The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
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.
So the big job today was to pull the sink. This is the sink; by the time I took this picture I had already removed the doors from the front of the vanity to make getting at the rest of the thing easier:
I’ve never actually disconnected a sink from a wall, mind you, so (much like every other step in this process) I’m being real careful to make sure not to fuck anything up along the way. First step in pulling a bathroom sink is to turn off the water. I didn’t get a picture, because cutting the water to the toilet was a piece of cake. The shutoff valves for the sink, on the other hand, were 1) stuck and 2) started crumbling in my hand when I tried to apply a bit more force to them.
I don’t know much, but I know when I’m about to make a big mistake, and shearing the shutoff valve sure as shit sounded like a big mistake. So, maybe ten minutes into the big job of the day, I called a halt and called a plumber. That was at maybe 9:00 this morning or so; it’s 3:15 now and the plumber left about half an hour ago, so yay for folks who can get out quickly. The plumber disconnected the sink for me and replaced the shutoff valves, all the while swearing at the shitty plumbing job the builders had done– which is not the first time I’ve heard that. Every plumber who has ever entered this house has left wanting to travel back in town and beat hell out of the dude who built the place.
There was some careful examination of the way the sink attached to the vanity, because it looked like the most obvious way to pull the sink out had a good risk of dropping it through the countertop, potentially wrecking my new shutoff valves. This seemed bad.
So I went with the second most obvious way, and just grabbed the countertop and yanked. Amazingly, it worked:
Just in case you were wondering if this was a quality vanity or not:
And then we pulled the rest of the thing, and the swearing started, and the swearing really hasn’t stopped yet; I’m actually swearing uncontrollably under my breath while I’m typing this, because this fucking bullshit was what was under the vanity:
Make sure you look closely, there, and note that several of the long broken pieces on the right there actually match missing pieces elsewhere on the tile, meaning that they tried to pull up the tile, gave up quickly, and then just threw the shit under the vanity.
Also, five will get you twenty that that’s asbestos tile, and it’s also a good quarter-inch lower than the rest of the floor, meaning I have to redo my flooring plan again. I’m hoping I can just find a piece of plywood of the right size and slap the fucker in place, because otherwise I’m going to have to pull the entire floor, because unless I miss my guess those tiles are made of cancer.
Take a wild guess how happy I am right now.
Got a lot done yesterday, including averting/dealing with one major setback when the floor didn’t turn out to be quite what we thought it was. Ordered new underlayment for the tile today that ought to be here by Friday, so we didn’t lose much time over it.
Anyway, here’s what’s happening today:
That’ll be a day, I think. Whee!
If you’ve been reading this blog for way too long, you may remember the Terrible Decisions series, in which my wife and I decided to redo our bathroom. That process led to a (if I don’t mind saying so) good job re-tiling our shower, and then… stalled.
She has the week off. We are unstalling.
Hello, over-the-toilet shelf!
Goodbye, over-the-toilet shelf!
Hello, floor trim tile!
Goodbye, floor trim tile!
Hello, toilet!
Goodbye, toilet! Hello, wax ring!
Goodbye, wax ring! Now, the raggedy hole in the wall there is the reason this entire nightmare project got started in the first place: we had a leak behind the tile, and the water was running down the side of the tub and basically turned that corner of the drywall into mud. (I just spent ten minutes looking; I posted a picture of it at one point but hell if I can find it.)
That one simple thing– ripping that piece out– turned into a full-bathroom renovation. Which we WILL FINISH this week because if we don’t we only have one toilet and I will not live in a house with one toilet. At any rate: I cut out the diseased part of the wall, carefully avoiding cutting a hole in the stack and thus necessitating what would probably be thousands of dollars in repair costs.
Yes, I know this is cement board, not drywall, and you’re not supposed to use cement board in place of drywall. However! It’s also in the same spot as the bad part of the wall. If we end up with the same leaking problem in the future, I want it leaking into cement board, which is going to be RedGarded and thus a lot more waterproof. This part of the wall will be behind the toilet anyway and so the minor difference in texture shouldn’t be too noticeable.
Next step: Get rid of the rest of this goddamned wallpaper. Which I expect to take the rest of the damn afternoon. If not my entire life.
I got it into my head to do some home improvement today. My wife and I have figured out the schedule for the bathroom and expect to have all major renovations completed by Martin Luther King weekend and to repaint during Spring Break. That sound you hear is God laughing; longtime readers remember how long tiling the bathroom took.
I started off with simple stuff:
I really, really tried to get my son to ask for either the Captain America’s shield or Mjolnir variation of this nightlight, but he wasn’t having it; it was Iron Man’s hand or nothing. The sticker was actually the biggest pain in the butt on this one; additional fun was had upon realizing someone had stolen the hardware out of the particular box we’d purchased, and additional additional fun was had upon realizing that the two places in the back where you mount the screws are different sizes, one far too small for any other screw I had, so I had to get creative with a nail. Whatever, it’s solidly attached and not going anywhere unless we want it to (the batteries will need changing eventually) and the kid loves it so screw you, nail.
