Are You Tired Of House Posts Yet?

I'm finding it extremely difficult to concentrate steadily on anything but my new house and it's current state of transfiguration. Last night, Daniel went out to the house to take some boxes over and talk to our contractor - again, without me because I was at the office until 8:30 p.m. Blah.

The brick re-pointing has been finished on the back terrace. Basically, re-pointing bricks just means cleaning them up, replacing or repairing any damaged bricks and re-mortaring the brick joints. It's a maintenance thing to keep any brick structures from crumbling to bits. And the non-painted, exposed brick of the terrace seriously needed some maintenance. Here's a picture of the steps after being newly re-pointed yesterday.



Our contractor, who is a hoot and a total pleasure to work with, sent new pictures of the work they've been doing on the master bathroom. The plumber was there today, re-plumbing everything and upgrading pipes and connectors and such.



We've come up with an interesting design (well, I guess we didn't really "come up" with it since they've been doing something similar in Japan for ages) to accommodate our smallish space. Since we absolutely want a walk-in, tiled shower stall, but also want a soaking tub, we're going to combine the two. So, you'll walk through the glass shower door into the tiled shower stall and just beyond, tucked in a sort of nook, will be the soaking tub. Get it? No? Never mind then, just wait til I post pictures of the finished design.
Right now, it looks like this:



Oh, and the mystery of the mystery tile has been solved. It's the glass tile we're going to be using as an accent in the shower. The shower will be tiled mainly with black slate, but then we're going to do a band of decorative glass tile. Our contractor brought us a sample of said glass tile. Mystery solved.