Weekend Developments

On Saturday morning, I was overjoyed to discover that I really do get the new season of New Scandinavian Cooking on our local PBS station. Yay! I've already told you about my love for all this Scandinavian, and I was dying because I hadn't seen the new hostess. Double yay! (Which in Norway would be spelled jag and would mean "I." Which reminds me of how my dear friend Jay's Norwegian grandfather always called him Yay. Which I think is funny.)

On Saturday evening, we went out to the downtown Italian restaurant for the first time. It always has long lines, and we had to sit in the smoking section to get a seat (Ask me sometime about how wierd it is to move from a state where there is no smoking in restaurants and bars to a state where they still allow this ridiculous practice.) The service was fast and pleasant, and the food was passable. Very Spaghetti Warehouse! I don't think we'll be going there very often. We make good pasta at home, so when I go out for Italian, I want something special. Then we saw a Belle Epoque French farce at the College. The theatre was lovely, and the farce was very farce-y. The acting was surprisingly good, but the costumes only only passable. We finished off the evening at the local diner for desserts. Eh. Mine wasn't that good, but I'm willing to go back to try the cheesecake.

On Sunday, we headed to the farm stand and bought a red, white, and orange pumpkin, a half-bushel of apples, and some of the season's end tomatoes.

Somewhere in there, I found time to lay Vinyl Tile in the upstairs bath. Let me remind you what the bath looked like originally:

The floor was 1958 flecked linoleum:

Eventually, we'll renovate this bathroom completely. I'd love to raise the ceiling again and bump out into the hall closet and some of the utility room for more space. When that day comes, we'll pull up the floor. But that is years away, so we've gone the quick, easy, and cheap route. Vinyl tile.

Almost two months ago, we were looking at tile options, and we asked you, our dear readers, for your input. The popular vote went for dark grey faux-slate tile, and I was swayed. D. was not, but his favorite was out of stock at Lowe's last weekend. So, abracadabra, the popular vote wins.

Here are the results:



We're happy with it. I'm looking forward to getting used to it, because right now, it's a little disconcerting to pay so much attention to the floor.

The process was fairly simple, though I am clearly not very good at it. I swept the floor, then primed it with KILZ latex. It wouldn't have been hard to paint the floor at this point, if you were so inclined.

Then I spent about an hour arranging the tiles in every conceivable way (grid, grid plus offset, diamonds, diamonds plus offset). I also shifted them a half-dozen times to test out aligment with different parts of the room. Eventually I just gave up and chose the simplest thing. It only took a half hour to get all the full tiles down, then a long time cutting in all the edges. Ugh. That's when my back started to hurt, and my hand was sore from breaking off pieces of the tiles.

But the bottom line is that it was an easy, inexpensive (<$50) project that could be done in one day and freshens up the bathroom immensely. So thanks, Internet, for helping me choose vinyl bathroom floor tiles.