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...