One step forward, two steps back…or something like that.

That seems to be our motto for the past week. We’ve been really questioning if we know what the heck we’re doing building this house. We’ve had to backtrack on a couple of projects. We were so excited to get our ceiling fans up and now the darn things have to come down to accommodate “pancake” junction boxes to meet Loudoun County code. Go figure. It’s a difficult thing not having a regular ceiling or attic space. Life certainly would be easier if we had a nice big void to stuff things in. When we first started all the wiring we should have been better organized, as it’s been a total hassle going back and figuring out what wire goes where. It’s probably not a good thing when you begin to refer to the wires in the basement as a “rats nest.” Oh well. We tidied things up and will now sleep better at night.We also started but later failed at tiling our entryway/mudroom on Sunday. We decided to lay the tile directly onto our reinforced Advantec subfloor. It’s certainly structurally sound and level right? Most people mount tile to a cement board like Hardibacker or Durock but we opted not to. The 16” x 16” slate we are putting down is about 3/8” thick so we figured ½” of thinset would make the tile floor about even with our wood floors. No problem…no need for backerboard. So we thoroughly cleaned the floor, marked all the lines, suited up with kneepads, then mixed the thinset. We laid the first tile down only to find out that the height wasn’t what we expected and that we should probably put backerboard down anyway. So late yesterday afternoon we cleaned up the thinset goopy mess and ventured to Home Depot to buy 25 sheets of Hardibacker board. We put a good dent into installing the boards last night until our bodies could take no more. The scene was too ugly to photograph. Sorry, no photos.On the other hand, Saturday was a beautiful day. We had a number of visitors stop by, even four-legged ones. Willow was happy to show off her home turf to Charlie & Hannah, Rob and Katie’s dogs. Happy dogs!Hannah, Katie & CharlieRob worked on installing the vent pipes. See Todd and Rob high up on the roof determining the correct location for the pipes. We wanted to make sure the pipes didn’t poke up through any of the seams on our metal roof.Erin got the first mud layer down in the shower (3 parts sand to 1 part Portland cement). After it’s good and dry, a layer of felt paper will go down, then the shower membrane. The felt paper will help to protect the membrane layer from scratches and so on.The Welsh clan stopped by on Saturday afternoon to check out our progress. Here's Kelly and our nephew River.