The Battlefield: Glass items arrived Friday, and caused me great distress on seeing the "brooch-like" pieces. They're black plastic ovals with raised roses (painted gold) on them. What a bunch of sadists at the company.

Anyway, the greatest distress came from the fact that there was no way to just flatten the roses as I had intended. Distress then arose from the fact that there seemed no way to take the roses off of the ovals. The roses themselves seem to be made of glass.

I spent a few hours yesterday trying various ways to get the roses off. It wasn't until this morning that I succeeded, by holding them close to a candle flame and then popping them off with an X-acto knife. With this obstacle overcome, we could proceed with the next step for the project.

Namely, tear out the guest bathroom sink and countertop.


Here's the old bathroom sink and countertop. Nothing really wrong with it in appearance, although the sink has several large cracks in it, and the tile's rather boring.


We had gone shopping yesterday for the stuff we needed for this partial remodelling. We bought a new cheap sink, a decent-looing faucet, and a chisel and small maul for taking off the countertop. And I went to it!

Unfortunately, there are no photos of the effort because Shelley was making a whole bunch of yummy dishes for lunch this week while I banged away at the old tile. There was about an inch of cement under the tile, and beneath that they had used a mesh wire on top of boards.

All the tile and cement came off fairly easily with the big chisel and maul, and the vacuum took care of the mess admirably. That left us with a cabinet with boards, which we covered over with plywood so that it will be easy to lay the glass mosaic.


Shelley lays the new sink into the new countertop.



Shelley's looking forward to this project as well (thankfully!) and as usual does the plumbing work (because she has the patience to deal with rusty pipes and fittings). She has to get a couple small parts to make the old pipes connect to the new sink, but it's gone very well so far.

I've started work on the design for the new mosaic countertop. It's certainly going to be a composite of materials at the end: bevelled glass with colored metal foil behind it; regular stained glass in several colors in small to medium-sized pieces; the black plastic ovals; the gold-painted roses repainted; river-polished stones; numerous very small mosaic background pieces of glass.

As the project stands, Shelley will finish the plumbing next weekend. I'm awaiting some additional pattern books that I hope will be here by next weekend.

Once I design the pattern for the top, I'll cut the glass and then apply an adhesive to the back of the big pieces, stick them down, then spread the adhesive over the whole top and press in tons of little background-color pieces. That will set overnight, and then we grout it. Should be straightforward.