No plan survives first contact. It snowed last night, a lot. So I had to spend 2.5 hours outside digging out our walk way and then hooking up our snow blade. I almost never use the snow blade so it had sunk down into the ground on the attachment side and I had to pull it out with the tractor. This of course meant that I could not lock it into place until I dug the dirt and grass out of the way. So the plow took me about 25 minutes to hook up by itself. Once I had it hooked up I went to town on the driveway. You have to be careful not to dig into the gravel because the blade will tear it up. I did pretty good but the driveway is a little wider now near the road.
The elk came down with the snow but they appear to be staying on the upper hillside and the upper CRP. The wheat field is fallow this year so they cannot damage it. They also appear to be staying out of the bottoms. There really is not any food there but I thought they might try and find it and tear up the fields but so far they are not. Last time they came down in a huge group they started tearing up the snow and ground to get to the grass. They made a mess of my hay field.
Mr Rainman picked up some longer 2×4 and some 2×6. We are going to make the closet hall wall a 2×6 deep as it was already! This will make it a lot easier to fit the pocket door and to have something to nail into when applying the wall. I ordered the frame yesterday and it should be here early next week.
One of the surprises was how much I am going to have to rewire. Now that the walls are open all of the stuff that was done blind will have to be updated and secured. I need a different type of electrical box to be able to slide it in and out to account for the plywood/schluter/tile thickness. I may even have to mount the boxes after I put up the plywood as I am unsure if they will come out 1.5 inches. I am pretty sure they only adjust up to one inch. I need to move the electrical outlets to the left and right on one wall. I need to move the fan switch and light over two feet so you can reach it when you enter via the pocket door. I need to install 10g wire for the 220V electrical heater in the ceiling and wire in a switch. I just thought of this, the location for the switch was going to be in the cabinet but I was going to put it on the side where the pocket door needs to go! That means I cannot put a recessed box in the wall, I will have to put a box inside the cabinet, good thing I just thought of that, disaster averted. I have already removed the hall lights and fixed their anchors and tightened them back up. They are perfect now, for the last 18 years they have been a touch saggy, I was probably the only one who noticed. I also have to lower the light over the sink, I used the old electrical box and it was three inches from the ceiling. Not aesthetically ideal I am told, so the new light height has been marked.
I had the wife go into the room yesterday and I marked out the three in shower cubby locations and heights. The medicine cabinet/mirror cannot go over the sink as the plumbing is in the way, I was going to move it two feet to the left. You would not be able to see yourself in the mirror while standing at the sink so this was shot down. The sunken medicine cabinet is going over the toilet and we will be finding a mirror for the bathroom. This is why the project manager has to have early input, it saves a lot of retro job changes later on.
We did discover an “ugh ooh” yesterday. The floor under the tub and back wall cabinet is shot. There used to be a toilet where the cabinet was previously located. Mr Rainman almost fell through the floor over by the tub drain and I almost fell through floor over by the old toilet spot. So it looks like we will have to tear out at least three feet of subfloor and reinstall new subfloor. This will make running the power much easier. So it is what it is. The wife says I should have expected it. She is right, it has really been quite a while since I truly tore into the bones of the house and this room was a parlor before and they just pieced together two more walls to make it a bathroom. If I had truly known how bad the walls were I may have prioritized the bathrooms. I know now I should have added that second bathroom upstairs on year 2! Not waited until the teenager was out of the house. Well, it is getting fixed now and we will reinforce the walls and run full intact studs the length of the wall, not pieced together things. They had a window in the wall of the bathroom and just pieced in a couple of 2×4 chunks when they took it out. No sill plate or box for the window, now in their defense it is a non-weight bearing wall but still it makes it a lot easier to set the window. They just cut the shiplap on both sides and slipped the window in place.
I am hoping on day three we can get the floor torn up and I can see whether we need to purchase one or two pieces of 3/4” plywood subfloor. Milo stayed home with me and he is so used to staying with Annmarie at work that he refused to let me out of his sight all day. He spent most of the day trying to get into the bathroom. Once he figured out we would not let him into it, he laid out in the hallway and supervised our progress.
Stewart Creek Somethings 