Caught On Video
Grout, Grout, Let It All Out
This is a thing you can’t do it with out. Come on. I’m talkin’ to you. Come onnnn. (Okay, enough with the Tears for Fears reference). Let’s talk about grout, because with our penny rounds finally all installed, grout was next on the agenda. It has a way of taking things from in-progress to looks-completely-finished-oh-thank-goodness. Observe:
So here’s how we got there. First I have a little “materials shot” for ya:
- Bucket of clean water
- Putty knife & another bucket to mix grout in
- Paper towels because, well, grout is messy
- Sanded grout (from The Tile Shop, $19 with discount) – ours is the Mobe Pearl color
- Rubber float (from Home Depot, $2)
- Flexible Grout Admixture (from The Tile Shop, $17 with discount) – this reduces grout shrinking and cracking
- Sponge. Woot!
Oh and we used leftover rosin paper from Home Depot to prep the room, since it was again helpful in keeping the mess off of our counters.
Grout, like thinset, is another mixture that you only want to make in small batches – since it’ll dry out after about 20-30 minutes. So according to the instructions, I started by pouring a bit of admixture into my bucket and then adding the grout powder second.
Just like with my thinset, I used my putty knife to mix everything together until I got a that toothpaste-y consistency that I found easiest to work with.
I had forgotten how much I enjoy grouting. That may be an overstatement, but after the focus it took to actually install the tile it was fun to do something that took very little thinking. It was basically just using the float to smoosh the grout onto the tile and, more importantly, into the cracks. Sherry helped too. She was less into it than I was. Ha.
Once we made sure we didn’t miss any spaces, we held the float at an angle and scraped off some of the excess from the front of the tiles. Then it was time for some sponge-and-water action. This not only cleans grout off the front of the tiles, but also kinda smooths the grout between the tiles. It’s kinda weirdly amazing to me how simple but helpful this step is.
If you want to see these steps in actions, we managed to film this little one-take video of it. Clara’s need for a cream-cheese refill cut it a smidge short, but you get the point:
Admittedly the task is a bit tedious – and more than bit taxing on your wrist – but we managed to get it all done in one afternoon.
The difference between an ungrouted and grouted tile job still amazes us. Just when we thought we couldn’t love our penny rounds more. You can see the difference below – the left side has dried grout in it, the right side is ungrouted. You can also see how much lighter the grout gets once it dries. Of course there’s still a haze on the grouted tiles on the left, so they don’t look as gleamy as they do once you buff that off with a cloth after it has fully dried.
Oh, and since people had asked before – here’s a picture of the corner seam after it was filled with caulk that matches our grout. We also caulked the seam where the tile meets the counter (that’s still drying in this pic, so it looks darker along that bottom edge). This was taken before we buffed the tile with a cloth though, so it’s kinda chalky. But you get the idea.
Here’s the whole room completely done, though it’s kinda hard to make sense of it at this picture size – since it sort of just looks like a gray wall. Haha. But in person it’s approximately 50 times bigger than this photo on your monitor. And those gleaming penny rounds look pretty darn lip-smacking. Yes, I just used that adjective. The penny tile does that to me.
So here are some close ups so you can get a better idea of what it looks like in real life. Thankfully even when you enter the room from the frame hallway on the far side of the kitchen you can easily make out each individual penny tile. Which is nice because it would have been a colossal bummer to spend 14 hours tiling the room only to have it look like gray paint from afar. Even from the front door it clearly looks like little round penny tile on the part under the microwave that you can see from there. Whew.
This shot is probably best at depicting all the varying tones in the tile. It’s awesomely random. Some tiles are a bit darker and some have a dark ring (or semi-ring) around them – we think it looks really charming and adds to the dimension. And you can see the polished shine on the top right corner of this shot (they look hazy in this pic for some reason, but up at the corner you can see that they gleam in real life). It’s actually a really “marble-ish” look without having to dish out the money for marble.
Here’s another close up to show how some tiles have darker rings and varied coloring. And you can really see how the grout cleans things up and adds some nice tone-on-tone action where dark holes and mesh once were:
We were a little nervous about the grouting step because we had heard that it can accentuate any seams or inconsistencies in the way that you laid the sheets. But our experience was the opposite: it actually seemed to disguise those little mistakes. It’s probably because our tile / grout color combo is low contrast, but if it was dark it could highlight those flaws instead of bridging the gap and making things look more finished and even. So this isn’t to say that grout solves a bad tile job when it’s low contrast (unfortunately nothing solves a bad tile job) but if there are tiny inconsistencies, similarly toned grout might be your best friend. And thanks to using a good sealer, it shouldn’t be a bear to keep clean (we used something awesome on our first house’s tiled shower and didn’t have to scrub it ever again – even while hosting Open Houses a year later it looked as good as it did the day we grouted).
Here’s a better shot that shows the shine- although it’s only on that portion of tile on either side of the range hood. I blame our terrible kitchen lighting, but it’s next on our to-do list! Yes, we have an appointment with our electrician and everything.
Speaking of other still-to-be-completed projects, we also still have to add a range hood and some open shelves. We think our tile will be a pretty darn sexy backdrop for our dishware and such (knowing Sherry, there will be a whole lot of “and such” up there with our dishes – the girl has plans).
Even though grout is done, our job with the tile isn’t 100% complete. We still have to seal it. And before that we have to do a bit more clean up (aka: more buffing to remove small traces of haze in some areas). It’s pretty common for grout jobs and The Tile Shop actually sells haze remover, but we’ve found that just good ol’ fashioned elbow grease (and a dry dishtowel) can also do the trick. Buff, buff, buff. So we may try that first. That is, once our wrists recover.
You know we’ll be back to share all the goods as we go (applying our sealer, planning/replacing the lighting, range hood happenings, open shelves, new cork floors, etc). In the meantime, have you guys ever grouted? Did you kind of like it (me) or kind of hate it (Sherry). The good news is that we both admitted that it was totally worth the hassle when we were done, so that’s unanimous. Glad to have it checked off.
Psst- Take a wild guess who is the most excited indoor train rider in our family. Might not be who you think. More on that here.
How To Install Penny Tile (And Lots Of It)
We did it. We tiled the entire back wall of our kitchen in a counter-to-ceiling backsplash move that we like to call Project Crazy, and we lived to tell the tale. We still have to grout, add a big ol’ industrial range hood and chunky open shelves (those will just be screwed right through the tile with a special drill bit) but when we squint we can almost picture it…
As for the top seam where the tile meets the ceiling, there’s crown molding that runs around the entire room (although we removed some of it on the window wall) so we’ll be adding that back around the whole room so the top of the tile will look nice and finished once we get to that step.
The black box next to the range hood is an outlet for our range hood, so that’ll be hidden once we install ours. We tiled a few inches behind the range hood duct, but didn’t remove it since once we install our industrial hood that area won’t be visible.
Once we add our floating shelves (which will be 12″ deep) along the oven wall, the space on either side of the window will be 14″ – so it’ll finally look balanced again! I mention this in every kitchen post because I. Can’t. Wait. For. That. Moment.
This entire backsplash process took us around 14 hours total. We tackled it mostly in 2-3 hour chunks in the evening after Clara went to bed or on weekends while she napped (so it’s a good indication of what anyone with a day job might be able to follow). That includes a few hours of figuring out how to cut the tile, which we summarized in this video for you (read a lot more on that process here).
We also shared an in-progress post about prepping the room for tiling, mixing and spreading thinset, and placing the penny tiles here. So that might come in handy if you’re at that stage of the project and could use some reassuring.
It’s really important to place penny tiles in a way that makes the line where each sheet meets less obvious, so we found that a staggered pattern was the best method for us to achieve a seamless result:
That way your eye doesn’t catch one seam and follow it all the way across the room (more on that here). We also played around with each sheet of tile after squishing them into the thinset, scooching them a bit to the left or the right or higher (since they were on a sheet of mesh it was pretty easy to manipulate them) until they looked evenly placed so the seams weren’t obvious.
Just wanted to recap that stuff for a second so anyone looking for an exhaustive post about installing penny tile would have those pics and links all in one place. Anyway, when we last left you, we were just beginning the back wall, which we knew would be tedious (but hoped wouldn’t make us rue the day that we picked penny tile). The good news: it didn’t. We made it all the way across that wall, baby! Without wanting to poke our eyes out with penny tile once (well, maybe once…).
