Tag: bathrooms

Lights!

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This is as exciting as my day got– picking out the lighting for the bathroom remodel. That’s what they look like; bask in its room-lighty glory. Or not; we didn’t exactly go super-complicated on this particular decision. I suppose we also picked out a bathroom exhaust fan, but seeing as how the entire decision-making process for that was to authorize whatever our contractor had already suggested, and I couldn’t pick the one we chose out of a lineup if my life depended on it, it didn’t count for much.

My criteria for the lights: 1) brushed nickel, to match everything else in the room; 2) smoked glass so that I’m not staring at bare lightbulbs, and 3) facing downwards to make the bulbs easier to change. My wife argued with none of these determinations and I more or less went “Okay, whatever you want” beyond that. I think we’ve been surprising the people at these places with how quickly and easily we’ve been able to make decisions throughout this process, although I did horrify the saleslady at the fixtures place a couple of weeks ago by abruptly snarling at my wife about something or another; Bek knew exactly what I was doing and laughed about it, but the saleslady clearly thought I had decided to die on the hill of refusing to have oval-shaped pulls on the vanity or whatever it was that I’d complained about, and you could see her bracing herself to be an unwitting bystander in Marital Drama.

I suspect these people probably have a touch of PTSD, and I don’t blame them for it; we probably ought to just get along in public and not make jokes. I will do better in the future.

There’s not much more to report here, really; I planned for the first couple of days of summer break to be low-activity and I’ve successfully achieved that. Tomorrow we are heading to Illinois to finally meet my new nephew, so expect a hotel window picture tomorrow evening and maybe some baby pictures if my brother and sister-in-law will allow it. Maybe I’ll just put my hand over his face and post that; we’ll see. We’ll stay overnight– the boy is psyched about staying in a hotel for the first time in forever– and be back Sunday, and then Monday morning I start actually Preparing for Things. We’ll see how well I do.

Adultifying!

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

We met our contractor– the same people that did the roof– at a flooring supply place today and picked out the look for the new bathroom. On the left, vinyl flooring that will extend into the laundry room and looks like tile. On the right, the walls in the shower (12×24, nice big tiles) and, divided into little squares, also the floor for the shower. In the middle, accent tile for the shower. It’s going to run vertically from the showerhead to the handles, form the back of a niche for shampoo and such, and possibly also be a little vertical accent stripe on the bench that’s going to be in there.

We’ll go to a different place for fixtures and a custom vanity in a week and a half or so. Will there be body jets in the shower and a bidet on the toilet? Yep. There sure as hell will.

Whee!

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: PHASE 2 COMPLETE

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

We hadn’t stopped working; I just decided a few days ago that I wasn’t doing any more updates until shit looked good.

Shit looks good.

IMG_2814Another look at the shower tile (finished over winter break) and the new toilet.  The new toilet is wonderful.  If you shit God, God will be flushed.  As a fat man, I appreciate this.  The new toilet is not leaking.  Did I ever show you the new floor tile?  That’s not leaking either, but tile generally doesn’t do that.

IMG_2819The new vanity and countertop.  This… is a bit more of a problem.  Everything you can see is not leaking, is hooked up, and works beautifully.  Note that I also put new floor trim in, although you can’t see it too well.  It’s just trim; trim’s not actually terribly impressive.  But it’s there!

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Closeup of the countertop and the new faucet.  I love this countertop a LOT.  I’m also glad that the vanity is taller than the old one, because it means that the boy’s going to have to grow a bit before he’s tall enough to splash water out of the sink, and hopefully by then he’ll be less likely to wantonly splash stuff around.  Yes, the distance from the faucet to the electrical outlet is within code; yes, I’m also putting safety stops into the outlets when they’re not being used.

IMG_2817This shit right here is not my fault.  And it’s leaking.  (And it’s better than it looks, because that one PVC join that is obviously crooked is not crooked any longer.)  The supply lines to the faucet are working beautifully and appear to be watertight; the rest of it, not so much.

Basically it’s leaking at the one spot that is obviously bad, which does not surprise me, as joining those two pipes in that fashion was basically a kludge involving crossed fingers.  The PVC-galvanized join is strong and so is the join where the trap joins with the pipe coming out of the wall.  I need to talk to some folks who know better than me and come up with something better than the kludge.  I also need to fix a new leak that popped up by the drain that wasn’t there originally, because in all the screwing around with the pipes I accidentally loosened the top (blue) pipe too much and now it’s leaking too.

