The Last Nice Day...

This weekend was all warm sunshine, crunchy leaves, tile grout, and mirror frames.

Saturday was a nice day and we got to see a little sunshine for a change. That’s especially nice since the current forecast calls for rain every day for the next 7 days. Ugh. Welcome to November in Portland. But, Saturday was nice, probably the last nice day in a long time. I mean, it actually got above 60 degrees. Wow.

Rather than spend all that nice light working on the house, I took a little time to take some pictures. I got a few nice ones of the leaves the recent wind and rain left all over our yard. I have to say, in summer, it’s nice having two large maples to keep us shading and cool, but in fall we get carpet bombed by those two. Fortunately Jenn has volunteered to do the raking while I work on the inside.







Saturday we did take some time to grout the backsplash around the tub in the master bath. The grout we chose is kind of slow to set. In the past, we’ve sponged it off the tile face after 15 min, like the directions say, ended up removing too much, and were left with cracks after it cured. This time we left it for several hours. This made it harder to get it off of the face of the tile, but did leave a lot more grout in between the tiles. Maybe too much grout. There aren’t very clean lines between the tile and I may end up taking the Dremel to it. Did I mention I bought a Dremel? :-)



Sunday I finally got around to building a frame for the bathroom mirror. The idea was to build something simple that has a shaker/Stickley look to it. First, I made some 1"x3" white oak stock. Then, I made a simple butt-joint frame around a stock 24"x36" mirror I got from Hell. I also wanted a little shelf in front of the mirror. With all that, the mirror was a little too tall to fit in between the light fixture and the backsplash tile. So, I cut the mirror down to 24x32 and, with the frame and shelf, it all fits. I’m glad I got a good glass cutter back when Jenn and I were briefly into stained glass... Now that I built one mirror frame, I need to build two more just like it: another one for the master bath and one for the 2nd upstairs bath. Hopefully I can get that done this week. Next up will be the skirting on the jetted tub. I do prefer wood work over tiling!