Thankfully, there weren’t many cuts since we could slap a ton of full sheets up in that giant expanse of wall, so although we took our time placing them to keep seams from showing up, we did move faster than having to cut a bunch of tiles. It probably took us three days of 2-3 hour sessions each time. We found it helpful to use little glass dishes to divide full tiles, half tiles, more than half tiles, and less than half tiles. That way if we needed to quickly back-fill an area, like the edge of the wall, with half-tiles or slivers or almost full tiles we already had a little dish of them separated out that we could dig into quickly.
Here’s a video about spreading the thinset and placing the tiles, complete with how to back-fill any tiles that you need to add and how we slid them around and adjusted them to look more seamless. Oh and in the video when I describe it as a brick-layers pattern, I create a horizontal one with my hands, but it’s really a vertical one (two tiles on top of each other and one staggered in the middle of that next to it). Oops. Hope that makes sense when you see it!
And here are some pics of us making our way across the wall. John applied the thinset with a putty knife (and sometimes a trowel). We mixed enough thinset to set about four to six tiles at a time (so it didn’t dry out before we could set the tile). You can see John applying the thinset in the video above.
Then John scraped it with his trowel to make little ridges to help the thinset grab the tile and stick for good. Our trowel was a 3/16th notched trowel since penny tile is small, so we heard that smaller ridges were recommended (you can also see this in the video above).
Here I am placing the top tile on the left side of the wall. John got a kick out of the fact that I could comfortably stand on the counter without having to crouch (oh the perks of Team 5’2″). You can see how we worked from the bottom left corner and went up and out to create a staggered staircase effect. This allowed us to build things slowly without having much of a problem with keeping things level since each tile interlocked down the staircase on two ends to keep it from skewing.
Day by day, we inched our way across…
Here we are in the very last corner, finishing things up. You can see that we scooted the oven out while we were working (to gain more access to the wall and keep from getting thinset on it).
Since a few of you have asked for a shot of the corner to see how the tile meets, here ya go:
Let’s get a little closer…
Basically whatever would be placed next to the last tile on the wall where the wall ends just wraps around and gets placed on the new wall. It’s not 100% perfect but once it’s caulked/grouted we think it’ll look pretty darn good (we’ll snap another pic for you then).
Oh and some other folks asked how we’d be “capping” the 14″ of tile that will be exposed on each side of the window wall, so here’s a detail shot for ya:
We actually got some thin glass tiles that we thought we’d like, but they just looked too brown and sort of competed with the penny tile, so we decided some thin thin thin pieces of craft wood will make great simple and clean little borders that don’t compete for attention. They’re not hammered in completely yet, since we’ll be pulling them out and painting them white like the rest of the trim in the room after grouting (just to avoid getting paint on the grout).
Grellow note: the picture above is probably the most true to life shot of our wall color (in some of the far shots it looks darker/greener/brighter than it is). In real life it’s a soft avocado color (although it can read quite differently on different computer monitors). Here’s a link to it on BM’s site if that helps, since the bad lighting in our kitchen hardly does it any favors. We think once we tackle the new lighting and add the open shelving and some pretty colorful accessories up there (and on the counter) it’ll all tie together really sweetly. You know we’ll share those pics as we go!
Obviously we still have to spread all that grout, but we’re giving our arms a day of rest before picking up the trowel again (well, I guess in this case it’ll be the grout float). As for the specifics, we picked a soft creamy-gray grout that’s a smidge lighter than the tile. You can see it in this sample shot snapped at the store back when we chose our tile (more on that here):
Oh and see how you can kind of see the seam in the picture above (there’s a horizontal line of grout in the middle of the photo that seems a bit thicker/bolder). That’s why scooching things around and stepping back to see how it all looks before moving onto the next tile is so important! We were sticklers about it, but we’re so glad we took the time to keep everything as evenly placed as possible.
Now we just need to grout, get new lighting (and kill that haven’t-used-it-in-13-months fan), add crown molding and some sort of decorative treatment and baseboard to the back of the peninsula, lay our cork floors, install our new dishwasher, and add shoe molding around the room. And probably some other stuff that our tile-drunk minds are forgetting. So we’ll be back with grouting progress in the next few days or so- probably on Wednesday. We’re hoping we can knock it out pretty quickly, but you never know until you’re knee deep in grout… we’ll keep you posted!