Then a minor improvement to the bathroom:
It would have made sense to complete all the work before adding things like towel racks, but I’d gotten tired of having to walk across the bathroom to get my towel when I invariably forgot to put it on top of the toilet tank before my shower. This was actually a piece of cake to install; they include a paper template that you can attach to the wall with painter’s tape to make sure you drill the holes in the right places, and the design is pretty forgiving of minor mistakes anyway. This is also rock-solid and not going anywhere.
On to the day’s big project. Our microwave is from 1992. It came with the house. It still cooked food, which is, after all, the primary purpose of a microwave, but the light underneath it had gone bad (not the bulb, the light itself had died) and the button to make the fan work was getting increasingly more difficult to deal with, and being from 1992 it didn’t have a turntable, so it was time for an upgrade.
It would have cost an additional $114 to have them install. “Scoff!” I scoffed. “I retiled my bathroom! I put a stereo into my car! I can do this!”
Step the first: tear out the old microwave. This took a bit of time, not because it was difficult but because we wanted to make sure that at no point did the microwave fall out of its spot in the cabinets, so we had to make absolutely sure we knew where all the appropriate screws were and what they’d loosen before we pulled them off– because, see, if the microwave ever falls, it lands on our countertop range, which is glass, and then we’re out $1300 for a new one. So we gotta be careful.
I failed to get a picture of the old microwave in situ. Here’s what the hole looked like, with a few holes bashed in the drywall behind it to make sure I knew where the studs were:
To make sure you appreciate it, a close-up of what was apparently the kitchen’s original wallpaper:
The old microwave, consigned to the garage until we figure out if it’s legal to just throw it in the trash:
Wanna see what 22 years of never cleaning the exhaust fan on your microwave looks like? I only threw up six times:
At this point there was a pause, to very carefully read and understand everything and use the templates they gave us and make sure everything was going to work properly. The actual installation itself wasn’t any more complicated than drilling a couple of holes and mounting the wall bracket against the back wall; not a big deal.
Take a look at that picture of the hole up there. See that piece of trim running horizontally underneath the cabinets? That was causing us some problems, as the lag bolts they gave us to mount the microwave under the cabinets weren’t quite long enough. So Dad and I ran out to Lowe’s to come up with a better solution. We came up with something we both thought would work and came back, ready to have a working microwave ten minutes later.
Ha.
The problem we hadn’t noticed: the template for the back of the microwave fit perfectly on the back wall. We knew that the trim was going to cause problems and bought appropriate bolts. It didn’t hit us until trying to mount the thing that we couldn’t actually install it flush because the template against the wall extended up higher than the trim. So the microwave was at maybe a 20 degree tilt forward, meaning that the only way I was going to get it to hold in place was with bungee cord.
The trim had to come out.
I’ll spare you the details; there was lots of consternation about whether the trim in any way represented structure (don’t think so; at this point really hope not) and how best to get it out without noticeably damaging the cabinets around it. The thing was screwed in place in some really weird ways and getting it out required some creative use of my dremel and the new drill bits I’d bought to install the towel rack. (Yes, I was at the hardware store twice today.) But eventually it came out and as of right now, an hour or so later, the microwave hasn’t pulled all of our cabinets out of the ceiling yet, so I think it’s installed properly. The fan ducting even lined up right, although the original owners installed the duct backwards so I need to go in tomorrow and retape everything. But we have a working microwave again!
And there was much goddamn rejoicing.
Books of 2014 post tomorrow, I swear.
Okay, the habit my wife and I share of taking forever to get shit done because we like to make sure we know exactly what we’re doing before we get into stuff and also we’re lazy and work six days a week has caused this project to take so, so, so much longer than it should, but you can’t really argue with results, can ya? Sooner or later the grout will cure and then we can actually goddamn shower in there again!
And soon winter break will roll around and we can destroy the rest of the bathroom and start this all over again.
So psyched.
The accent tile has got to be completely dry before I can put a tile above it, or it crushes the mesh and shoves them together.
The accent tile is not dry. It’ll take another hour before I’m comfortable.
My mortar is not going to last another hour, and I’m out of mortar. As it is 8 PM on a Sunday, I cannot acquire more mortar at this time.
Which means it’s going to take ANOTHER GODDAMN DAY TO GET MY TILE DONE.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGHHHHHHH.
(There’s a weird optical illusion on the left side of the image, where it looks like some of the tiles are either totally the wrong size or cut in weird places. Not the case. it’s the reflection of the grout lines on the tile on the side facing the shower faucet.)
The left wall is completed except for the bullnose edge, which is going to be a piece of cake, and the larger middle wall is well along its way– the gap in between it and the walls on the left and right are all tiles that have to be cut to size. We are figuring that we’ll spend the evening after the boy goes to bed cutting tiles and then we’ll actually finish the job later this week. I hung nineteen tiles today, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but shit, I’m exhausted. Bek has been trying to cut the tile, which is turning out to be hellishly complicated, and we’ve each ruined a couple of them trying to get it done right.
One more day ought to do it, though.
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