Details

Now that the tile walls and tile floors were up, we were able to do lots of little things. So I did these things at night, after work. As such, they took a long time to complete. We started with painting. Heidi had picked a nice light blue paint called Wave Crest. It's a little lighter than sky blue. But since we had done a lot of drywall work, we had to prime first. Those of you who have seen me paint before know that I'm not all that great at "cutting in" corners. But I finally found the secret. I got a really nice 2 inch brush from Home Depot. As long as I'm careful and take my time, I'm able to cut in pretty nicely now. I cut in all 4 joints where the wall meets the ceiling and didn't have many places where I got paint where I didn't want it. And since I'm painting with latex, whenever I did make a mistake, correcting it was as simple as wiping it up with a wet rag. We painted the ceiling gloss while and the walls the wave crest blue.

We had bought a cabinet to put over the toilet. Since it would be easier to install it before the toilet was back in place, Heidi and I hung it on a Friday night. Hanging it was simple. We used a stud finder to locate one stud the cabinet would hang from, and put in drywall anchors on the other side of the back of the cabinet. Sometimes it amazes me how non-sturdy something can look, and how sturdy it really is. We drilled 3 drywall screws into the stud and 3 anchor screws into the anchor and everything is really sturdy. While I didn't hang all of my weight from it, I tugged at it pretty good and it stayed firm. The last thing you want is a big ole cabinet full of supplies falling down on your head while you're sitting there on the toilet...

The next day, my friend Kelcey came over to help me install the vanity cabinet. IT took some finageling, but we finally got it in w/o too much trouble. Then the toilet. Whoops. When we cut the floor underlayment, we left a square hole around the drain. But, it was a little bit too big in the back. I patched it up with a little of the floor grout. It's not perfect, but your eye isn't drawn to it like it would be if I'd left it open. And it was just the wooden subfloor that you could see, so no big deal.

Now that the vanity, sink, and toilet are all back in, it's time for the truly finishing touches. We'd purchased a curved shower curtain rod like you see in hotels these days. It lets you stand in the middle of the tub without having the cold clammy curtain brush up against you. Part of the installation is to take the bracket apart and screw the back of the bracket in place on the wall into "decorator" achors. They're like drywall anchors, only you hand screw them into place rather than drill pilot holes and hammer them in. We took it apart and set everythign on the sink. When we went to screw the brackets into place, instead of using the proper screws, we accidentally grabbed the screws that held the bracket together. Then when I tried to take them back out, they wouldn't come out. So we used some other machine screws I had laying around to hold the bracket together. But, alas, it's important to use the right screw for the job. The screws going into the decorator's anchors didn't hold. And the curtain rod fell down a few days later. And in doing so, it ripped a bunch of the drywall down with it.

Patching drywall isn't as easy as installing new drywall, but I've had some practice. ;-) So I patched the hole, sanded it smooth, re-painted and we got a new curtain rod from Bed Bath and Beyond. Luckily, they're not terribly expensive,m only $39.99. The time was consumed putting the drywall joint compound up, letting it dry, putting another layer up, letting it dry, putting a third layer up and letting it dry. Then I had to sand it, prime it, and put 2 coats of top coat on, all of which had to dry. And like I mentioned earlier, all of this took place after work at night. So it was a day between each application of joint compound and paint. But I have to admit, even though I know where the patch is, I still can't see evidence of it. Yay me!!!

The old mirror that hung over the sink wasn't bad or anything, but years of previous owners painting the bathroom without taking the mirror down left the edges smeared with paint. So we replaced it with a mirror that was the same size, only with a 1/2 inch bevel around the edges. Installing it was no problem.

When Charlie was here, he had me get a new elelctrical outlet, switches, and plate cover. Installing them is easy. Turn the power off at the breaker box, take the old ones out, and connect the new ones. Then I turned the power back on and tested them. Great!! They all worked. I went to put the plate cover back on, and the screw holes (in the outlet and switches) didn't line up perfectly. So I took the plate off and tried to move the switches and outlet around a bit. Did you notice how I didn't say anything about turning the power back off. Yeah. I stuck my hand into a live outlet. Needless to say, I felt a "little" twinge. And of course, by "little" I mean incredible. And by "twince" I mean painful shock coursing through my arm. Yikes!! So I go back downstairs and ask Heidi if I look ok. She's dumfounded. "Uhhhh why?" "Never mind. Do I look ok?" "yeah, you look fine, why?" "I just stuck my hand in the live outlet and got quite a shock. I just wanted to you look at me to be sure I wasn't messed up and didn't realize it." "YOU WHAT?!?!?!?!" Wives don't like hearing about all of the stupid things you do while working on the house. But I lived. So, it's all good.

