May 2-4

I love long weekends.

Especially when they are filled with sunshine and time outside. This weekend definitely fit that mold - it was beautiful in Toronto! Everyone was out in their gardens and at the garden stores stocking up for the year.

We did the same, although we are fortunate that our house "came with" a lot of perennial landscaping! We have added things here and there over the past few years, and we always plant herbs and some veggies. This year we have garlic (planted last fall), tomatoes and lettuce. We have room for a bit more, so I'm thinking kale or swiss chard, and maybe some potatoes (only because we have some in our cold storage that are sprouty and could do worse than being planted and seeing what happens!).

What did you get up to?

Big news...

The Mr and I have been keeping some pretty exciting, pretty big news under wraps. We shared the news with our families at Easter time with this:

We are having a baby!
 
Quite exciting all in all...here's the low down to questions I know you're dying to ask:

1. I'm 20 weeks (aka 5 months), due at the end of September (due date is our wedding anniversary!), and I have been fortunate enough to be feeling great!It does explain my lack of participation in the bathroom demo (and subsequent painting, naturally).
2. This little one is going to be a surprise - we are not finding out if it's a girl or boy. Neutral nursery here we come.
3. Speaking of nursery here is our progress so far:

Ha.

Clearly "progress" is a term I use loosely. 

The room in question is/was our office and it has been playing home to all of our guest room furniture while we use our guest room for bathroom items for the reno! (Although we recently have a bed back in the guest room so that's a start).

Let's get this bathroom reno done and then onto the nursery!

Sneak Peek - Bathroom

Ok, I know I've been a bit MIA...but for good reason! We spent the weekend in Ottawa for a friend's lovely wedding...it was a gorgeous weekend and tons of fun. Got the chance to catch up with family and friends, and stock up on some of our favourite goodies (namely bagels from Kettleman's!).

And today...today we had the plumber come back to hook things up in the bathroom. THIS is exciting primarily because it means we have a toilet again on the 2nd floor! Big coo for any middle of the night bathroom trips. I've taken some quick shots here and there...but you'll have to wait (so will we!) for the full reveal. We have some final details to tie up tomorrow, and then our electrician is set to come on Tuesday and hopefully a piece of glass will be installed at the end of the tub / shower sometime soon.

In the meantime here's what we're looking at:

Yes, our lovely dual flush toilet re-installed. hoorah!

There are a lot of new things in this photo...stay tuned for the details

And there are two other pics that I would love to share...but either my bandwidth or blogger is NOT happy about uploading my little iphone photos, so I'll take it as a sign that I should leave the sneak peek at this and make you all drool with anticipation until the real reveal.... :)

Until then, have a great rest of the week!

Shower curtains - bright and bold, or nice and neutral?

Hi all,

I shared my tile with you the other day (and I'm still just as excited about it), but onto the next thing. We have to find a shower curtain for the shower...this is no easy feat. There are a LOT of cheesey shower curtains out there. Seriously, google image "shower curtain" or even Pinterest it, and you get a lot of cheese factor.

The last shower curtain I had won't fly (it's brown), but I ended up buying fabric and having my mom sew it  to get the length we desired (I HATE short shower curtains). That's an option, but if we can find a pre-fab one out there it will speed up the big reveal to you guys :)

Here are some options I came across on Pinterest and in my searches.

Starting with the nice and neutral:

 (a) this is a gorgeous bathroom (b) I like the classic look of the black and white. We almost went with this floor, but once we chose a modern vanity I wanted a more linear floor...ok back to the shower curtain. The border could easily be a DIY, and having the 2 shower curtains (although I was doubtful at first) could be a great way to show off beautiful tile in the shower. Image via DesignManifest

 Another black and white option - this one from Target!

Gray Ikat Chevron - WestElm via DesignSerendipity

This one reminds me of turkish towels...via WestElm

Patterned, but neutral tie-dye vibe - Shibori via WestElm

 And now for the bright and bold:
 

 

 If I decide to go for colour in my bathroom - this is the print I want! Not sure if I would go for the coral or another colour, but I love the pattern. Diane Von Furstenburg (of course) via Refinery29

 Rainforest by West Elm

This one is funny, yet not kitchy via LivingExclusive

So, what do you think? Neutral or Colour?

1 curtain or 2?

Now we're talking...

Hi all!

If you follow me on instagram (interiorgroupie) or twitter (@interiorgroupie) you have seen that we had some exciting grout progress last week. This is uber exciting as it means the bathroom is kind of getting close...to looking like a bathroom again...

 

Loving the dark grout...

 Loving the floor...

Loving the future home of our double vanity...(which is proving to be a challenge since the vanity placement won't be lined up with the studs...right...)

 

And now the hard part - to choose the perfect paint colour. We have to do the painting before the plumber comes back so we have a chance to paint properly behind where the rad is going and where the toilet is going...but what colour? 

Currently Benjamin Moor Distant Gray (2124-70), American White (2112-70), and Paper White (OC-55) are in the mix. Bathrooms don't get a lot of light, so I'm thrown by how light / white to go, or if I should go with a touch of grey. I'm also a bit worried about the gray being too blue (I don't want that)...what do you think?

Bathroom progress {subfloor, drywall and tile oh my!}

Happy Monday!

How was your weekend? Ours was good - dinner with friends on Friday night, errands and some relaxing on a chilly Saturday, and then more relaxing and some clean up on a sunny Sunday. Overall, a pretty great weekend. Since the bathroom is now well under way there's not much for us to do on weekends - this is very "new" for us. We're used to being part of the progress instead of watching from afar. I have to say, it's pretty amazing to come home from work and see progress every day! If we were doing this on our own we would be nowhere close to where we are now, and we would have made more than a few rookie blunders along the way.

Before the drywall went up, the Mr. and I did some finishing touches on the framing, including framing out the spots for our recessed medicine cabinets:

Last week marked the subfloor being completed (the mr. did most of it, but our carpenter came in to finish off the tricky parts around the toilet), drywall going up, and tile going up! The ceiling also got fixed (from where we ripped out the wall), and some taping and mudding happened.

Well hello there, future home of the double vanity.

Sneak peak at my pretty new bathtub (we tried to protect it with plastic and tape...we'll see what happens :) ). We are going to have glass put as the third "wall" ontop of the pony wall (or knee wall) for a clean finish to the bathtub area.

On a non-construction note, I did some baking this weekend and tried a new muffin recipe for apple spice muffins from Smitten Kitchen.

They are delicious.

What did you get up to this weekend?