The Half Bath from Hell!

In my very first blog post, I explained the terrible experience I had with buying my home. If you haven't, please read it and learn from it.  For instance, even three months after closing on the home, I got a letter from the title company asking me to sign a paper they "forgot" to have me sign.   The experience was so bad that when we finally closed, I refused to go in the house for a whole week. The only reason I entered my new house after the week was because my mother was in town and wanted to see. Every time we went to the house, I acted like a total brat. HATED the HOUSE! After moving in and settling a bit, I begin liking it. As we move forward with renovations, I think I like the house even more, and then I get a setback like this half bathroom from hell.

We began renovating our half bathroom. While most people would tolerate the way it looked, I hated it and had to change the whole thing.  There was an old toilet and the vanity was built into an odd wall that had a weird-concave like angle. It had to go. I didn't anticipate everything to go smoothly, but i expected things to not be like this and in all fairness, after the wall incident, they are all pretty much my own fault.

Let me preface this my saying, the times it takes to do this is because we work opposite shifts. Most of the things we do require two people. I work in the day, he works at night. The only time I see him with his eyes open are on weekends.

I also know a lot of these issues we are having is due to the fact that we are doing everything ourselves and we haven't been the best in planning these little catastrophes. Shit happens. It's just in my nature to think everything going wrong is the end of the world. I have a naturally pessimistic attitude. 

BATHROOM FROM HELL INCIDENT 1:

As I may have mentioned before, I curse whoever painted this house. They painted flat paint over gloss which translates into a mess when you try to clean the walls.  Well in the bathroom, it translated into paint peeling off the wall.  I suggested spackling it and then sanding and painting over it. My fiance bought an orbital sander instead and went to town on the walls  

This may not seem like a big deal, and it probably wasn't. but it took close to 3 weeks to rectify this situation. As a perfectionist, I am still not pleased with the imperfections in the wall. The image below is how it turned out when we initially painted the walls.

BATHROOM FROM HELL INCIDENT 2:

The sink we bought is from ikea.  It was inexpensive and a great buy for a wall-mounted sink. Wall studs typically sit 16" apart.  In my house, one of the studs were 10" and 14" apart with NO stud where the sink needed to be mounted at. 

When we found this out, I threw a tantrum (very child like).  Eventually my fiance came up with a solution that would take an additional month to rectify.  

 He had to cut open the wall and install 2x4 studs horizontally  between the oddly placed studs. Once he did this, he placed the wall back in place, spackled, sanded and painted it.

The issues here came when the 2x4s were not cut short enough, we had to turn the water off more than once and the pipes wouldn't stop pouring water. It was a lot of poor planning on our part, but knowing nothing about what he was doing, I didn't know how to plan for the negative things that could go wrong. 

We eventually got the sink in and it looks beautiful and ended up being worth the trouble. I will show you pictures when the whole bathroom is complete.  :)

BATHROOM FROM HELL INCIDENT 3:

The current issue is actually my own fault. I wanted a river pebble/stone flooring. You can buy river stone tiles, but they cost at least $10/sq ft.  Even though this bathroom is small, it is still about 20 square feet, translating into over $200. I didn't want to pay that much for it.  My bright idea was to buy 40lb bags of river stone and some thin set and slap it down on the floor.  I did this on one section of the floor to see if this would work, and it did! 

In between me creating the picture above and now, incident #2 took place and I had to stop. I needed there to be a solution for the sink first because if we were unable to get the sink mounted to the wall, I would have to go with a pedestal or another vanity, and it would have NEVER sat level on this stone. It would probably always have a teeter to it.  So, I stopped doing this and waited until we got the sink it.  

Once we got the sink in, I took to doing this again and found that I needed more stone. That shouldn't have been an issue, but Home Depot had discontinued the stone I used for this.  I used the nifty store inventory locator, and grew increasingly disappointed. :(

There were two shops that sold white river stone, but it wasn't right. They weren't smooth like the ones I already had were.  

I am immensely disappointed and don't know what to do for the floor at this point.

Any ideas?