Guest Bathroom, done in time!

Before I talk about the bathroom, I want to tell the story about putting our Athens, Georgia house on the market.  We decided that since it was so easy to sell our rental house next door, we would do the same with our home. I took many pictures after the estate sale and posted it  for sale by owner on Zillow December 14th, 2016 with a notice of an open house on December 18th.  Since Mike and Maggie would be out of town and Molly already moved to Florida,  I asked my good friend Kim to hang out with me during the open house. Good thing I did. I asked her to help me keep track of the number of people that came, but we lost count after 15 showed up within the first 1/2 hour.  The following are some photos I put on Zillow, in no particular order.

I am really missing that fire place right now and doesn't the kitchen look familiar?

We had the open house from 1-3pm and the phone rang at 2pm with a full price offer.  I couldn't believe it!  Of course I told him that I would need to wait because the open house wasn't even over yet, and I knew another  offer would be coming in.

Another offer did come in but it was a low ball. When I told them I had a full price offer, they came back with a higher offer.  The bidding war had begun.  Much to our surprise, by the end of the day, we had an offer of $7000 over asking price. We were elated.  Other offers had come in but none could beat this.

Since it was during the holidays, we made an agreement to wait until January to have the home inspection.
Long story short, inspections are brutal and the buyer backed out. The other people interested had already bought another home.  I called another broker who had a client who had made an offer and  they were still interested.  We sold the home for asking price. We now had to sit back and wait for her to sell her house.

Now, back to our bathroom remodel here in Davenport Iowa.
My sister Sherry came to help me out and I was so appreciative.  This would be my third time tiling a bathroom floor and I wasn't nervous about it at all. We decided to lay and cut the tile before we mortared it to the cement board.  We then mixed the powder mortar with water and started setting the tile. This is a photo of me using my new hand saw with a diamond blade just for cutting tiles.

We were so excited to have the first step done. We made sure every tile was straight and spaces were the same size between tiles. Above you will see Sherry inspecting our work.

We woke the next morning ready to start grouting when Sherry noticed some tiles were moving up and down when she jumped on them. What????

We were disappointed to find some tiles did not mortar to the cement board correctly.  When I bought the powder mortar mix, the tile guy at Lowes told me to make it like pancake mix. My pancake mix must be very dry and thick because it was too dry for the tiles to stick.  We thought we were going to have to pull all the tiles up but some were attached extremely tight.  Sherry got to work scraping the floor while I scraped the back of the tiles.  There would be no grouting today.
Sherry kept saying it was her fault but I decided it was the supervisor's fault, pictured below.

Below shows how many tiles we had to reattach.

I waited another day before grouting, and that went perfectly fine.

The girls would be here Saturday for the holidays so we were cutting it close. Mike and I were able to install the toilet Friday night, but not without some hiccups.  We lost a bolt down the hole and looked on line what to do about that.  A magnet wouldn't work because the bolts are brass.  Another idea was to use a shop vac to pull it out. I tried our vacuum but that made the whole house smell like sh**t.

We decided just to flush many times to move it along.

Saturday came and we flushed some more. I then noticed the puddle of water in the basement coming from the bathroom upstairs. Are you kidding me?  This is my third bathroom I have redone and have never had so many problems.  The girls would be her in a couple of hours and we had a leaking toilet. Mike and I decided to call the emergency plumber once again. He ended up being the same guy who put the toilet in downstairs.

Finally, the bathroom was done, just in time for the girls and boyfriend who would stay for over a week.
Lessons learned.... always use already mixed mortar, even though it is more expensive, and leave the plumbing to the experts.  I will have more before and after photos in the next blog.