Month: February 2025

Bathroom remodel day 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It is official, there is no longer a toilet downstairs. There is not a shower either but on some level the toilet is more important I think. Luckily, we do now have a toilet upstairs but that means that the wife and I now have to share a bathroom in the morning before going to work. Luckily, I am going to be off most of the month working on the downstairs bathroom remodel so there will not be any jockeying for bathroom space.

Mr Rainman came out on Monday while I went to work. He managed to get all of the main items torn out except the tub. I took a lunch and drove home to help him carry the vanity out of the bathroom as it was too heavy for one person to move. The entire thing is made out of solid wood and plywood. There is a lot of ceiling space

But I am pretty sure we ran some of the ductwork for the downstairs through that empty space. We are going to tear out the entire ceiling and see what we end up with. We may be able to raise the bathroom ceiling! So we have a 85% plan currently but it is fairly fluid. I talked the wife into a pocket door over the weekend. It will go on the hall coat closet side of the bathroom. I will have to alter the tile configuration and do some calculations to see how much tile I have to accommodate the change. We may end up just taking the shower enclosure to the ceiling and going up the wall four feet around the other walls. I am not sure. I am waiting to order the pocket door frame until we get the walls all opened up. I am pretty sure that closet wall is only 2×4 turned sideways thick. The bathroom used to be the front parlor where guests were greeted. That is why you can see a brick chimney on the back of the shower wall. When they decided to do indoor plumbing they just boxed off a room in the middle of the house so the pipes would not freeze and there was easy access.

Our plumber used Pex and copper throughout the house when we replaced all of the plumbing. This is causing some issues as I don’t want to cut it all out, solder on dead heads, tile then cut and solder again. So I am looking at ways to get a nice tile finish with tile saw and tile drill. I will still have to solder in new hot and cold extensions for the shower. We want to move the faucet controls up to waist height. I know how to do it in theory but I am not very good at it. I usually have to do it a couple of times. We are going to tear the room all the way down to the studs so we can get a great view of everything hidden in the walls. We will then see if we need to adjust the level of the walls by furring them out with some extra 2x4s. We are going to sheet the entire bathroom with 5/8 plywood before doing any tile work. The room has shiplap on it now and every time I have had to disturb the shiplap I have replaced it with plywood or more boards. You can hang anything anywhere in the house. Also, the house is over 110 years old, I figured that they know something we don’t and some of those old techniques work.

I just needed to get to the floor

Steve HardinLeave a comment

One of the add on projects was to fix our master bedroom lights. The stained glass lights fit the farmhouse theme but depending on where you are in the house some rooms are noticeably darker. Our bedroom only had one light over the bed and if you were over by the book cases it was dark! We have talked about adding another light for years and I finally decided it was time. We purchased the lights and then it was just up to me to install them. The real problem with this plan is over the years I have added boards and plywood to the attic to create a storage space. This storage space now has a relatives stuff, our daughter’s stuff, our stuff and our Christmas stuff. The bugs love to get into the attic and I bug bomb it every year. We have not vacuumed it out in 10 years probably. So it was a bug jungle up there. It needed to be vacuumed. The real issue was to run the wire for the new light we needed to pop up the floor and then run new wire to the new light. So first we had to dig out the boxes then clean then get to the correct spot without tearing up the entire floor.

Now that Annmarie has a sewing room again we worked on cleaning out the walk in closet in that room and brought down all of the bins of bulk fabric. There were eight bins of fabric! The sliver lining of this is that we found the material for her to make me some new dress vests and she is going to make me a suit out of some really nice thin Pendleton black wool. This gave us an extra eight empty bins. So we started to consolidate all of the cardboard boxes and putting them into plastic for more permanent storage. This took two days as I kept getting distracted by finding stuff I had not seen in 20 years! We managed to empty out about 20 boxes and consolidate them into the eight bins. We still have two more empty bins up in the attic.

There were a lot of old books from the old schoolhouse. They were in fair condition but most were from 1900-1930. I just put them in a plastic bin and the child can deal with them in 30 years when we die. There are two whole bins of Barbie clothes and dolls. I was going to take down the storage rack I had set up for all of the electrical wiring supplies I would need to install power all around the attic. Instead I wired up three outlets in the entire attic and left the rest of the boxes empty. Eventually, we will get it cleaned off and moved to a different location in the attic. I will need it eventually and the child keeps buying stuff for her wedding next January and it is getting stored in our attic.