Author: Steve Hardin

Bathroom remodel day 21

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Well it is starting to come together finally. I realize that all of the prep work is essential for the final steps to come out properly. It just took way more time than I had anticipated. Normally, when I give a time projection for a project we multiply it by three for the “real” time frame. We cannot be without a shower for three months. It is painful.

Mr Rainman and I were able to put up two of the walls yesterday. We have opted to only mix 1/4 bag of mortar at a time and this is working much better for us. We are able to stay under the thickening time. The screwy part is if you did this all the time you would be much faster. The first wall took us almost two hours but the second wall only took us one hour and it had more tile cuts than the first one.

I watched a bunch of videos and they wanted you to start at the top and tile down. We tried that, don’t ask why I even bothered, I saw it on the internet is my excuse. As expected it did not work and the tiles kept sliding down, this pesky thing called gravity was working against us. After we did two vertical sets of tiles I gave up, ripped it all off the walls and installed batten boards with a level after calculating how to get full tiles to the top and hide the cuts at the bottom of the wall. This worked very well and we will be taking them off, plugging the holes and cutting all of those tiles tomorrow. I will try and get a picture of the room after we clean up tomorrow.

The straw boss had to be consulted again today on a design change. The tile we got for the main part of the bathroom looks like a paper linen cloth. If you zoom in on the pictures you can see the pattern. It is really nice stuff and goes great with the floor. My plan was to use the shower wall tile to wrap the end columns of the shower on the toilet side of the bathroom. Now that I have seen the wall tiles I wanted to use them up the main bathroom side of the columns. Schluter makes these great metal transition pieces that will help us make the transition from tile type to the next. She stated that my alteration was her initial expectation. I will now be counting the tile to see if I have enough to do this as it was not in my initial calculation when we purchased the tile. Luckily, they did give us quite a bit of extra tile so I think there will be enough extra to do this.

Tomorrow the floor pan for the shower is supposed to be delivered to the store. I called them to reserve more of the metal trim to make the transition from tile to tile around the shower and niches.

Bathroom day 20 remodel

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Well, today was finally the day that actual tile was applied to the bathroom remodel. I was not sure it was ever going to happen as long as it was taking to get to that step. Before Mr Rainman began tiling the floor I made us go out and measure the toilet to make sure that it would fit. I wanted to make sure it was far enough from the wall to not hit after we installed the tile. We will have about an inch to spare! If we were going to have to tackle that mess I wanted to do it before we had tile on the floor.

We opted to tile the main floor first as I will be setting the wall tile on the floor tile to hide the lower edges. In the shower I have to actually tile the walls first before I do the floor. It has to do with how the drain is installed. I need to watch that YouTube video again. This entire process has been internet searches and YouTube videos when it comes to the Schluter part. I am super happy with the waterproofing ability of it but man it takes a lot of time to do it correctly if you are not proficient in using it.

It took 3/4 of a bag of mud to get the floor installed. We are going to use two buckets tomorrow and only mix 1/4 bag at a time so the mud is fresh and not so thick. It gets very hard to use when it is thick.

I had forgotten how much I dislike using tiles that are mesh backed. Each of the 2×2 squares is attached to a 12 inch square mesh. In theory this makes it faster. It does do that but the gaps are not equal between the tiles on the mesh so placing them can be difficult. I managed it with adequate swear word usage. I need to use the do rag on my head again. I had sweat dripping off my face into my eyes halfway into the floor tiling process. It is a lot of work to get that mud down into the squares on the Detra membrane.

I had unfortunately set the laser up in the hallway and Mr Rainman kept bumping it. About 1/4 of the way into the floor he asks me why I did not set up the laser in the shower space out of the way. This is a great idea and one that I did not think of earlier. I think I did not do it because the ladder is there but I could have made room for the laser.

We managed to just get the last of the tile laid using the last bit of mud/mastic. Mr Rainman go to go home early.

Bathroom Day 19 remodel

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Well the weekend was well spent, the bathroom is almost ready for tile. We just have to install the two membranes in the shower around the nozzle and the handle then seal the Detra membrane seam and Detra to the wall. The shower pan is still pending arrival by this Wednesday. It should not be a holdup for us as we can do the main bathroom floor and then the main bathroom walls first. If the pan is still not here after we get those tiled then we will grout them all next.

I just need to keep making progress every day. It took two days to get all of the holes and seams sealed correctly to provide that waterproofing that Schluter guarantees. I did not realize how long it was going to take. Mr Rainman asked me if I had read the reviews or not on the Schluter products and I said no. I knew it would do what I wanted but did not want to know about the reviews. He said one of the biggest complaints was on how long the system took to install by people not professionals. After getting this far I would say those reviews are spot on!

On Saturday, the Gingerman helped me seal nail protrusions and joints all day and on Sunday Mr Rainman helped me do the same thing. It is not a fast process. The bucket time on mud is around four hours using the All-set version and this is nice as that much time is needed. The only real problem is as it thickens you cannot add water to thin it out. You have to just hit it with the mixer to smooth it out again. This only works for so long before it is too thick to work with. If we were faster this probably would not be a problem.

