It has been a long two days. I just keep finding more issues. We ordered a special shower nozzle. I thought it was the valve and nozzle, it turns out it was not. I was able to get a Delta valve in Pendleton that will work just fine. We worked on getting the pocket door opened up but we did not have a long enough self tapping screw so that involved another trip to town. Regular screws were not going to go into the metal support studs for the pocket door.
We did manage to get the pocket door opening cut out. Mr Rainman suggested we go to Hermiston to buy all of the Schluter supplies so we have them on hand and can potentially avoid the upcoming snowstorm. We did not manage to avoid the snowstorm but the road did not get closed on us. I did however get pulled over by the police and issued a warning for driving too fast in bad weather conditions. This was fair but I am unsure why we got picked out of moving traffic. The officer was right, we went a lot slower the rest of the day.
The remodel store was amazing and they had 90% of what we needed. There is a lot of stuff to putting the room together according to how Schluter wants it so that the waterproof guarantee is met. You have to take pictures and document the process and follow their installation instructions. So their website and YouTube videos will be a necessary component of getting this all put together correctly. I have to say that we are only going to do this once and we do not want it to ever damage our house. Water is incredibly insidious and can damage a lot of your house before you catch it. We had to tear out an entire master bath and subfloor in our second home due to a crack in our tile wall in the shower. We don’t want to do this job again in our lifetimes.
The entire Schluter waterproofing material to do the entire bathroom was around $3500. The grout alone was $800, it is 100% epoxy based and nasty stuff to work with but it is the same stuff you would use in a pool so water is really not an issue. Now if you have been to the hardware store you know that a 5# box of screws is now $40. We have already used about $150 in screws alone in a 6’x8’x8’ room. We have over $1500 in lumber for that little room. It is not cheap to remodel currently, and honestly, I do not see the prices dropping. By the time we are done we will have spent $15k in materials. This will have gotten us exactly what we wanted a waterproof room that has an entire tiled floor, tiled shower floor to ceiling, a pocket door, custom vanity (I altered) with granite top, custom oak linen cabinet made to fit the space (I build), smooth profile toilet, in wall cubbies in shower and medicine cabinet, in ceiling heater, Bluetooth speaker vent fan, tile 4’ up all other interior walls, tongue and groove wood above the tiles and a tin tile stamped patterned metal ceiling with tin crown molding. Doing the work yourself is the key to keeping the cost down. It will take at least four weeks to get it done, maybe a little longer for the finishing touches. I am told that this is a 100% completion project and there will be no stopping until it is done. I may have to order some new wood trim for the hallway walls but that will wait until we are at that step so we can order the necessary material only. But yes this is the last BIG ticket item for our house to be completely remodeled. It will have only taken us 20 years to rehab and repair our lovely home.
We have enough material to start getting stuff done. We will install the plywood over entire room then start installing the Kerdi-Board on the walls, then put the membrane on the floor. We are going to tile the main part of the bath first both the floor and walls while we wait for the shower pan insert. There is plenty of work for us to do while we are waiting for the material!
I was unable to pick the grout color so I brought home paper samples and set them on the tiles. We looked at them for a while then made a choice. We are going to go with the “Smoke Grey”, the top one on the picture for all of the grout in the entire room. Now I just have to call in my choice so the coloring can be ordered. We have to mix it into the epoxy when we combine the A & B bottles.
We spotted this weird slide track on our back hillside near the chicken coop. We think it is a raccoon sliding down the hill in the snow. We have seen raccoon tracks in the snow so I know there is at least one living in the barn still. So far I have not lost any chickens to it this year.
Stewart Creek Somethings 