Flooring in the Small Bathroom

I had no idea that putting down peel-and-stick tiles on the bathroom floor would be more work that completing the flooring in the entire kitchen and den area! . . . but I should have! Why - you might ask?

Let's think about this - it's a small room and therefore there aren't many areas that you can use full tiles (about 12 or so). This means that you have part tiles along 2 entire walls and then you have to cut tiles around the toilet and the sink area. If you haven't seen the pictures of the little bathroom, then you don't know that there's a little half-wall at one end of the tub. In the end, more than half the tiles we placed, needed to be cut. In other words, a lot more time was required than I originally figured - oops!

We (Corrie, Meghan, and I) completed the job yesterday and it does look pretty good! Meghan and I put down the full tiles by ourselves. We even measured and cut the tiles around the toilet - of course, we had Corrie remove the toilet first so we couldn't mess up too badly. Neither Meghan nor I like to cut with a utility knife, but it turns out that I'm a little better at it than she is. We eventually just called Corrie to help us cut the tiles. He is definitely much better and straighter. Also, he's faster too.

We became the measurers! The only problem - Meghan and I are good with the simple measures like inches, half inches, and quarter inches . . . even eigths of inches we can handle, most of the time. If stuck, Meghan just uses the old stand by method - one tick past the half or two ticks less than the three-quarter mark. It was when the tape measure was giving us measures of 16ths that we started laughing a lot. Especially when we figured out that the walls weren't square and we had pieces where the measure was 5 1/8" at one end and 4 7/8" at the other. Of course, then we learned that there were "heavy" and "light" measures too. So - our 5 1/8" was heavy and then our 4 7/8" measure became a light 7/8". Of course, some of the pieces ended up having to be trimmed. I am happy to say that none of the pieces were too small!

I guess, toward the end, Meghan did a lot more sitting than anything else and she got bored. She filled in her boredom by playing washboard with the heat register - very annoying, but also funny. She also discovered the usefulness of a tape measure. Did you know that you can measure the height of a room from a sitting position? and the length of the next room by strategically leaning against the bathtub and facing out the door? and that a tape measure will suddenly bend over when extending it too far with nothing to lean on? Meghan taught me all those things and more.

Our bathroom floor is done now and looks wonderful with the yellow paint! Tomorrow will be a new day and another simple, but time-consuming job in our "little" bathroom.