What did you guys do this weekend? Do you all have off today in honor of MLK?
Psst- Oh yes there is a Clara vs. Santa wrestling match going on over on Young House Life…
Bowers In Da House
I promised more Bower visit deets on Wednesday when we dorkily spilled the beans that Katie B and I had been together in a series of photos that can only be described as awkwaaaard (get to the root of that joke here). You know we love a good Bower Visit Breakdown (like this one, this one, this one, and this one of yore). But before we get to all the stuff we did together, we’ll share the little video that we made for ya. Because KB and I always get the same few questions:
- how did you guys meet?
- are you real friends or just blog friends?
- how long have you been friends?
- what were your first impressions of each other?
- what surprised you about each other?
- what do you like to do together?
- how are your styles similar? how are they different?
- do your husbands really get along?
So we thought we’d answer them all on film for ya. Warning: you’re about to lose 12 minutes of your life to two giggly girls who incessantly say the word “like” and perform incredibly terrible impersonations of each other).
When it came to the stuff that we did together this time, here we go:
- filled our bellies with a ton of favorite local food (Bottom’s Up, Q BBQ, Carytown Burger & Fries) along with enjoying a few home cooked meals together in our torn apart kitchen courtesy of chef John
- did fun stuff with the kiddos like going for a walk near the river (where Katie snapped some family photos for us), hanging at the playground (where Clara & Will had some quality sandbox time), and even attending Clara’s weekly music class with Will in tow (he fit right in)
- checked out a few Saturday morning yard sales and even found a Goodwill Outlet (where they sell things by the pound in giant bins – it was like nothing Katie or I had ever seen)
- strolled around Carytown (where we did some browsing at a few thrift shops and consignment stores) and shopped at Stonypoint mall (where Jeremy got the same jeans as John, I’m telling you our men are hilarious together)
- hung around the house while our kids napped (Clara slept from around one to two thirty, and Will would sleep from two to five… so we were house-bound for a good chunk of time each day- which we used to do some synchronized blogging, talk about future projects, debate the merits of certain paint colors, take naps on the sofa, etc)
- rented a few movies after the kids went to bed for the night (X-Men: First Class for the boys and Bridesmaids for the girls) – we also watched a lot of Bang For Your Buck on HGTV since we liked betting which room got the most bang
In summary: good times. Katie even used her photog skillz to take some sweet pics:
So thankful for good friends, good weather, and sweet babies. Er, I guess they’re technically toddlers now. Sniffle. Did any of you guys hang with friends this weekend? Or have a weird feeling that KB and I were together? One commenter totally guessed that we were visiting each other while it was happening and we had no idea how they knew about it (maybe they’re psychic? or they saw us around town together?).
Psst- Check out Katie’s sweet post about everything. She even dug up our first email exchange. Love that lady.
Blogiversary IV: Let’s Get Personal
We’ve once again solicited questions from you guys on Facebook for our blogiversary extravaganza (of the personal, not decorating, variety). And just like we did in 2009 and 2010, we had fun answering a bunch of ‘em. We crammed as many responses as we could into 20 minutes, so unfortunately not every one of the 80+ questions got answered, but we figured 20 minutes was already pushing the bounds of an acceptable YouTube video length. Haha. Here are a few things that we cover:
- Our favorite and least favorite qualities in each other
- What our neighbors think about the blog
- If the former owners of our house read the blog
- Our weirdest fan interaction
- Who Clara looks more like
- How we deal with negative criticism
- What we wanted to be when we grew up
- What will happen to our blog name when we’re not young anymore
- If we ever fight or spend time apart
- And most importantly: John’s thoughts on the new Twilight movie
And of course there are a bunch of other questions, a Burger cameo, and John cycles through soda shirts just to keep things spicy. Oh but if you’re at work you can still watch it on mute and try to guess what I’m gesturing wildly about (or wait until tonight and watch it with some popcorn and take a swig of soda every time John changes shirts). Our only video-recording rule is that we’re not allowed to re-answer anything so it’s completely unscripted and sort of an all-one-take kind of thing (that we later edit down just to shorten things/take out the “ummmms” so we can squeeze more answers in). We don’t even read the questions until we’re rolling, so we don’t overthink or overplan – but sometimes we over-share. Haha. Who’s surprised.
