An orange sea

On the weekend we had a look at the house and the floors are now a lovely sea of orange Ditra. (Ditra is the orange plastic that looks like a waffle and will support the tiles while providing water proofing.) It's been neatly laid everywhere except for the tiny kitchen closet because they ran a bit short of the material.The walls had also been skim coated everywhere new drywall was installed. It's looking pretty tidy now.
We had a few chores to do ourselves, such as removing the rest of the old cabinets. We're almost done now, the doors are all off the last batch of upper cabinets. We also repaired the cracked corners in the closet (pictured above). The drywall needed some fresh screws as the nails that were used originally had loosened. After securing the drywall we patched up the cracks. No more drafty gaps!
We also painted a second coat on the clawfoot tub. The paint was looking a bit thin in places but now I think it's just fine. (There was a tiny bit of chrome that lifted off from the drain to reveal the brass underneath and that stressed me out a bit. I know it doesn't show but it shouldn't have done that and our new plumbing fixtures were very expensive. Ah well.) Bradley also replaced the old thermostat in the kitchen and we threw out the old gold faceplate that was on the light switch. Both those items had been tucked under the cabinet we ripped out, and were half on the wall and half on the old tile backsplash. Which needless to say looked terrible. So nice to have that sorted out.

And finally, the word from our tiler is that they are going to start laying tiles on Monday - hurray! Here's a glimpse of the lovely porcelain tile we have for the bathroom. I can't wait to see it in place.We've spent the last few days visiting IKEA and working on our kitchen plan. We're now satisfied with our choices and we've placed the order. We changed our mind about a few things and our cabinet doors are going to be "Adel white" instead of Lidingo. Adel is a plain shaker style door.

When you go to IKEA you can use their computer program and quickly convert from grid to 3D views of your kitchen design. It's really helpful to see it that way. We've kept the basic layout of our kitchen, but we wanted to fine tune the cabinet sizes so that we could have as much symmetry and consistency as possible. Not as easy as we thought it would be at first. But I think we've done well...