Lessee. Paint, curtain rod, grout, what else is there? Oh yeah, the transition between the tile and carpet in the hallway. When I cut the floor tiles, I cut the one in the middle of the doorway a little wider than the others, so it sticks out into the threshhold a little. Doh!!! But no worries. Home Depot sells hardwood flooring, and some fo the engineered pieces they sell are transition pieces. I got one that was pretty wide to hide the mistake and install it. Granted, it took a 2nd dtrip to Home Depot to get one that was the proper height on both sides, but it just snaps into a track I screwed into the subfloor. If/When we replace the carpet with hardwood, that transition piece is easisly replacable.

Then I painted the doorway trim and we put the door back in place. All done. I'll post pics, as they say in Jamaica, "soon come"...

All in all, I'm glad we did it. And really glad I did it myself. I saved a bundle of money instead of hiring a contractor, and I learned some copper plumbing basics. Charlie, Justus, and Kelcey were all indisipensible in helping me with this. I'm actually looking forward to doing the downstairs bathroom since it's just a half bath. No tub to replace/tile. Just replace the vanity with a pedestal sink, install over toilet cabinet, paint the walls and tile the floor...

But that's another post...

Episode IV: A New Bachache

I had arranged to take Monday off from work knowing I wouldn't be done with everything I needed to do in only 3 full days. So I got up Monday morning and got to work on tiling the shower surround walls. We'd agreed to use 4inch by 4 inch white tiles with a 2 by 6 inch bullnosed border around the outter edges. And Heidi selected some scroll and rope tiles to make a decorative border near the top. And we decided to do a layout that's called a "running bond". Instead of lining the edges of the tiles up vertically as well as horizontally, we had every other horizontal row of tiles start with a half tile. It's more of a pain to grout, but we like that look better than a checkerboard layout where each tile is directly overtop of the tile below it.

I started to tile the entire long, back wall. After I got about 2 feet up the wall, I realized I had forgotten about the ceramic corner shelves Heidi and I had selected. Luckily, it wasn't too problematic to pop those couple of tiles off in the corner and put the shelves in. However, remember when I said that my bathroom wall corner joints weren't at a true 90 degree angle? That they were slightly over 90 degrees? Well, that came into play again. When I would stick the ceramic shelf onto the wall, I realized that if the shelf is firmly against one wall, it doesn't touch the other wall. grrrrrr So I attach it firmly to the back wall, and load the other edge up with tile adhesive. I got Heidi to come check on something for me, and while she was looking things over, I go downstairs to use the toilet. I come back up, and I see she's taken the shelf off of the wall and is trying to re-attach it. "What are you doing?!?!? Did it fall?" "No!! You had it in upsdide down!!" Doh!!! Well, at least she caught the mistake and corrected it for me. And honestly, having that joint slightly larger than 90 degrees is better than slightly
under 90 degrees. But a correct 90 degrees would have been preferred...

It's been a while since I gave you one of my home improvement tips, so here's another one. The tile shelves were about 1/2 the height of my 4x4 tiles. So I ended up with a gap between the top of the shelf and the bottom of the next row of tiles. Plus, the shelf's sides were wider than 1 tile, but shorter than 2 whole tiles. So I had to cut some tiles to cover the area left exposed. It would have been smart and more asthetically pleasing, not to mention easier to grout, if I
had cut notches to make L-shaped tiles to fit into place. Instead, I cut straight cuts into my tiles. Instead of an L shaped tile, I had a bunch of rectangles. Which had to be glued onto the wall individually, and then all of those tile intersections grouted. But live and learn. It looked pretty bad when the tiles were naked on the wall, but after grouting, and caulking the shelf joints, it looked a million times better.

I work my way up the back wall and put the 2 large and 1 small corner shelves in. Then I get close to the top and remembered that Heidi had selected some decorative tiles she wanted put in 2 rows from the top of the shower. But I remember this after I put in an entire row that's technically above where we wanted it. I have plenty of extra square tiles, so I would still do 2 rows above the decorative
tiles but that would put the top row of tiles way over the tops of our heads and would require holes for the shower head pipe coming out of the wall. After holding some up on the wall, Heidi says she can live with just one more row of square tiles above the decorative ones, so I finish the back wall and move on to the side walls.

Here again is where the non-90 degree corners of my bathroom come to bite me in the rear. I started on the outside edge and first laid the 2x6 tiles up from the cove tile on the floor. We used a 4 foot level and marked a plumb (level up and down) line up to where the tiles will stop. Then as I start to lay the tiles even with the bottom of the tub ledge the flange of the tub stuck out a little bit from behind the Hardi Backer. Charlie had told me this would happen, so I was ready for it. I just really buttered up the backs of the tiles that fit in those places really well. They stuck to the hardi backer pretty well.

I worked my way up the wall, then as I got about 2/3 of the way up, I realized the horizontal lines of the tiles weren't matching up with the lines of the back wall. And it was significant. So, one row of tiles had the bottom 1/8-1/4 inch nipped off with the tile nippers Charlie left with me. It's not so obvious once the white grout was put in place, but when the tiles were bare, the gap was quite jagged looking. When I did the other side wall, I was more careful that the tiles didn't drift too much vertically. We're pretty happy with the results.

Once the tile was all up, it was pretty late, so I knocked off and had dinner. I grouted the next day after work and it looked pretty good. I of course learned some important tile work rules. Like, when you're putting tile adhesive on the wall, don't "over-spread" past the edges of where your tiles will go. I smeared tile adhesive beyond the edge that would be covered by the 2x6 bull nosed tiles. After it had dried, I thought I would just sand it smooth like you do with drywall compound. But tile adhesive is like concrete. It's pretty tough. I got the sandpaper out and started to work on it. Instead of the sandpaper making the tile adhesive nice and smooth, the tile adhesive made the sandpaper nice and smooth!! Admitedly, the corner by the toilet was the edge where this was more pronounced and since people don't usually look at that wall too much, I wasn't too upset. And once we painted, it looked not bad at all.

OK Lemme do another post immediately after this one. I wanna wrap this up since I've been done for a few weeks now. :-)

Episode III Revenge of the Plumbing

Sunday dawned bright and/or early. More early than bright, but hey, who can complain? By now Justus and I were incredibly sore. They always say when you start some sort of regular physical activity, it's the 3rd day that you're most sore. Ibuprofen: The breakfast of Champions.

Let's review the current situation. The new tub is in and the Hardi-Back wallboards are up in the shower surround. So it's time to lay the floor underlayment. Since Charlie's still there (note that not a lot of humourous mishaps happen when Charlie's involved, as opposed to when I'm doing the work by myself...) it goes pretty straight forward. Charlie planned a layout that had the boards arranged such that I wouldn't have to cut a circular hole in the middle of a big board for my toilet drain. Much easier installation. So we laid the boards down and used subfloor glue and drywall screws to hold them in place.

Now it's time for one last piece of plumbing work before Charlene and Charlie leave. The tub spout pipe. Keep in mind it's Sunday late morning by now. We get out the installation instructions again and look for how far from the wall we're supposed to have the pipe stick out. Hmmmm Can't find it. 3 of us scour those directions and find every other single dimension we needed. How far apart the holes in your wall needed to be for the faucet handle connections, how far vertically the fuacet handle connection needed to be from the tub spout, etc. But nowhere could we find the length that the tub spout pipe needed to come out from the wall. Since the instructions explicitly say 7 day of the week tech support, we call. AND GET A RECORDING THAT THEY'RE CLOSED ON SUNDAY!!!! Bastards. So since Charlie is experienced in these matters, he measures, estimates, dry fits, and determines where he thinks he should cut the spout pipe and attach the fitting on the end that the tub spout will screw into.

Yay!!! We're done with plumbing. Oh. Wait a second. We notice that we can't get the eustacheon cap (that circular metal cap/flange that surrounds your pipes as they come out of the wall. It hides the edges of the hole) won't slip over the threaded end fitting. Charlie says "OK No problem. We'll just sweat (use the blow torch) it off. So we fire up the blow torch and he proceeds to heat the fitting. The idea is we'll re-melt the solder and pop the end piece off. Then slip the eustacheon cover back on, then re-sweat the end fitting back on. Wellllll let's just say solder doesn't re-melt as easily when it's been previously melted and "sucked" up into a pipe/fitting joint. Justus ended up going into the office/brewery/bike storage/future nursery to hold onto the pipes from the access panel side while Charlie pulled with pair of pliers from the tub side. It still took a good hour+ for us to get that fitting off. But we finally did and got the eustacheon cap and pipe fitting back on. Then, after things cooled down from the hot flame being applied we dry fitted the tub spout on. Perfect!!

By now, it's early afternoon on a Sunday and it's a ~4 hour drive for my sister and her husband to get back home, so they head on out. And we're also to the point that I'm ready to start tiling floor, so Justus heads home too. I can't stress enough how much it helped out having Justus, Charlie, Charlene, and Kelcey come help me that weekend. The plumbing work I would have had to contract out, which would have been "not cheap" shall we say. And the demolotion work would have taken me a LOT longer. And the tub wouldn't have been installed properly... Thanks again guys!!

So, Heidi and I say our goodbyes and I start tiling the floor. Tile work isn't difficult, as long as you pay attention to details and finishing areas. Charlie had helped me mark the floor before they left. We decided to have a whole square tile start in the floor by the tub against the wall oppisite of the toilet. That's the part of the floor you see when you first walk into the bathroom. I laid the tiles across the floor at the base of the tub and work my way towards the door. Since we'd laid the underlayment the way we did, notching my tiles for the toilet drain was a piece of cake. Especially since Charlie had left me his tile wet saw. When I'd read or heard about tile wet saws before, I understood the principle. You have a carbide tipped circular saw that cuts into your porcelain or ceramic tile. To keep it from chipping, it has water run over the saw blade. I'd always assumed these things needed a hookup to a water supply or something complicated like that. Nope. It's just a basin of water under the cutting surface that the saw blade passes throughas it rotates. The tile saw has a guard over the blade that A) protects you from the spinning blade and B) protects you from the water spray the blade throws. But when you're cutting notches into tiles and not just straight cuts all the way across, you have to lift the guard up so you can see where the blade is cutting into your tile to know when to stop cutting. And you get splattered. And it's not just clean, clear water. It's water that is tinted the color of your tile. Since we chose a sandy beige color (for some reason the manufacturer doesn't have sample pics on the web. Nor does Home Depot...) I got covered in a muddy, brown spray. But only once. I started wearing a lawn and leaf back like a crab house bib to stay relatively dry. So, the tile floor installation went pretty smoothly.

Until I got to the doorway. The tiles that go across the doorway ended up not being the same length. So, I have the middle tile of the three that go across the doorway sticking out into the carpetting more than the other 2. OK, no problem, I'll just have to get a transition piece of oak from Home Depot. And then I notice that I didn't notch around the door frame. My tile just sticks up to the edge of the frame instead of going all they around the door frame. 2 ways I could have fixed this. I could have put a tile on the floor and taken a hand saw and cut my door frame away at the level of the tiles. Or, I could have notched my tile to closer hug the door frame. Instead, I ended up with these huge gaps that needed a LOT of grout. sigh. Live and learn.

The next day I got up and grouted the joints and started on the bath wall tiles. But, that's a post for this weekend...

The bathroom saga part II (The rise of the tub)

OK, when we last left our intrepid home remodeller, his bathroom was gutted. The vanity, sink, toilet, tub, floor tiles, underlayment, wall tiles, and wall boards around the shower were all gone. Stripped to the concrete block that separates me from my neighbor (I live in a townhouse). My brother in law Charlie, sister Charlene and I agreed to meet at McDonald's Saturday morning to pick up breakfast. Now people who know me know that I usually get up early on the weekends for very few reasons. Riding my bike for a LONG ride, to go hiking, and (exceeding less often these days) to go fishing. But when the alarm when off at 6:40, I dragged my tired self out of bed. We had a long day and needed to get started. I woke Heidi(wife) and Justus(my other brother in law) up and asked what they wanted from Mickey D's and headed on down.

Charlene, Charlie, and I picked up the food and went back to the house. Charlie made a shopping list for Home Depot as he looked over what we wanted to do and could look at the new pieces we got. It's quite impressive watcing someone do a job when they have massive amounts of experience with it. Most projects for me have what my wife calls the "Home Depot Scale." The more trips to Home Depot to finish a project, the more difficult it must be. For me to plan and do everything Charlie did would have entailed at least 15 trips to Home Depot. But he's good, so it only took a couple of trips. And one of those was simply because one Home Depot didn't have what we needed.

So, anyway, Charlie, Justus and I head off to Home Depot to gather materials. By now, Charlie had selected a few things that Heidi and I had previously bought as "need to return these, we'll get a better X today." So, we picked up various plumbing supplies (copper pipe, assorted connectors, and some propane for his torch to be on the safe side since his propane cannister was quite old he says). We get back home and get started.

Since we wanted to replace our existing nasty faucet handles with newer ones from Price Pfister, we had to cut the old faucet assemly out of the wall and replace it with the new ones. Charlie had said that would take the longest amount of time that day, and he was right. It turns out, to replace the faucet handles, you have to also replace the "manifold" that's behind your walls too. It's not a "plug and play" type of configuration where you just have to match up 3 handle/2 handle/1 knob and measure the distances between the handles. You have to take your Pipe Cutter and cut out your existing faucet assembly, and then use your handy dandy Plumber's Torch" and solder your new manifold and connections in place.

Now, even when Charlie said this would take the longest to do, I didn't realize just how long it would take. I think we took close to 4 hours to do this. But he did a nice job. We originally didn't have any water shut off valves in the access panel. If we wanted to do any plumbing work in the shower, we had to shut off the water to the whole house, which is slightly inconvenient. So, Charlie installed 2 shutoff valves for us. Then he cut the old manifold out, and installed the new one. One of the reasons I wanted help from Charlie is that I have no plumbing experience whatsoever. So I kept asking lots of questions as he was wokring. He was happy to answer them of course, but I didn't want to be the annoying "client" that contractors hate, so just watched most of the time.

Soldering, or "sweating" copper pipes together is not difficult at all. As long as you use some common sense. I had always thought that the way solder works is you melt it and then "drip" it into the area you want sealed. Not so. As you heat the pipe up, it actually draws the melted solder up into the hottest area. So, the idea is to heat the area you want sealed up, then stick your solder wire into the joint and melt a little bit of it. It will get sucked up into the joint. When you're soldering, your pipes don't get red hot and start glowing, but they do get pretty damn hot. So, be careful you don't touch anything you've just soldered. ;-)

After the plumbing work was all done, it was time to install the new bathtub. When we were planning the tub, I thought I wanted to put in a whirlpool soaker tub. But once we actually measured the area we had to work with, we realized our tub selection was going to be quite limited. The room was only 5 feet wide, and the toilet's drain was close enough to the the tub edge, that we were had to get a standard 60" by 30" tub. I got an American Standard Princeton tub that's made with their metal alloy material called Americast. It's stronger than plain fiberglass, but much lighter than cast iron or plain steel. Plus, it has a sloped back end, so taking a bath will be a little more comfortable with the back support instead of a straight up and down tub like I had previously. It has a white porecelain finish and non-slip areas on the bottom.

It's now time for the joy of installing a new tub. You position it in place and level it in every dimension known to man. I had a 3rd helper this time when my friend Kelcey showed up. First we had to attach a ledger board to the concrete block wall that the back of the tub will sit on. A ledger board is any type of support system that acts like a ledge that something else sits on. We attached to the wall 2 short pieces of 2x4s vertically at either end, and ran a long 2x4 horizontally across the length of the wall. Normally, you would just nail your ledger board into your studs. But my concrete wall presented a problem here. Instead of full 2x4 studs, they had narrow "furring strips" of wood up. So, we did the support 2x4 to hold the weight and used subfloor glue to hold everything in place. One cool aspect of this part of the project was that I got to use a new Christmas present that Heidi's cousin got me. Cooking with blow torches (Creme Brulee) and using lasers on things is really cool. But in the end, it is just a circular saw that I used to cut some 2x4's.

Before we could actually put the tub in place, we needed to replace the overflow pipe and the drain itself with the new ones we wanted installed. These pieces form a kind of T on its side. The overflow pipe connects to the overflow plate on your tub, and the "base" of the T goes to the drain of your tub. This whole assembly connects to your main sewer pipe. It turned out the connection there was below the subfloor level. So, instead of wholesale replacement, we connected the piece from the tub drain to the T connector, then connected the overflow drain piece to the T connector. We had selected an overflow cover place with a lever stopper instead of the old fashioned way of having a rubber plug you put in the tub drain manually. Much like the drawing of this one. There is a little piece of tubing that when you activate the lever, it drops into place and blocks the tub drain piece. It turns out that that copper piece is almost custom fitted to the T intersection piece of your pipes. And since we left the original one place, the new copper piece wasn't big enough to "plug" the drain. I've been back to Home Depot once already to try and get a new larger one, but apparently that's going to require a custom piece that I'll have to go to a plumbing supply store to get. :-\ Charlie says there are plumbers out there who would be able to get that whole T connection out from under the subfloor, but I sure don't see how. They must have specialized tools or secret Jedi Mind Trick powers that work on metal pipes or something. I dunno.

Once the tub was in place, it's time to put up the wall boards. I'd mentioned in my previous post we were replacing them with Hadi-Back brand of underlayment. This stuff requires a carbide tipped blade to cut if you want to cut it with a circular saw. It would destroy a normal wood cutting saw blade. Charlie had brought his saw with his carbide tipped blade, so we used that. With the pieces cut to lay out just right, we installed the Hardi-Back up on the walls. Remember when I mentioned those furring strips on concrete blocks? That's how my previous drywall was attached. The special Hardi-Back screws that we got were too long to attach to the furring strips. They would go all the way through the strips and hit the concrete block and then the head of the screw would stick out from the wall 1/4 inch or so. We discovered that some other screws we'd picked up would do the job, so Charlie used those instead.

It was at this point we finally realized something with many reaching consequences. The walls that form my bathtub cove are not at perfect 90 degree angles to each other. They're slightly larger than 90 degrees. When we attached the Hardi-Back to the walls, the board were perfect placed over the flange of the tub close to the corners, but as we got further from the corners, they pulled away from the flange some. Charlie said no problem, I just needed to put LOTS of tile adhesive on that bottom row of tiles to secure them in place. It's all good.

By now it's pretty late in the day and we're exhausted. Especially Justus and I who'd spent the day before doing all of the demolition work gutting the bathroom. Our muscles were sore, our joints stiff from bending, squatting, and kneeling in unnatural positions for 2 days in a row. It was around 7 or 8:00 I think, so we called it a night and went to Famous Dave's BBQ for dinner.

What did we learn today? We learned a lot about how to do a home improvement project the right way. Planning planning planning. Not just what pieces you want to install, or layouts, and measurements. But when you're at Home Depot, go ahead and pick up anything and everything you think you might even remotely need to do your project. Then don't open stuff until you actually need to use it. Home Depot has a great return policy. As long as they can re-sell it, they'll take anything back. For instance, I was a little worried about the Propane tank we'd bought. Charlie's propane was just fine, so we never needed the one we bought. See, if I'd been planning this, I would have said, "Oh, if this other tank runs out, or doesn't work, I'll just go back to Home Depot and get another one." Which of course means work stops on the project, and you burn more gas in your car driving to and fro. Instead Charlie says to get everything at once, and return what you need. All in all, we ended up returning a little over $100 worth of stuff that we had bought, and still have a few things to take back to Lowe's that we didn't use.

I'll have more in a few days. I'll post pics eventually, too. I'm still doing the finish work at night and keep forgetting to bring digital copies of the pics into work to post...

The Bathroom Saga part I

When I bought my place, the upstairs full bathroom had some cracks in the grout between the shower wall tiles, and the caulk seal around the bottom of the tub was in bad shape with multiple cracks letting water behind the walls. So, I stripped the caulk up, bought a Dremel with special carbide tips and a guard specifically made for removing grout w/o tearing up your tiles, and went to town on it. Then, re-grouted and re-caulked everywhere. That was several months ago. The problem was originally caused by a leaky faucet behind the wall. I tightened up the faucet and stopped the leak and thought everything was groovy.

Well, apparently not. When my wife and I installed a closet organizational system in the room next to the bathroom, I took the plumbing access panel door out to paint it and looked again at the backside of my plumbing work. The greenboard that was the tile backing had completely disintigrated. The only thing holding the tiles up was friction and the grout. yikes!! So I called my sister's husband, who used to run his own electrical contractor's business and is exceedingly handy with all things home repair related. He confirmed that this fell into the "bad" category of things to have happen in your home. So I decided to replace the greenboard and re-tile that area. I also decided to take the opportunity to "fix" my bathtub. Over the years since it was insalled, it had broken one of the supports and was no longer level front to back. It tilted toward the front, which was causing the joint between tiles and the top of the tub to be more than the 3/8" that's the largest recommended caulk joint. And by "fix" I mean, replace. I've never liked the tub. It was old, scratched, and impossible to clean since the finish was ruined. And since I'm replacing the tub, now is a good time to replace the vinyl tile floor with ceramic tiles. And since everything has to come out to replace the tiles, might as well replace the ugle vanity cabinet and sink top too.

So began the great debate between me and my wife. Now, I'm no general contractor, but I'm not afraid of tools, or fairly innocuous projects. In the past, I've helped my ex-father-in-law finish a basement, so I've built stud walls, ran electrical wife, installed outlets, light fixtures, and recessed lights, and done drywall work. And helped my sister's husband do some drywall installation. But nothing involving plumbing. My wife was trying to encourage me to have a contractor come in and replace the tub instead of doing it myself. I argued why should I pay someone else to do something that I am more than capable of doing myself with some more skilled help? I think what really put it over the top for me was I told her if we did have a contractor do it, she'd have to be the one to stay home with them while they did it since I'd have to work extra hours to pay for it. I sure didn't want workers I don't know coming and going in my home when no one was home. "Plus my sister's husband said they'd come up and help me, so we can replace the ugly standard faucets with pretty ones like you wanted to do before..."

And so the planning begain. We decided to replace the wallboard, shower tile, tub, faucets, vanity cabinet, sink, floor tile, light fixture, medecine cabinet, and shower curtain rod. And install new towel bars, a recessed light over the shower, and a wall cabinet over the toilet. The _only_ thing we weren't replacing was the toilet. (That is as long as I could get it out and back in w/o breaking it...) Now that the project was growing in scope, my wife got nervous again, but was settled the more she saw me researching what needed to be done, and talking to my sister's husband on the phone. The plans were set in motion. We asked our friend who lives a few courtywards away in our same townhouse community if we could use her shower at night since we were destroying our one and only shower. She graciously said we sure could. (Thanks M!!!) I, with my wife's brother's help, would gut the bathroom the Friday after MLK day, and my sister and her husband would come up (they live 4 hours away) for the weekend and help me install new stuff.

My wife and I started to look closer at the various items we wanted put in. We looked at tubs, vanity cabinets, sinks, faucet handles, medecine cabinets, ceramic floor tiles and so on. And looked. And looked. We finally started to pick certain ones out and take them home. Our place isn't that big, so we just stockpiled it in the living room floor. We spent a week with a net tub still in its shipping carton as our coffee table. Now that we were actually paying money and taking things home instead of just looking at them, we got a little anxious. We realized this was for real, and not just idle dreaming. But we were ok with that.

On Friday, the 20th, my brother in law and I took the day off from work and gutted the room. We first removed the toilet. Pretty straight forward, just turn the water off, flush it, remove the closet bolts holding it to the floor, and lift straight up, over the tub lip and drain the rest of it into the tub. Here's a tip to anyone doing this themselves in the future: When you lift the toilet, go straight up. Do not tip the toilet one way or another. There's a significant amount of toilet water left in the bowl that escapes out the drain in the bottom if you tip it. I'm just sayin that having toilet water drain all of you and your floors isn't the most sanitary... Then we disconnected the water supply from the sink and removed the sink top from the vanity. We kept it in case we needed to see how something was hooked up. Keeping old pieces of things when replacing them is a pretty good idea until you have everything installed like you want it. That way, if you need a part from Home Depot, you take the old one with you and say, "I need this. Where do I go?"...

