And now onto mortaring those pieces...

We took a mid-day break and returned to mortar in our morning's work. The guest bath looking solid:
We did the master too. Edit: here's the "owed" pics: While we had a fresh batch of mortar going we decided to work on the river rock in the shower too. Here's Eric laying the mortar bed and a snippet of a finished portion:

We definitely improved at this as we went along. The rocks come in perfectly square sheets on mesh backing, but naturally the dimensions don't perfectly match our shower basin. So the trick was to line up the squared sides on the straight edges of the basin, but cut away any one outer row of rocks that would be adjacent to another sheet of rocks (and do this with all sheets). Then you play jigsaw puzzle and fill in the spaces between sheets with individual rocks (that you cut off the mesh) that sort of free-form to fill the space. As you can see below, our very first row has a more noticable square in the center, whereas the middle and front are pretty indistinguishable:

We're contemplating using the rocks up the first course of the mortar bed as well.

Justen was here for a few hours today putting up door crowns. These two nicely frame the guest bath in and out:

Rumor has it that our granite countertops are being installed tomorrow and more appliances arriving too! So we wanted to make sure to get our stove in place (we've only got 1/8" clearance) so that there is no question that it will fit with the installed counters:

We're hoping for some fab photos for you tomorrow!