When we set the Detra membrane on the main floor, I told Mr Rainman it would only take us an hour. Nothing else I have provided a timeline for has turned out to be accurate and it was already 1500. He grumbled and said we would be there till 1700 at a minimum. He mixed up 1/4 bag of All-set and I cut the Detra membrane to size so that it would fit. We got the entire floor covered with two sections. It only took us about 15 minutes once we had the All-set cured and ready to go. It did take the entire bucket of All-set. If we had another 1 square feet of membrane to apply we would not have had enough to cover the floor.

This gave us time to go out and try and catch one of the alpaca, Mad Max as the idiot had a piece of baling twine dangling from his neck and dragging on the ground. Annmarie had noticed it the day before. I figured we could just show up with treats and they would come running up to us, we could grab him and then be done. Nope, they did not want to cooperate. After multiple failed attempts to grab the needed alpaca by the head or hold onto the twine trailing it we ended up having to push Mad Max and Snoop into the orchard and shut them away from everyone else. This now resulted in us chasing two alpaca around, after several failed attempts and one resulting in me getting dragged across the ground as I attempted to hold onto his foot while being dragged, we opted to open up the gate into the back alley way hoping to get them both into a smaller space so we could catch Mad Max. Mr Rainman went to open the gate and I followed them to gate leading out of the field. It was closed but they both knew it was the desired escape route, it just needed to open for them to have what they wanted.

As I was approaching them, Snoop decided to start picking on Mad Max, this unintentionally forced Mad Max into the fence and I went onto the open side of him. Snoop was blocking the other side and Mr Rainman was able to sneak up on Snoop’s side and grab Mad Max by the neck. I just had to slide the twine over his neck and we were all done! Mr Rainman was out the door with everything done by 1620!

Our grain cracker came a week ago but we are going to have to get it set up. The Gingerman is getting grain from truck clean outs and it is a mixture of everything. The chickens don’t like entire pieces of corn, wheat, barley, or peas. So we will need to crack them so they can be eaten. If the bags are a little wet I put them out for the sheep and they do not care in what shape the grain is, they will eat it. We have a lot of storage space available currently but I plan on getting four more metal 50 gallon drums to put in the back of the chicken coop. The drums will hold about 200# of grain/drum. I have enough room in the back of the coop to hold five drums and then there is a the grain storage out in the barn. The barn storage can hold at least 2000# maybe more.

Bathroom remodel day 17

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Yesterday I wore my blue jean work pants. Normally, I just use my old cotton pants that are too short or too faded to wear to work. They just stay in place with no extra help. The blue jeans were a little loose when I started the day.

Annmarie asked me about our outside cat, Luna. She wanted to know if I had seen her recently? This is a great question as she is as old as our other cat that just died and she has been exhibiting some of the same behaviors it did before it died. I had not seen the cat in 48 hours but its food had been disappearing. The dogs now know how to get back in the garden area so they could be eating her food. When I went out to feed her I reached inside the igloo and started digging around looking for a corpse. She was all curled up in the back and muttered at me for interrupting her sleep. She is alive! We will have to watch out for this as I think she will die this year of old age.

Mr Rainman came out for the morning and fed the cows and calves then we moved the grain bags and all of the tile into the house. We needed the tractor pallet so the snow plow had to be removed (I hope we are done with snow) and the forks placed back on the tractor. We had to go get the new tile saw from my mother’s and the rest of the bathroom tiles. This all got unloaded into the house except the saw. We have decided that the temperature is going to cooperate enough to let us keep the tile saw outside the front door on the lawn. This will help contain the mess in the easiest fashion.

Mr Rainman mixed up a whole bag of Schluter All-set mortar and I kept installing the Kerdi-board on the bathroom walls. I used a mud spot process for leveling the walls using the Kerdi-board. I managed to get about 1/2” of lean out of three walls in the shower. I do have a little variation amongst the panels but am fairly confident that I can now work that out with mud depth during installation. This took me almost four hours, which is the pail set time for the All-Set. I had about two inches left in the bucket that I had to throw out but considering the five gallon bucket was almost full I don’t feel too bad about that.

The more mortar I got up on the walls the higher the moisture content in the bathroom became. This led to me sweating and my blue jeans stretching. I kept having to keep pulling my pants up all of the time, until finally I was at a critical step and my pants fell down around my ankles. I finished the current step then pulled them back up. I eventually had to stop long enough to go upstairs and grab a belt to keep my pants on my hips.

I need to bring a rag into the bathroom with me today so I don’t use the front of my pants to wipe off excessive mud from the tool handle. I keep getting mud on my hands and then need to wipe them off. My pants are handy and convenient when I cannot touch anything because of contamination. I did try to use the mud to cover up the screws but it was too thick. I had to stop. I was able to get all of the Kerdi-board installed and on Saturday I will be waterproofing the shower and Kerdi-board walls.

Our hallway has been clogged up with various items during this entire construction. Now that not as many tools are needed I am pre staging the tile. It all needs to be up to room temperature before it can be installed.

Bathroom Remodel day 16

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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.