Bathroom bits, pieces, and ... finishes? Really?

Well, with the windowsill finally finished and most of the other trim installed, patched, and painted, it was time to get Bob the Plumber back out to install the bathtub, toilet, and vanity that had been taking up valuable real estate in the garage for the past six months.

(Closer to eight months, but who's counting? By the way, this is yet another overdue completion of a post that's been sitting in the draft folder for oh... six? eight weeks?)

So, obviously, if it had been us doing this by ourselves, it would have taken at least three weeks and involved a minimum of six trips to Home Despot, at least one to the ER, and several dozen cases of beer. Bob, being the professional that he is, managed to install all three fixtures in one day. Of course, I had to help him (and another guy) get the tub up the stairs, and then help again when the vanity went up, but he got it done.

I took this when he went out for lunch (and to grab a couple of feeder hoses because the ones that came with the tub were shit):

Aside from the three-ring circus of trying to get the tub up the stairs, the most exciting part of the day was when we got the part where we needed to install the vanity. We had managed, between Bob and I, to get the damn thing up to the upstairs landing, where we left it while he installed the taps and other bits (easier than trying to do them in place). But moving the vanity into the bathroom itself was, well... trickier.

As I may have mentioned, the bathroom itself is exactly five feet wide. That's sixty inches for you metric users out there. The vanity is JUST under 60 inches. And when I say JUST, I mean it's really 59 and 63/64ths. Complicating the matter is the location of the water feed for the toilet, and its position relative to the door of the bathroom. See, to get the vanity into place, we have to slide it straight through the door, and then straight back to the wall. The toilet is slightly to the right when looking in through the door, but the water pipe that provides the water to the toilet is, of course, almost directly in front of the door and in line with where we needed to slide the vanity.

Marvel at my skills of an artist!

Oh, and did I mention that if we broke that pipe, there'd be no fixing it without opening up that wall again? Yeah.

Anyway, we managed to get the vanity through the door and into the bathroom without smashing the pipe, but when we went to slide it back into place, well, that's when we encountered another small problem. It turns out that the walls on either side of the vanity were very slightly bowed, either from Tony the mudder feathering out around the electrical boxes, or because, I dunno, I suck at drywalling. Whatever the case, getting the vanity past the edge of the door required first a little surgery to the vanity itself:

And then some serious gouging and scraping of our nice drywall/paint job. Which I did not take a picture of because, quite frankly, it hurt.

The next step in the process (or somewhere in there at least) was to order and install the blinds. Owing to the shape of the window (as shown in detail in the last post), we had to order custom-made horizontal blinds. Also owing to the direction the window was facing, i.e., south, we had to order real wood blinds to prevent any warping or shrinking from the sunlight. Needless to say, they weren't exactly cheap, but our options were a little limited so we ponied up, measured the windows carefully, and ordered them from Rona.

Within a couple of weeks or so, we got the call that they were ready to be picked up, so the War Department drove all the way out there on a Thursday night while I was at my woodworking course (more on that in a later post) to pick them up. Of course, they couldn't find them. They were somewhere in the store, at least according to the computer, but not anywhere the employees could actually see. So she had to drive home empty handed and I had to drive all the way out there the next night to pick them up. I did manage to raise enough of a stink that they gave me a gift card to make up for our trouble, but it was still annoying.

What was even more annoying than THAT, thought, was that the damn things didn't actually fit. See, we had made our careful measurements against the edge of the windows themselves. But the blinds were two inches thick, which meant that the inside corners overlapped each other.

Of course, I wasn't exactly welcome at Rona at that point, so we had to perform some surgery on our new, very expensive blinds. I had to disassemble each one, cut off a little bit of the metal spacer at the top (some from each side, of course, because why would anything be EASY?), trim the wooden slats CAREFULLY in the chop saw, and then turn them over to Amy, who stained the fresh cut ends the same color as the rest of the blinds (and did an amazing job, too). Only then could I actually hang the things.

And I'm not even going to talk about hooking up the damn shower pipe and curtain ring. Let's just say Bob needed to come back and show me a few things, and leave it at that.

Anyway, to cut a loooooooong story short (can you tell this is the point I finally sat down to try to write the rest of this post), like, a couple or three months, the Ba'ath Bath is no more. We now have a master bathroom befitting the name, and I will shut up and let you enjoy the pictures, much as the War Department enjoys the fruits of our labours:

(Here's one without the flash so you can get a better idea of the actual colors:)

There's one TEENY little job left, and that's to fashion a brace for the shower head and hang the curtain, but given that we won't need the shower any time soon, and the War Department has already been enjoying the tub, I think we can safely call this project done.


Next time: Raw pine! Woo!

Shall we say... two weeks?

Well, I fell into that same old trap again, where I put off writing a post because I thought it would be nice to wait until the bathroom was finished and I could include pictures of all the awesome. And really, on Thursday of the week before last, it looked like my plan was going to pay off.

First, the lighting store called to let us know that the new light fixture was in and ready to be picked up. Then I got a package at work with the two new shower riser connectors I had ordered (to replace the split one - more on THAT in a minute). And then RONA called to let us now that the blinds we had ordered had been finished and were ready to be picked up. Then we got home to find that the towel bar, toilet roll holder and other accessories had been delivered.

So it looked like it was all coming together nicely. And really, when I left for my woodworking course (more on that in a minute, too) on Thursday night, I honestly thought that I'd be winding up my Thanksgiving weekend with a post full of pictures showing a completed master bath.

You would think, after how ever many years this nonsense has been going on, that I would know better by now.

Sigh. And of course, I STILL haven't written anything about the windowsill or how we got the damn vanity to fit. So much to cover, so little time.

Anyway, let's start with the windowsill, seeing as how it's rather germane to the rest of the stories, particularly the ones about the blinds (and let me tell you - there are some stories about the blinds...). As can be seen in some of the previous pictures, the new window in the former Baath Bath is of the bay persuasion. That is to say, there are actually three windows, sharing a single sill. Before I run out of words and high-falutin' phrases to describe said window, how about few pictures of the working area:

Yeah. THAT'S gonna be fun to trim out, eh?

So my first idea was to basically create three separate pieces (technically six, as I'd have to repeat the process for the top part of the window), one to go in front of each window, and then carefully patch and seal the seams.  Given that the edges were not exactly straight (or parallel, or anything close to something that resembled EVEN), I figured the best thing to do would be to start with some cardboard templates.

As you can see, even the cardboard templates were a little challenging (though I admit to being pretty damn proud of myself for using MATH to get the angles so close). I managed to trim them up to a semblance of fitting, and then transferred them over to three pieces of 1x6 finger-jointed pine. The next step would have been a LOT easier if I owned a bandsaw, but I made do with some hideously dangerous table saw work, and some futzing with the jig saw. Fortunately, depending on who's side you're on, I didn't hurt myself and managed to make three fairly close wooden representations of my template.

And yeah - that's totally not going to work. Basically, the wood is so misaligned and out of level that I'd practically have to build a form and cover it with concrete to get a flat enough surface for the wood to sit flat. Anything less, and the seams would just split and it would always look like crap.

After some thinking (and swearing, of course), I settled on a different approach: one piece of continuous wood, cut to fit the exact shape of the sill (and a second one for the top). Given the size and layout of the sill, however, I'd have to make this out of plywood.

Man, I can't even tell you the amount of effort it took just to get the damn piece to this stage:

Just. So much.

Gah.

And then, of course, what should have been a fairly straight-forward trace and cut along the line turned into a hellish chore of trying-to-make-do-with-the-wrong-tools again. Mostly because the jigsaw we have is a piece of absolute crap (and it's my fault because I bought it as gift for the War Department), and I DON'T HAVE A BANDSAW.

Anyway, after more swearing than I'm even comfortable admitting to, I got this:

Thanks to a bright sunny day (which I spent stuck inside working on the goddamn trim), you can really see the craptacular job I did cutting it. Nothing like shining a light on something to really pick out its flaws, eh?

Sigh.

Sorry. Got a little bitter about it there for a second.

Still, I stuck with it and got the top piece in as well, though the amount of swearing didn't decrease much at all:

Once that was in, to add insult to insult (no injuries to speak of, aside from my wounded pride and self-confidence), I was now faced with having to install the trim around my trainwreck of a window sill. Which came with its own challenges of course, given that Tony the mudder had to do a LOT of feathering to get the corners smooth enough, meaning that there was no way in hell the trim was going to sit flat on what was an exceptionally un-flat wall. Here's a close up of one of the worst offenders, just in case you want to stare at some random marks on our walls for a few minutes (go ahead, I'll wait while you try to wrap your brain around the angles involved there):

I got most of the trim to fit okay, with a little creative editing, but that corner required some serious surgery to make the trim fit. Don't believe me? Well, here's the corner piece as it looked from the front:

And here's the back of that same piece after I nibbled away all the wood that was in the way:

And the matching piece for the other side:

Oh, yeah, and did I mention that I was, of course, doing all the test fitting and marking at the complete opposite end of the house, and on an entirely different floor, from the saws and tools I needed to do the cutting. SO glad we bought a house with a huge flight of stairs. So, so, SO glad!

I guess the good news is that, well:

 a) I have a pretty good idea of where I went wrong with the sill, and pretty sure that if I ever encounter this problem again, I'll have a better approach. (Buy me a beer and I will tell you - AT LENGTH - exactly what that is. Buy me two, and I'll offer to help fix yours too, but then I'm an idiot for beer that way.)

 b) Thanks to the War Department and her amazing touch with the caulking gun (and a few hours filling, sanding, and painting), it came out looking mostly okay:

No, I don't have a close-up and you can't see it even if I did. Which I don't.


Anyway, this post is long enough, and there are already too many pictures in it (Blogger starting gakking pretty hard on that last one), so I'll sign off for now. (It has nothing to do with how thinking about this bloody window has made me all pissed off or anything.) The story of the shower risers and my woodworking course can wait until next time.

(In case anyone was wondering - no, the bathroom is still not finished. It's gonna be another two weeks. Tops.)

Ba'ath Bath update!

So I thought maybe I should post an update about the current state of the master bath renovation before we headed out for our annual baseball pilgrimage. Then I forgot about it until ...uh, a couple months later? Oh, no wait. A little more than three...

Oops.

In my defence, I DID actually start a post... which doesn't help anyone, given that I never actually published it. Not only that, but it was so damn long ago that I pretty much have to start over from the beginning. Fair warning, though: if you come across any weirdly disjointed paragraphs or sentences in this post, you'll know why. (Damn. I should use this excuse EVERY post...)

Anyway, Tony came over to work his mudding magic on the drywall, and then we spent a few days (weeks) priming and painting over his efforts. See?

Oh, yeah: we went with the Restoration Hardware color, "Silver Sage", again. I think we made the right choice.

Once the painting was done, we installed the heating mat for our heated floor, and then laid down the Schluter-DITRA over the entire area. Messy! And for something called "an uncoupling membrane", remarkably unsexy, too. (How in the world I failed to take a picture of this, I will never know. I suck. Sorry.)

On a personal note, "Schluter-Ditra!" is almost as much fun to say as "Dr. Oetker!" (If you don't know Dr. Oetker, they make frozen pizzas or something. We like to call them the Nazi Pizza Doctor. "Ve haf vays of making yoo eat anutter slice!" Even though I think it's a Dutch name? But still, not a name you'd associate with pizza, unless it was, like, EVIL pizza.... Sorry, that got weird in a hurry.)

Anyway, then Mr. Not-Those-Clarks-The-Other-Clarkes came over and spent his Sunday helping me cut and dry-fit all the tiles for the floor.

And then, like some kind of... well, dumbass, he came over again the NEXT weekend and helped me actually install them. And all he wanted was beer. Weirdo.

It took me a couple of hours after that to scrape the dried mortar out of the cracks, and then I grouted it.

Heh, funny story about that.. well, funny if you're not me, anyway. So, after some careful research about the type of grout I needed (non-sanded), I went off to Slegg to buy it. When I got there, I got to talking with the guy who worked in the tile section, and he explained that I was actually mistaken. He assured me that I needed the other type of grout (sanded). Given that he'd been a professional tiler for 20 years, he seemed convincing, so I decided to follow his recommendations. (It turns out he was totally right - THAT sort of major calamity is not the punchline to this particular story, but I know that's what you were thinking.) He asked me how much I needed, and I talked myself through the numbers. It went something like this:

"Okay, well, the bathroom is 5 feet wide and 12 feet long, so 5x12 square feet. Yeah, I need enough to do 600 square feet then. How much can a bag of this stuff cover... huh. It says only 180 square feet per bag."

At which point the guy butts in and.. points out that it's easy enough to stretch the coverage from a single bag well over 200 square feet by cleaning the tiles as you go and constantly remixing the grout back into the bucket.

For some reason, he did NOT chime in to point out that my math was really, really wrong. Like, even for me, that's some highly wrong math.

Fortunately, Slegg has a good return policy, and I got my money back for the two bags I didn't even open, even though I did have to drive them all the way back to the store like an idiot.

The Injury Report

So, I managed to slice my finger quite badly while smoothing out one of the grout lines after I'd completed it. Which, well, was a pretty fair indication that I hadn't gotten enough grout into the joints. Sure enough, I must have started wiping up the grout too quickly after putting it down, or else the sponge was too wet.

Fortunately, I hadn't sealed the grout or the tiles yet, so I just regrouted the whole thing over again. Worked out much better the second time.

One of these days, though, I swear. I WILL do a project, just one, right the first time.

Oh, that reminds me. The Toilet From Hell has won another round against me. I won't go into details, but suffice to say that I'm more convinced than ever that attempting to replace it will result in a broken flange, flooded living room, or similar catastrophe. That thing is possessed, I tell you. Possessed.




Lots more to come about the bathroom, but I figured maybe I should just bloody well post something and not worry so much about getting it all up to date in one go, hmm? Next time, the windowsill!

Two of my least favorite jobs

If you read the title of this post and braced yourself for a right proper rant-fest about how much I hate insulating and drywalling, well, congratulations: you've officially paid way too much attention to my blog. I would encourage you to get out and get a life. Well, maybe read the post first, THEN go.

Anyway (assuming you're still here), yes: I really hate insulating and drywalling. So very, very much. But I must admit that it's hard to get a real hatred on for either task right, considering that we've actually finished both of them.

Insulation, see:

 

The first piece of drywall! (Only took 45 minutes! Yay!)

Drywall done! (Took a lot longer than 45 minutes! Yay!)

Let's take a closer look at the one behind the vanity, shall we?

Yeah - seven holes in a single piece of drywall. And it fit the first time! (Well, I had to rasp down the edge a bit cause it was a hair long, but the holes all lined up.)

Oh, by the way, I would still be working on that drywall right now, were it not for Mr. Not-Those-Clarks-The-Other-Clarkes. He's apparently completely insane, because he volunteered not once, but twice, to help me hang the drywall. Given the state of the War Department's back most days, he probably saved both of us AND our marriage... I will buy him much beer, and sing his praises to the cats (who will either completely not care, or hide under the bed until I stop).

Okay, so I still have one small patch to put up (that I only remembered while taking these pictures):

So.... GRR! I HATERS TEH DRYWALLZ!!!1!!!

Bah, it's easy enough. Oh well.

On to the mudding! (Well, on to calling Tony to come in and do the mudding, anyway. Why else would I be so calm?)

My kingdom for a floor

The mess in the master bathroom continues, though it's probably not quite as much of a mess as it was a few weeks ago. Mostly because we had a professional come in and do the plumbing for us, and we couldn't have him working in the war zone that we'd left after the subfloor came up.

Whatever would he think of us?

(His name's Bob, by the way, and we would wholeheartedly recommend his services to anyone in the Capital Region who requires the services of a good plumber. Once, of course, we're done with him.)

Of course, now that I think about it, I'm probably getting ahead of myself a little bit. Yes, we have taken up the subfloor, but before we could do that, we had to remove the last vestiges of the Ba'ath Bath. Namely the vanity and the toilet (not, sadly, the Toilet From Hell).

Vanity before...

Vanity gone:

As you can see, we continued removing the drywall, and finished up with a pretty much completely gutted bathroom.

Oh, did I say finished up? Ha! It was at that point that the real fun began, and we started taking up the subfloor. Not only did this particular task require pretty much every saw we own (yay for powertools!), but I FINALLY had an excuse to spend the gift certificate I got from the Top Brass for my birthday.

You see, I had to cut out the plywood subfloor using the circular saw and then pry it off the joist using crowbars and other implements of destruction. While this worked out pretty well, the blade guide on the saw meant I couldn't get close enough to the sill plates of the wall.

We have to "sister" a new joist to the existing one so that it will project out past the sill plate and give us a nailing edge for the new floor. Otherwise, the floor might sag along the edge of the wall, which would be extraordinarily bad if, for example, someone were to install a 400-pound tub right there, and then fill said tub with a few (many) gallons of heavy, heavy water. But the closest I could get to the existing joist was about an inch and a half -- which is exactly the width of the 2x8 we're using to sister the joists.

Now, I could probably have used the reciprocating saw to get most of the extra wood off, but it's not EXACTLY a finesse tool, if you know what I mean. Add to that the fact that there are an awful lot of pipes and wires and other, somewhat important bits of things that run through the wall and sill plates, and I REALLY didn't want to have to redo any of it.

So I hied myself off to the Home Despot, and spent my birthday money on one of these:

It's kind of like an angle grinder with a wood blade on it (along with a recessed attaching nut and a few extra guards and whatnot) and it totally did the trick. Well, along with a lot of sweat, dust, and a helping hand from a chisel here and there.

And then came Bob, to make our crappy old plumbing look all shiny awesome fun!

Befores:

Afters:

Once he was finished, we got busy with the sistering. Here are the new joists in place, with plenty of meat for the new subfloor to rest on.

And then we insulated (in a desperate hope to ensure that people sitting downstairs in the kitchen wouldn't be able to hear any "bathroom noises" anymore):

And then we covered it all up with 3/4" tongue-and-groove sheathing:

Bob came back and pronounced it ... awesome! Or, well, "good enough", which at this stage, you know - I'll take. At least I don't have to work while balancing on those damn joists anymore. I was utterly convinced that I was going to place one foot wrong and go straight through the ceiling into the family room. And probably wreck something else in the process. Something a little more... me.

Anyway, next up, even more fun! Electrical! More insulation! Drywall! Swearing! Possible injuries!

Oh, almost forgot - I promised to post some pictures of the new window from the outside:

Sheer gorgeous-ity! Or -ness. Something. I dunno. I'm tired and haven't had a beer in more than a week. Shut up.