I will wait a few days, do some research and some thinking, and then take another shot at this, and if I can’t get it right the second time I’ll just suck it up and call a plumber.  I’m not actually upset about this; it’s leaking at a spot that I knew was dodgy and it’s not leaking enough that it renders the sink unusable.  If I need to wash my hands or my face in that sink, it’ll be fine; the pot underneath will catch the small amount of water that comes out.  I just want it perfect.

Later this week, we’ll get into what Phase 3 entails.  Phase 3 is the final phase.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The end is nigh

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

We’ve laid every tile we can lay without standing on any of them.  I’d prefer to have the job done today, but not at the expense of doing it right.

Almost there, kids. 

IMG_2800

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Hell Yeah edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

Quite a lot accomplished in the last 24 hours or so.
IMG_2781That is the bathroom floor covered in horrid blue glue and Tavy Thin Skin, which is a product I’d never heard of a week ago designed to make it easy to tile over vinyl.  I spent a fair amount of time Googling and searching around and discovered that, while I found a lot of contractor types who hadn’t used it going “Man, I don’t see how that will work well,” I couldn’t find anyone who had used it and had bad results from their floor.  The biggest complaints were about spreading the glue and that was something I felt like I could deal with.  We did not get to the skimcoat yesterday, but we did do it this morning:

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So.  Nice clean layer of thinset laid down; tomorrow we tile.  That is probably going to extend into Monday but I’m hoping we can get it done in a day; it’ll depend on how easy it is to cut around the toilet and the floor register and to deal with the two rows where we basically just have to re-cut the rectangle on the tile.

A day after the tile is set, grout.

A day after the grout, the sink and the toilet (at least the toilet; I’m predicting complications with the sink) goes back in, along with the door, and we are set, son.  At least until we decide what to do with the electrical.  The lamps are still going to be in the wrong place, and we won’t be putting the mirror up until we decide where to put lighting.  But basically everything below the waist will be finished.

Also completed today and yesterday: Cut the trim around the door so that the tile could go under it, trimmed the door itself by half an inch, then yanked a door from our other bathroom and trimmed it by half an inch.  That door in particular has been a huge problem since we got the house; at some point some water got between the vinyl and the subfloor in there and bubbled the tile up, and the door’s been extremely difficult to open and close, to the point where we rarely use it.

No longer.  Fixed as hell.  We’ve both been just opening and closing it for the hell of it.

Also fixed: every folding closet door in the house, damn near all of which were off their tracks.  I’m kicking myself for this one; turns out these are extremely easy to fix, it’s just not immediately obvious how to do it.

Important detail: not a bit of this project (and by “project,” I’m extending all the way back to the very beginning) would have been possible without the internet.  We would have made so many mistakes.  I love being able to look shit up and find videos on how to do stuff any time I need it.

And now I shall go to my other job, and endeavor not to fall asleep behind my counter.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Friday

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Basically took yesterday off from bathroom stuff because of the carpet/tile people coming in to clean; clearing the living room and dining room of anything we could carry counted as work enough, and I spent the day in here working on Searching for Malumba.

I will be satisfied with myself if, by the end of the day, I have:

  • Cut the door trim so that the tile fits underneath it (already done!)
  • Fixed the last couple of screws on the plywood piece so that they’re flush
  • Measured, cut and glued down the Tavy Thin Skin over the vinyl tile and plywood
  • Restored the living room and dining room to usable status

I will consider it a bonus if I have also:

  • Laid down a skim coat of mortar over the Thin Skin.

No tiling is planned for today.  I’m hoping to get that done this weekend, and I should be able to, especially if I get that skimcoat done.

After

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Well… uh… the carpet looks *great*, but photographs do not do it justice.  Like, my phone is showing phantom dirt, or maybe it’s got a little time machine attached to the lens that I didn’t know was there before, or something like that, and the carpet looks muddy and disgusting despite no longer being muddy and disgusting.

The grout in the entryway actually looks about the same, which is moderately disappointing.

Here; I dry-fit some of the floor tile in the bathroom today.  Have a picture of that.

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TERRIBLE DECISIONS: mystery WTF addendum!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

That’s hardwood.  From the BEDROOM.  And it is a good 1/8″ higher than the subfloor around it, which is gonna play hell with leveling this mess.

Those of you with a carpentry/contracting background are welcome to speculate as to just why the hell the bedroom’s flooring extends an inch and a half into the bathroom.  I’m hornswoggled.