Both Bathrooms Tiled — and Epoxy for the Heavy Ones

Days fifty-eight and fifty-nine, logged together. The bathrooms crossed their finish line — the trade our mentor warned would bring “another crisis” is now, mostly, behind us.

Saturday: domes and the last walls. My brother and the electrician installed both remaining dome ceilings, wiring the indirect lights as they went — the side-gap we’d left for inserting the lighting became the installation handhold, an accidental gift from earlier planning. Aligning panel seams was fiddly; nothing about it was hard, just patient. Below the domes, tile coverage reached 100% in both bathrooms, including the tub faces over their cured waterproofing. One pragmatic call: the tub’s own edges skipped the jolly-cut miter — the schedule couldn’t afford it — and honestly, the finished look concedes almost nothing.

For anyone budgeting a renovation, the tiling arithmetic deserves respect: a skilled professional needs about a day and a half per ordinary bathroom — and that’s before masonry tubs, floor-slope rebuilds, and the other surprises an old house adds. Our tile phase ran long, and now we know it always does.

Monday: the stain finishes, the bath begins. The oil-stain campaign closed out the remaining timber — annex rafters, beams, purlins — using the settled recovery sequence: damp cloth first, sander only for the stubborn cement spatter, and for wood that got scuffed during masking-tape removal, a thin touch-up coat of stain itself covers the sins.

Then the bath’s walls opened a new chapter: 600 mm large-format tile over waterproof plasterboard — and a new adhesive doctrine. Ordinary tile mortar can’t be trusted to hold that weight on board long-term; the correct bond is two-part epoxy (resin and hardener, actually mixed, not guessed) blended with silicone, combed over the back. Big single-format tile pays twice: visual calm, faster coverage — and half the grout lines to clean forever after.