Retaining wall

There has been good progress on the retaining wall so far, should be finished up this coming week!

Concrete

This past week, the excavators and concrete guys have been hard at work on finishing things up. All the concrete is now in place, such as the garage:

Also, the front porch and sidewalk:

It really fills out the look of the front of the house:

Tiling progress

Lots of progress made on the tile lately . . . the laundry room is completed:

The back wall of the master shower has the tile set:

Finally, the 2nd bathroom shower is cement boarded and just about ready for tile. The floor here is complete, like the master bathroom:

More painting and tile prep

Wow, things have been busy since the last update! Where do I begin...

Well, we got the big common area room all painted in a very light blue/green - very subtle. It went quicker than I thought it would!

Next, tile prep has continued in the laundry room and 2nd bathroom. The laundry area is all laid out and ready for the thin-set:

The master bathroom shower is about ready for the tile layout, and the 2nd bathroom shower area is just beginning with the vapor barrier:

With the warm weather lately, things look a bit different outside!

Cabinets, Tiling, Carpet, Door, etc...

Lots of progress this weekend! We did a bit more prep for tiling in both the guest bathroom...

 ... and the laundry room ...

Next, we put carpet in the walk-in closet in the master suite:

The big project though was tiling the master bathroom! It took a good part of the day just to lay out and cut the tile. A good tile saw with a water-cooled diamond blade makes the straight cuts easy, though cutting holes for plumbing is still a real challenge even with a tungsten-carbide drill bit.

After prepping the tile, we used a notched trowel to lay out the thin set and then set the tile using these nifty little spacers called TileJax! They make getting good even grout lines very easy, and are reusable. After letting the tile harden for about a day, we then applied the grout and ended up with pretty nice results.

After getting the tile set, we hung the closet door, a nice six panel solid cherry door. Quite heavy!

Today, I did the final wipe-down of the tile floor. You always end up with a bit of grout dust on the tile no matter how well you wipe down during the install:

It shines up real nice after another wipe down with a damp sponge after the grout has had a day or so to dry: