Renovating the main bath: Part 4 - Setbacks and delays

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.