With most projects this size, you have to anticipate some stuff going wrong and the project not going as quickly as you first thought it would. A day after laying the tile, I can home from work to find one of them cracked. No reason, just sitting there cracked. The plan was to grout that night, but now since the tile cracked, I have to wait an additional 24 hours to make sure the mortar sets and this doesn't happen again.

Since I needed something to do in the meantime, I went to Home Depot or Lowes (I've been to so many, they are blurring together at this point) to cut some floor molding. Luckily, I found some that is very close to what is currently throughout the house. In these old colonial houses, you usually see thicker baseboard. To match the existing, the new ones are currently 5 1/4 inches tall. The widest mitre box that I could find was 5 inches wide. So, this means that tonight I'm going to be free handing 45 degree angles to hopefully get them to line up perfectly in the corners. If this doesn't work, which I'm more or less expecting it not to, we'll be changing the height of the molding.

Once again, here's what's going on:

• The chair rails, which I still loathe, have caused more of problem than I anticipated since the wall is now indented because of them.
• I've been patching them over and over to get them as smooth as possible.
• The grout has been applied and the floor is completely done now.

After another coat of paint to where I patched the walls and figuring out a way to cut the base molding, I should be able to start putting things back into the bathroom and be done with it. The goal is by the end of the day on Friday, which is the two week mark, and what I promised to the wife.

I finally had another day where I felt very productive about the progress on the bathroom. I finally got to the point where I laid some tile and hopefully when I get home from work, everything will be set and there won't be any problems. With Christi out of town, I did have a little extra support at the house. Scott and Anne came over because they both Anne was extremely excited to learn how to tile. Luckily I was able to show them the process by laying a few down before we needed to cut around the pipes and toilet. I had not put together my new tile cutter (image on right) before they came over, so they were nice enough to spend some time in the garage with me helping me put it together. I told them that for the installation costs, Christi and I would come over and help them tile whatever they wanted as soon as their house hunting is over.

Why buy an expensive tile cutter when doing a bathroom the size of a closet? Well, your wife demands that you get one. I'm pretty sure this is a set up so that I have to tile every other project that she has in mind. We actually bought the tile through Lowe's, and they have free tile cutting there, but it's about a 15 minute drive each way and if I screwed something up, it would take me forever to keep running back and forth. Plus, with the gas and how I just buy everything in sight inside of a home improvement store (yes, you'll be able to see some receipts when the project is finished), I'm sure paying for it straight up was better than making all the trips.

Tiling takes a little bit of time, so in terms of pictures, there's not too much to see:

• Seeing how noisy the tile cutter was, I was able to get most of the tile down before it got too late. There's just a few pieces to go.
• All of the main cuts around the toilet and pipe are done.
• The daunting task of tiling around and behind the radiator are still ahead ...

Old houses are, well, old. There's really no other way you can say it. The trade off for having original hard wood floors from the 40s is that you're going to have a large plumbing pipe run right up your bathroom wall and part way into your baseboard (see image above). I had some plans of leaving the original baseboard in place so I could match the rest of the house, but because of how it was put down in some areas as opposed to others, there was no consistency with how our new vanity looks (don't hold your breath, it might be a while until we get to that post ...) and how the tile needs to be laid on the floor. So, I just took the rest of it out. I thought demo days were over, but there's always something else that needs to be done. This day didn't feel as productive as the first, but we're slowly moving in the right direction.

Here's the progress that was made:

• I found a new way to stop my pipe from dripping water.
• I sawed underneath the door frame to allow room for the tile.
• A fresh coat of paint now covers up the sea foam/mint green that used to be there.
• Tiles were roughly put down to get a sense of how the room will look when everything is in place.
• Because of the unique tiles that Christi and I picked out, I have a lot of room for error when I grout. This will be extremely nice considering that the walls aren't exactly straight (see earlier where I talk about trade offs for an old house).

Christi and I have always talked about renovating our main bath, by ourselves, but never really found the time or the motivation to start the project. So while she's in Nebraska for work for two weeks, I thought I would get the project going myself and see how much I could get done before she came home. *As a note to those reading this, Christi didn't mind the chair rail that went across the bathroom, but I did. Little did I know that this would be the toughest part of the project ... so far. As with the fish tape tutorial, hopefully I can teach some people out there the right things and wrong things to do when doing a project like this without professional help.

