest bathroom looks so different now and it makes me want to re-do our master bathroom really bad...well, correction...have somebody re-do our master bathroom!