Month: February 2025

Bathroom Remodel day 16

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I was flying solo yesterday as Mr Rainman had a birthday to celebrate. I was staring at the walls and deciding where to start with the Kerdi-board install when it dawned on me that so far nothing has really worked out easily for me. So maybe I better check the niche rough openings just for shits and giggles. The box says that they are 12×20” niches. So we made the rough openings 12.25×20.25”, so there was a little adjustment room. The box lied. They are more like 12.75×20.75”! I started looking at the plywood hard to see how much I would have to remove to get to the internal cross pieces I had installed to stiffen the niche area. I recognize that Schluter said I did not have to do this, but with all the other reinforcement I had to do on the bathroom walls I just tossed this in as a bonus. I ended up needing to cut out a small section through the edge of a 2×4. The oscillating saw was the only tool I have that would go deep enough and not tear up the back wall also.

The trouble with this is I don’t have enough batteries for the Makita saw. I was chewing through a battery every five minutes. Plus I needed more blades. So I ended up using the Makita and the new DeWalt until one got so warm that my gloves hands were hot then I switched out to the other brand. I will say that the quick blade switch ability on the DeWalt is very nice. I kept alternating between wood only and a blade that could cut through the screws. It took almost four hours to fix this “mistake”. It would have taken a day plus if I had managed to get the Kerdi-board installed before I caught it. I made sure to dry fit the niches before calling it a success.

The Kerdi-board is very easy to install. I have been super impressed so far. I started on the easy section of the bathroom. It is really easy to cut with just a razor knife and the lines painted on it make it easy to freehand the cut. As I was installing the special washers it dawned on me that I did not have enough washers and screws. They did the calculations for a washer every twelve inches but when doing small sections you still need two washers.

The weekend is coming up so I had to stop and make a trip to Hermiston to get more washers and screws! Another two hours of drive time. My timeline is fluid at this point. I am making day to day predictions and at the end of the day refining them. My current prediction is that we will be laying tile by Saturday. I am going to stick with it!

We wanted the bathroom vanity to look like an antique wash basin. The granite I picked out had a lot of purple in it and I wanted to see what the sink would look like on it so I pulled it out of the box and just set it on the granite top. I like it, most of the room will be grey so this color is central to our decorating scheme.

Bathroom remodel day 15

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Projects never go on the timeframe I quote, we should all know this by now. I quoted a month for the entire bathroom rebuild. I thought that was from start to 100% finish. That is not going to happen. When we get to the 95% mark we will need to measure and order the new wood trim and it will take a few weeks for it to arrive. But the goal is still to take a shower and use the sink and toilet by the end of the month.

Yesterday we got the floor cut and then I had to drive to the Tricities to pick up our vanity and granite top. I brought some towels and between the towels and tarps I was able to put the granite top in the bed of the pickup and wrap up the vanity in a tarp and strap it down for the ride home. It was of course raining hard the entire trip. While I was driving to the Tricities the Tile store called to tell me that my shower pan would be another week before it arrived! This is not good news. I stopped by there on my way home to get more all set and to get the depth of the shower pan 2 5/16”. This way I can set the wall tile start height above this and continue to get the shower tiled in. I can do the walls outside of the shower and the floor outside the shower. If I am that far ahead and still no pan, I will grout the floor and wall tiles outside the shower and install the vanity. There are always projects to keep going on. I could install the tongue and groove above the tile. This will not slow down progress. Mr Rainman has been working on getting our old door stripped so we can recondition it and use it as our pocket door. We staged the Kerdi-board in the hallway so I could install it on Thursday.

Mr Rainman got the entire floor down and attached while I was doing errands. We are now ready for the Kerdi-board.

Bathroom Day 14

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I am not sure I should count this as day 14, because I have had to work at the paying job a couple of the days. But I decided to count the days I am on vacation and the clock is ticking no matter what else is going on in our lives. We are past the halfway mark on the calendar and tile is not going up on the wall yet. I recognize that this is a concern. I recognize that it seems like progress is fairly slow but we are actually moving forward every day, I tell myself that repeatedly.

Mr Rainman and I got the rest of the plywood up on the walls. Surprisingly, the room is fairly square except for a corner of the shower by the shower head. I had to watch another video yesterday about the Schluter Kerdi-board. I can use mastic to butter out the corner and get that portion of the shower all level. The way we installed the plumbing we had to cut out some of the plywood to get it to fit correctly. Kerdi-board is getting installed over the plywood then tile so it will be fine. The plywood was an extra step and one that cost about 3-4 days of labor. It is so we can install grab rails anywhere we want and it will make putting up the tongue and groove and the tin ceiling much easier.