The bathroom isn't the biggest place in the world (about 7'x4'), so the pictures were a little tough to take, even with my 18mm lens on the Canon. If you can't see much from the pictures, this might be one of those you had to be here to know what's going on projects, and if you haven't been to our place, hopefully the first time you come over, you'll see a sweet new bathroom.

On to the process:

• Take a bunch of pictures before you start in case you have to tell the contractor you hire that this is what it used to look like. Overviews here, here and here.
• Have fun ripping everything off the wall, including the hideous chair rail, and then punch a fist size hole in the wall while removing ... the chair rail.
• Crack open a beer, realize you have no clue what you're doing and call for expert advice.
• Listen to your father, because he may or may not have experience in the subject, and get back to work.
• Learn how to patch a hole by applying a wire mesh over it, filling the holes with wall compound, realizing everything will be alright and remind yourself to thank dad later.
• Rip everything out of the bathroom. This includes the chair rail (yes!), shoe molding and base molding, vinyl floor, toilet and vanity. Then take the mirror off the wall and realize one of the previous owners did a horrible job patching a medicine cabinet and think of how great your hole repair job is compared to theirs.
• Worry what you're going to do about it, and then realize you'll just buy a big mirror to cover it up and hope the next owner doesn't read this blog (it's really not that bad).
• Take more overview pictures, here and here, to show off the sweet progress you've made in the first day.
• Keep the injuries to a minimum by only slicing up a knuckle or two.

All in all it was a good day, and hopefully a lot more can get accomplished when I post the second part to this series.

No, I didn't go to a tropical paradise (I wish) to go fishing at this time of year. No, we're not drilling holes in any lakes up here to go ice fishing. I'm talking about fish tape. This might be an instructional post to a few people reading this. I found out absolutely nobody in Connecticut knew what I was talking about when I told them about fish tape, and almost everyone in Nebraska knew what it was. Obviously, this isn't one of those regional pop/soda/coke type of debates, it's just that people didn't know what it was.

For those who don't, fish tape is made up of thin steel that allows you to thread it easily through walls. Most electricians use it, and most people named Brian Helge use it when they drop their surround sound speaker into the wall. As you can see from the image, there is no easy way to get a wire when you're hole is near the ceiling.

So, this is what you do:

• Assess the hole and realize this is going to be extremely difficult to do by yourself.
• Go into the basement and look at the ridiculously small hole that you have to work with.
• Use electrical tape to secure the wire to the fish tape, feed it up the wall and brace the fish tape holder so it doesn't fall when you go upstairs.
• Realize this is almost impossible with one person, so go a new route by dropping a weighted string and praying that you can grab it from the bottom.
• Try both processes around 10-15 times with no luck, and then somehow, manage to get the two caught on each other and pull the string up.
• Go to extreme measures to make sure the wire doesn't fall back down when you pull the fish tape back down through the floor.
• Marvel at a job well done.

Who would've thought after working at ESPN this long, my parents would be more regulars on their programs than I am? I guess this really isn't shocking, as this has happened before. I'm just glad mom keeps showing off her ESPN gear.

Sitting alone eating dinner last night, I glanced down at the floor to notice the ridiculous amount of toys that Stanley piled up on our rug. Something that a lot of people don't know, is that we teach Stanley what the names of each of his toys are. I decided to shoot some video of something that Christi and I are used to doing every night:

The Pheasant (original toy that started the naming conventions):



Soccer Ball:



Go Big Red (we trained him to do this in a few days right before the Holiday Bowl):

Every year ESPN is kind enough to show all of their employees on one edition of SportsCenter right around Christmas.

Been too busy the past 350 days and need a quick gift for that special someone on your Christmas list? Look no further than your local Target store. This year they are running a special on outside animal lawn ornaments that come complete with heart worm. I'm still shocked someone looked at this picture and thought it warranted it to be on the outside of the packaging ...

The last time that the Oakland Athletics were thinking about leaving town for a new ballpark, one of the greatest viral YouTube video of all time was released. In my opinion, of course. That's right ladies and gentlemen, it's time to throw the car in neutral and ghost ride da whip: