Author: Steve Hardin

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

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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.

Bathroom day 7

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I had big plans for today, I was going to get things done and move on to the next step. My day went so well that I kept a little timeline:

0800 Mr Rainman arrives and starts the Kubota tractor sitting in the yard, it was 4 F, and the tractor did start! The plan was to actually just let it idle and warm up for an hour. He then unpacked the rest of the box that was the pocket door frame. Big surprise, one side of the frame had a three foot piece of board that was warped and sticking out almost an inch from the main runner board. This was not good and needed to be corrected. He suggested (foolishly) that we send it back. I am on a timeline, I have a solid deadline and I will not be deterred.

0830 I realize after reading the instructions for said pocket door frame that we had sized the rough opening incorrectly. We were going to have to raise the top piece almost another eight inches.

0835 This was not going to happen as the hallway light was in the way.

0845 I had to have a phone consult with the wife to discuss moving the light. The problem is that if I raise it up then the light will be too close to the ceiling. It was decided that I would raise it and then flip the light upside down.

0900 While we are discussing this it was decided that I would run a new power outlet into the closet so we could have a closet light. Also, I cannot just run power from the hall light so that if you turned on the hall light it would automatically turn on the closet light. Instead I needed to figure out how to get power into the closet.

0950 It was finally decided that we would run power up the shoe side of the closet. The tile was far enough from the wall to drill a 1/2” hole down under the house. We had already discarded four different plans before this. Mr Rainman drilled the hole but now that we are going to have to run more wire and I still need to run new heater wire to the main service box we needed more electrical wire.

0955 Mr Rainman went to town to buy more 12/2 wire while I continued to work on moving the light. I had a really nice four inch hole bit and we made the hole lickity split!

1015 I went to install the outlet box and it was only a 3.5 inch box. I ended up having to go out and cut three more pieces of wood to make a support to screw the light box onto.

1200 Mr Rainman arrives with the new 250’ of electrical wire. He proceeds to tear apart our rough opening and cut longer legs.

1215 Light wired and turned on to see if it works. It works, and not only does it work but we positioned it directly across from the coat closet. Now the closet and overhead storage space are very bright and there is no need for a closet light. We decide to leave hole we drilled earlier open, until the straw boss verifies that the new light position and lumens entering the closet are sufficient.

1220 We hold a brief discussion on moving all three hall lights higher up on the wall and turning them upside down. One of the two on the long wall would be easy but the other one is boxed in and almost impossible to reach. It would take some more disassembly and a few hours to make it happen. So we opt out of any more changes to the lighting.

1230 Back at the pocket door frame. Attempted to pull the bent board back into position with screws and it will not pull the wood together. We are going to need more force. I take more measurements and decide that the frame can be cut to accommodate a 29.75” door instead of a 30” door. So more math, the frame got all marked up and we cut the three sides to the “correct” length.

1245 Mr Rainman reassembles the rough opening again with the taller boards. It was decided I had better crawl under the house and run the new wire from the breaker box to the bathroom heater. It needs its own 20 amp breaker. Since it was still single digit temperature outside I did not want to leave the house without power for long. I removed the front of the box and jammed a fiberglass cable rod down below the box. I was pretty sure that there was an opening under the house on that side of the box.

1300 I had to crawl under the house. There are a lot of spiderwebs. the tough part is we have a two foot round return duct running under our house and you have to shimmy under it . There is a small crawl tunnel to scoot under the duct but it is fairly small. When I went in I laid on my back and just slid down and under the duct. It was tight but I did not get stuck at all. Holy Smokes! This side of the duct has seen no human traffic since I installed the wire for the new wall oven years ago. The cobwebs ran from the floor to the underside of the floor, it was straight out of a horror movie. I had a hand covered in so many cobwebs I was making a ball of cobwebs with my left hand before proceeding along the foundation.

I was able to spot the rod, attach the wire and Mr Rainman pulled it up. He had to leave early, so I proceeded to get the wire into the breaker box and then run the individual wires alongside the outer edge of the box and make a run at a breaker near the other breakers related to this section of the house. I did not stick all the breakers together, I grouped them by location and then left 1-2 open spots between them just in case I needed to come back and add more circuits.

1500 Power back on and everything works, I have not wired the heater yet but the wires are all pulled and I left the new breaker off. I reread the instructions for the installing the frame. My rough opening is till not the right size. I had to go cut another piece of lumber and tear out what Mr Rainman had done and install the new pieces. On the plus side, I was able to go get a wood clamp and crank down on the bent piece of wood and get it screwed in flat like it was supposed to be.

I was able to get the pocket door frame mounted up on the wall but again I made another adjustment to make the door sit lower. The instructions they were giving me said the door would be 3/4-1.5” on the bottom of the door. I don’t want that big of a gap so I lowered the frame by 13/16”. This has caused a gap at the top of the rough opening. I am merely going to cut a few spacers and screw them in tomorrow, I am not going to tear it out again!