And just because we’re chatterboxes, this year we tossed in three bonus business-related answers:
Q: How did you get sponsors? Do you solicit advertising? What’s the secret? First we wrote about 200 posts and had been blogging for a while without even thinking about sponsors, just because it was something we loved to do. We actually had no idea there were even people or companies who sponsored blogs, we just thought of it as a fun creative outlet/diary. Then it slowly dawned on us that because we were gaining more traffic and posting every day, maybe some local folks or small online businesses would like to get a button on our sidebar in exchange for a tiny fee. So we tossed up a “wanna advertise with us?” button just to see what would happen. We thought it would be awesome to make a few extra dollars to put towards projects, but definitely didn’t have high hopes. Much to our surprise and amazement, a few small companies and Etsy vendors emailed us to say that they were happy to give it a try. So we just shared our stats and offered people a flat fee for the month and a slightly discounted fee for the quarter.
To this day we actually still use the same system. There are definitely more intricate ways of charging sponsors (like per click, per view, etc) and even more complex ways of calculating rates. But we decided to keep it simple and start with a flat rate that we felt was fair (based on what we saw other sites charging with comparable traffic) and just let the sponsors tell us if it was too high (and if they did, we’d adjust). If it was too low, well, we love a deal – so we figured why not offer one ourselves (after all, we were satisfied with that rate since we were the ones who came up with it). That system seems to be working for everyone, so much so that we haven’t raised our rates in almost two years (despite a great increase in traffic since then).
When it comes to managing sponsorships, we use Google Ad Manager to organize everything. It not only serves the ads to our site, but also helps us keep track of expirations so John can send renewal emails / invoices. So it’s a bit of paperwork on our end, but completely worth the effort since our sponsors are a big part of what makes this blog possible. There’s definitely not a get rich quick aspect to blogging (at least not in our experience), but we’ve seen that by focusing on content first and readers second, the sponsors will gradually fall into place.
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Q: Do you have to post a certain amount of times each month for sponsors? Nope, as we mentioned above, they pay a flat fee per month so no traffic or amount of posts are expected or promised. We’ve just posted 1-2 times a day about the same range of stuff for the past few years, so it’s a pace that works for us. Some juicy stuff + some light stuff + some personal stuff = a comfortable mix. Posting in some sort of regular rhythm provides structure and helps keep our creative juices flowing. If we stopped blogging every time we were in a rut or ran into a snafu we worry we might never start again. Gotta keep that momentum up! <– picture me in a bodysuit and legwarmers saying this in a sing-song-y voice a la workout videos from the eighties
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Q: Aren’t you scared to have so little job security when your whole family’s income relies on this blog? We’re not gonna lie, it can freak us out if we think about it too much. But we’ve squirreled away the recommended amount of “safety net savings” to fall back on if this ol’ blog suddenly grinds to a halt (which we built up before John came on full time as some sort of “insurance” to quell the nerves). We also have side gigs (like our column for BabyCenter and Do It Yourself magazine along with the book that we’re writing), so that helps us feel semi-diversified.
We also both left advertising on very good terms with former employers/clients, so that’s another road we could explore if we ever needed to (and John still takes on the occasional advertising consulting job on the side, just to keep his toe in the water). In the end I always say that five years ago we had no idea we’d be here doing this, so trying to figure out what we’ll be doing in five more years is probably an exercise in futility. We just do our best to keep chugging along and try not to let the neurotic thoughts creep in!
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So there it is, twenty minutes of video evidence confirming that we’re dorks and three bonus bidness questions. What surprised you guys most? Was it the fact that I make up sayings that aren’t really sayings and then collapse into a ball of giggles? Or that John is so into Twilight movies? Will anyone else help me make “I took that baby to the market and carried it home” a real saying? Come on, it’s kind of catchy…
Psst- John’s over on BabyCenter answering one more question about being a stay/work at home dad. It’s actually a post that even surprised me. Check it out here.