Mr Rainman and I had a discussion about the tongue and groove yesterday. Now when you look at the pocket door you can really see the 1/2” slant. I truly believe this is because nothing is breaking up your eye. You can only see it when you are standing in the shower looking outwards. I need to consult with the project supervisor to determine what direction she wants the tongue and groove but I think a 45 degree angle will totally throw off your eye and make it disappear.

That being said as she was inspecting the progress yesterday she spotted a mistake! I had cut one of the niche openings too wide. This happened because we did not install vertical 2×4 bumpers in the opening like we did the other three niches. I don’t know why we did not do the vertical ones. The horizontal ones are in place. Luckily, she spotted it so today it will be corrected with a couple of 2×6 boards installed vertically, problem solved while still little!

Mr Rainman put stripper on the door yesterday so we can get the paint off of it and start getting it rehabbed. We are going to have to plug one end of the latch and then drill new holes for the new handle and lock. It is doable but not super easy. Pretty much the story of the entire job to date.

The granite place called for the third time yesterday so I am going to have to make a trip over there today. The rest of our Schluter order was supposed to be in the store today also, so I am hoping to get both of them in one trip.

The outside temperature is warmer and now it is starting to rain on us. The problem with this is the wood wants to get wet and the back runoff creek bed is now really starting to fill up. It is roaring at night but only about 18” deep at this point. It is moving incredibly fast as the rain and melting snow start coming off the lower mountain foothills. I still have about fifty feet of diversion dike to complete up by the old chicken coop. That is going to have to get on the list this spring. It is too muddy at this point to do anything useful. It would just wash away.

Here’s hoping that the rest of the week goes smoother and I can get the Kerdi-board installed and tile up on the wall this weekend. If I can have tile going up by Friday I will be happy.

Bathroom day 12

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Well it’s been a long three days. Mr Rainman and I have kept after it diligently every day. There have been some setbacks, namely the plumbing. I am not a plumber, I have never been a plumber and I won’t even play a plumber on TV as I am just not a plumber! I managed to burn up the toilet stub and had to cut it short and after a couple of hours and two trips to the store I was able to solder on one end cap. The Gingerman had offered his soldering services but he was going to be gone until Sunday evening.

So I finished installing the new supports to block off the old door. I messed with that for 30 minutes trying to get the three outlet boxes equidistant from each other in a straight line. They are 9.25” apart and will look great when we are done!

The pocket door has been painful. I have never installed one before and the kit does not exactly have the greatest instructions. We installed the door and played with it to see how it works. It took us 30 minutes to figure out how to lock it into place onto the rollers. The door slants to the closed side. The floor slants also so I kept the slant so that the default position on the door will always be closed! This makes perfect sense to me and once we have the handle with indicator you will be able to tell if the bathroom is occupied, besides the fact that the door will not open. I ended up looking at how the contractor installed one in my mother’s house to figure out what would be the next steps for us. We know have a groove in the bottom of the door. This was painful as I always forget how to use a router, go shallow then a little deeper and make multiple passes, do not try and just count one inch out of the wood. I used the circular saw to make rough cuts and cleaned it up with the router making multiple descending swipes to get to the one inch deep goal. We also shimmed the opening bump board so that it now hits the entire door end at the same time. There is only about 1/32” opening in spots along the doorway. We will need to install trim to block the view of peepers.

Finishing the sliding door early is going to have to take precedence. We need to get the door stripped and sealed so it can be reinstalled before we close up the pocket. We are going to reuse the old door and will need to put a plug into the handle end where the old box knob was located. Then I will have to drill a new hole for the new flush locking mechanism. The door will take a few hours to strip and sand then re-stain and seal it.

We started to put up the plywood but realized quickly that without the plumbing being installed or the sink and toilet stubs blocked off we were limited in what we could cover up. The ceiling had some complicated cuts to get it all on a single piece of material. I ended up marking and cutting one sheet wrong. So far we have not been able to utilize my mistake yet. We are using scraps when possible so that we don’t have to go buy more lumber.

The weather has not really been cooperating. First there was a lot of snow. Then there was a lot of ice over the snow. Today it was rain and freezing rain. We had to move the sawhorses out onto the front lawn as Annmarie ended up doing church remotely from her office due to ice on the roads. This meant we had a no noise rule for a couple of hours today. We just moved the makings to over by the front door and carried plywood over to the front door to mark and cut it to fit.

There will be no progress made tomorrow as I have to go in and do the paying job for a day. Mr Rainman is coming out on Tuesday so we can dig back into the project. Annmarie wants to know when we are going to start tiling! I tell her when all of the prep work is completed.

The quail have finally found their block I placed outside the kitchen window. They come every day now to eat seeds from their block. Sometimes it is very hard to see them. They are easy to spot when you are outside as they make a lot of noise! Like a whole lot of noise!

Bathroom day 9

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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.