Bathroom day 6

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It doesn’t seem like I got a lot done over the weekend without Mr Rainman helping but the wiring I could do without cutting out the bathroom floor is done! I also spent a lot of time looking at problems and how to get around them.

Today, Mr Rainman came out and we started with him just cutting boards for a couple of hours. I was able to get the chimney wall all covered so that it can now have plywood applied. I needed to get the boards to stick out past the chimney. I was going to just line the whole wall with 2×6 but Annmarie told me that was overkill. So I lined them up every other instead. Of course I had them up for about 30 minutes before I realized that I had covered up the recessed shelving space. So I had to cut out the recessed areas.

We also had to trim some board at the ceiling height, it was going to throw off the plywood. He cut all the boards for the pocket door rough opening but we had to shim one side to get it square, level and perpendicular to the wall. We had three more places where we had to put fill in 2×4 so there was something to attach the plywood to in the corners.

Mr Rainman cut out the floor and we realized that they had cut the floor joist eons ago to install the toilet. We suspect it was the original. Unfortunately, they did not just box it out so we ended up putting in several support pieces so we can install the new subfloor.

I was crowing about how awesome we were doing when I remembered I had to crawl under the house and move two wires into the walls, not just next to them. The underside of the house is dirty and there are a gazillion spiderwebs that kept getting in my face. I had to crawl around on my belly to access the wires.

It was at this point that it dawned on me that we had not yet run power from the breaker box to the bathroom for the new overhead built in heater. I had Mr Rainman feed me the wire and I crawled about halfway when Annmarie came home and said she had a student meeting. I needed to kill all power to the house. When turning off the water or power always check in with your spouse. So I had an excuse to not finish the power install today. Plus, you never know when you are going to hit a snag and the power may need to stay off all night!

I had forgotten that I had tripped breaker #29 to rewire the two outlets in the living room. The cables had to be moved to fix the floor. Annmarie could not turn on the overhead living room light so I had to go fix the outlet so I could turn the power back on.

The pocket door kit was delivered this evening! It is still in the box and will need to be trimmed to fit our 29.75” door. We are going to reuse the original door as our pocket door. I am going to install the frame without the floor roughed in. This will let me move the tile under the door pathway. I am about three inches too short on the door for it to not have a gap at the floor. I will build up the floor about 1.25” and I think I can lower the door about an inch, so now I only have to add on 1” of wood at the top of the door to make it work. The patch job will be hidden at the top of the channel and I doubt anyone will notice.

I tried to get the baby chicks to come out of their area in the coop yesterday. I opened up the door and propped it open so they could intermingle with the older hens. They failed at their assignment. So today I tossed them all out, shut the door so they could not go back and put them in the area below the nesting boxes. I did use the heat lamp on that side of the coop for just this reason. They are only two months old and do have all their feathers but they are not big chickens. This should force more interaction between them and the adults.

Farm 4, Predators 0

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This is a great start to 2025! So far this year the Gingerman has killed one raccoon from the in-law’s front porch, it was eating her cat food. I have managed to kill two out in the barn and just caught one in the live trap. I thought we had all of the raccoons out of the barn but yesterday when I was chasing the cows out of the barn I noticed a single set of raccoon paw prints leading up the hill from the spring to the underside of the barn. There is one more still living in the barn. They eat the cat food and make an incredible mess. They find a high spot and use it as the bathroom making huge piles of feces. Which I then later discover and often they are in a difficult spot to reach or require a lot of moving stuff out of the way. I have a pile on top of my drying wood in the barn and I believe there is another pile on top of old wood we stacked up in the barn over a pass through in one of the hay bays.

I really need to pull that wood out of the hay bay and look at it. I bet about 90% can be burnt and the rest moved into the granary for later use. I was more of a hoarder early on when it came to barn wood. I realize now that it is only usually good for picture frames. Especially, wood that has been out in the weather for over 120 years.

Yesterday, the Gingerman is leaving the house and spots a coyote out in the wheat stubble field. He calls the progeny and she tells me. It is running towards the old chicken coop and the bottoms so I just need to get out there with a gun. I had not replaced the ammunition on the stock holder and when I grabbed the gun I realized that all the bullets were just empty brass. I only had two bullets. I wanted to go upstairs to get more ammo but after cleaning off the scope (dusty from construction work) the women said I was taking too long. So I went outside with only two shots.

I hoofed it up to the far end of the barn lot (100 yards) and waited. I tried calling the Gingerman on his cell phone but he was in a dead spot and so was I. I kept scanning for movement, no coyote, but there were about seven rooster pheasants flying around at the beginning of field #3 and walking around the bottoms on the snow. I stood out there for 15 minutes and never saw the coyote. It ended up turning for the creek bed around the cliff corner above me and I would never have been able to see it unless I walked another 200 yards in the deep snow.

I will be adding bullets to the stock ammo holder as I usually need more than two shots. Annmarie and I have been talking about how to store weapons at the ready inside the house but have them better secured. We will be doing some more research. Leaving them all stacked by the door is probably not a great long term plan. It definitely is not keeping them clean and free of dust and dirt.