Then we ripped the vanity cabinet from the wall. Here's another tip: When removing cabinetry from walls, be sure you take out all of the screws holding the cabinet in place. If you don't, you'll rip some of your drywall down and your wife will make you patch it. After we got that out, my brother in law started to remove the tiles from the wall around the shower with a cold chisel, and I started removing the nasty vinyl tile squares from the floor. I tried just pulling them up, or scraping under them with a 12" drywall/putty knife, but the glue held. So I did something I read about and it worked great. I put a towel down on the tiles, and set my wife's iron on super high and heated the tiles up. This caused the glue to release its bond with the underlayment. I still had to work the drywall knife under the tiles, but it came up much easier after that. I eventually worked out a rhythm where I would be removing one tile while just letting the iron warm up the next tile. Since the bathroom was only 7'X5', and 5'X2.5' was under the tub, removing the floor tiles went pretty quick, so I helped my brother-in-law with the tiles next. A drywall knife makes much easier work than a thicker cold chisel when prying wall tiles down.

Here's another home improvement tip: Just like when your moving, and you don't load up your biggest strongest box with your books, don't load up your biggest strongest box with ceramic tiles before making a dumpster run. It gets a wee bit heavy.

Now that the tiles were down, we removed the greenboard from the shower surround. Kind of fun. Just take a hammer/pry-bar "claw" and whack, then pull pieces out. That it is, it was fun until I realized we needed a nice straight edge to match up with the new underlayment we were going to install. So we used the utility knives and cut a fairly straight edge. One of the problems I realized that my bathroom had, was it wasn't greenboard they used in my shower surround. It was plain old normal drywall. I don't know how much of a difference it would have made since my problem started with a leaky faucet behind the wall, but it made me angry with the builders 30 years ago. Oh well. We were replacing it with some new stuff called Hardi-Back. It's a fiberboard that you can use in wet environments (like shower surrounds) or on the floor as an underlayment. Anyway, we only had the tub left now.

The first step in removing a tub is to remove the drain from the drain pipe. These are usually just screwed in place and you use a special tub drain removal wrench tool type thing to remove it. A coworker lent me his. It's a 4 segment thing you stick down in the tub and seat it with the cross of metal in your tub drain. Then you stick a metal rod (About as thick as your pinkie) through this hole in the wrench and turn it while you push down. Now, the metal rod my coworker gave me is just a LONG toggle bolt, and it wasn't staright as an arrow. When he gave it to me, he said, "if you bend it, just try to bend it back." So, my brother-in-law and I took turns trying to move this thing. It would not budge. We seriously came close to dislocating our shoulders trying to turn this thing. We bent the bolt several times. We finally gave up and went to Home Depot for some advice. After 20 minutes of trying to find someone who spoke English natively, or at least fluently, we bought a spray can of Liquid Wrench, and a new drain plug tool that kind of looks like a beefed up tuning fork that would let me use a BIG screwdriver as the metal rod and returned home. I sprayed the Liquid Wrench all over the bottom of the drain connection from the access panel and we again took turns trying to remove it. We finally got it to barely make 1/16th of a turn. So we slowly worked it back and forth to work the Liquid Wrench into the joint until we finally were able to unscrew the drain all of the way. 2 hours. It took 2 freaking hours to remove a tub drain.

With the tub drain removed, it was time to remove the tub itself. I _thought_ I had a cast iron tub, so a sledgehammer would be needed to break it into smaller pieces to make it more manageable to remove. But it turned out, it was made of steel, which just dented when we whacked at it as hard as we could with the sledge. But, since it was steel, that also meant it was much lighter. So no need to bust it into smaller pieces. We just tilted it up, pivoted it, and picked it up. Here's another of my patented Home Improvement tips: Be careful when pivoting an item that's 5' long out of a cubby that's 5' wide. The diagonal is longer than 5', and you'll end up with a nice deep gouge in your drywall, that again, your wife will make you patch. Now we were able to pull up the underlayment that the vinyl tiles had been glued to. It was just dense, thin particle board, so I just pried it up with my drywall knife and mallet.

So, now we have a completely gutted bathroom. The fixtures are all removed, the floor stripped, the tub surround stripped down to the studs. My sister and her husband showed up later that night and checked what we did. They seemed pretty satisfied with the demolition work, so we agreed to meet tomorrow morning at 7:00 at McDonald's to get breakfast and plan the day and make a Home Depot run.

Ok this is _much_ longer than I thought it would be, so check back in a few days and I'll tell you how the new construction went.