Any Given Day
Can you believe it has already been almost five months since we shared a house tour with you guys? So I decided to walk around with the Flip cam and show you how each room can look on an average day (since we had lots of fun with a no-cleaning-first tour back in April). And yes, this is the real deal. I didn’t pick up a thing (as demonstrated by my embarrassing bra on the chair in our bedroom, so just pretend you didn’t see that, ok?). Oh and for those of you who are at work, you can watch it on mute and pretty much get the gist of the average everyday glory. Or just try to read my lips (just kidding, I’m not on camera):
Things to note:
- I taped this before ORBing the daylights out of the hardware on the front door and the sliding doors, which is why it’s still brassy (it always takes me a few days to remember to upload videos)
- I’m terrible at walking around, talking, and holding a camera (it’s too much multitasking, so pardon the Blair Witch Project-ness)
- I’ve listened to this five times trying to hear Natalie Portman or Mila Kunis (since you guys say you hear it) and I can’t. I really tried though.
- I have no idea why I take time to point out that we have a Ruby Tuesday’s coupon on our desk. It’s so weird what you think is noteworthy.
- I should have paused to turn the ironing board so it points up during the video, thereby resnagging the win in Ironing Board Wars on camera (more on that here).
- Burger is so cute. I love how he’s just chilling under the covers. Life’s good when you’re a nine pound chihuahua.
- Sorry I’m almost completely inaudible for the second half of the video. Sleeping baby = paranoid whispering mom (which is ironic because we hammer while she naps – just not right outside her door).
- You can see that I still have yet to rehang the ribbon chandelier from Clara’s closet that I took down to paint and stencil the closet (it’s in a pile in our disaster of a playroom).
- Yes, it sounds like there’s a waterfall in Clara’s room. It’s her sound machine (mentioned here) which drowns out things like DIY projects and our barky dog.
- I like how I completely forgot an entire room (the sunroom) and galloped back through the house to show you things like squished pillows and a blow-up whale pool.
- The rocker in the sunroom really is trying to kill me (remember when I talked about it waaay back here in November – um yeah, not much progress)
- My dramatic ending on Clara’s stuffed animal is beyond weird (yes, we named her Georgia because she’s from there). What is wrong with me?
What about you guys. What would people see if you randomly made a shaky nausea-inducing video of your house before picking up a single thing? Anything embarrassing out there like a Carebear night light in the bedroom or an NKOTB poster in the closet? John actually had a Britney Spears calendar when I met him in 2004. Not lying. And she was wearing things like red leather bodysuits and braided pigtails. What can I say, my man has good taste.
Speaking of which, I was just going through old folders on my laptop and I found a bunch of funny old pics that I thought I’d share in the spirit of “any given day.” Here’s me and Alicia Keys back in 2005. We’re old friends. Just kidding, but I did get to meet a bunch of celebs when I used to work in advertising back in NYC (and they were all super nice except for one “star” who is rumored to be not nice – and let me tell you the rumor is true).
Here’s John’s passport pic from when he was 16 next to the one snapped when he was 24. Aw, Johnny’s all grown up.
Here’s John as a life-sized doll back in 2005 when we worked together (we met at an ad agency named Lowe where I was a copywriter and John was an account guy – aka: a suck up). The entire office cracked up about this project (it was for a certain deodorant client of ours). I definitely prefer John The Doll to the smarmy Ken doll that I had growing up.
Aw, here’s our engagement announcement photo (that we emailed to a bunch of friends and family, hence the photoshopped writing) from 2006. It was snapped about a minute after John got down on one knee at the top of a mountain (more on that here). Best day ever. Well, top five at least.
And here’s me and John the last time I chopped off my hair (right after our wedding in 2007). That’s Thomas Jefferson with us in case you’re wondering.
So how’s that for Friday randomness? What odd old photos are sitting around on your computer? Would you ever have guessed where you’d be today five years ago? We had no idea we wouldn’t both still be working in advertising (we really liked it and miss it all the time!) and after six years of calling NYC home, I never thought I’d leave. So funny how things work out.
Psst- Check out our first ever messy house tour here (it’s fun to see how many rooms have changed since April when we filmed it).
