bathroom remodel

Must finish bathroom

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Now that I am on a path to fitness and drinking more than brown life giving and sustaining water (coffee) all day I need that upstairs bathroom. Who thinks that drinking a gallon of water on top of a gallon of coffee is good for your bladder? I will admit that I tend not to twitch or flop around as much at night when I drink lots of water but its a hard habit to get into after living on coffee for 30 years. I need the bathroom to be a short walk from the bedroom to maximize my sleep time.

I was able to rub on the wall finish Friday but ran out. I need to do the lower section on one wall. The crown molding needs to go up but I needed to rub the finish onto the wall first. So I started working at the top of the wall and working down so we could install the molding, knowing I was going to run out. I used an old cotton T-shirt and it worked great, no little cloth pills left on the wall.

One of the complications of doing the bathroom in the winter is that I need a place to glue my shelves together. Obviously with the cold it cannot be done outside, unfortunately over the last couple of years the breeze porch has become a catch all location for everything. I do mean everything! So it has taken almost three full days to just remove all of the stuff that was out there, clean up and throw away a ton of stuff. We even got some new plastic bins so we could move all of the reloading supplies into the attic. Next winter I am shooting for building a custom reloading bench on the breeze porch. The bathroom has to come first so I can head outside in the spring.

Yesterday we concentrated on the breeze porch trying to get it cleared so we could use the space to glue shelves together. Once we have those parts glued together we can start installing the shelves. We need to construct the barn door to cover the closet opening also. I even managed to transplant three different plants that were horribly root bound and had not been touched for several years. I expect those plants to take off and be happy. I have about eight more plants that need some more attention. I may even have to start giving away some jade plants as I started about six plants from cuttings and they are taking off. I do toss cuttings in the trash as I cannot start every small piece that comes off a plant! I let my African Violets take a beating and have managed to start two new plants. I need to do cuttings and start 4-8 more plants. I had let them fend for themselves and ended up killing off three. The rest are so healthy they need to be trimmed back as they are starting to try and tip my planters over. The African Violets are from Annmarie’s grandmother so I keep them going. I have three cactus that have fallen over and need to be replanted. I always hate dealing with them once they get a certain size! I do use folded newspaper to wrap them up as I replant them but I always manage to get poked regardless. There is now a nice wide open spot to work and once we get some more tools put away there will be plenty of space to glue boards together.

The Covid symptoms persist, I have learned to just keep pushing. I hate that I cannot do what I used to before catching it. I want to be the person pushing the grocery cart so I can lean on the cart as I walk through the grocery store. I can now get across the hospital at work three times in a single day. I used to walk constantly for hours in a day and now I do it about 15 minutes a day. I still get very short of breath with exertion and if the shortness of breath persists then I start getting chest pain. I have things I want to do this spring. I am unsure of how much I will be able to physically do when the weather improves. It is very frustrating.

Bathroom ready for plumber

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Friday I spent rubbing finish onto the bathroom walls. I had vowed to not be too active but I had called the plumber on Monday and wanted the walls finished before the plumber came. At least the walls where the plumber was going to install something that would block our access to finish them. I am super happy with the finish, it is “Tried and True” wood finish, its just linseed oil and beeswax. Rub it on leaving thin coat, leave for 60 minutes and wipe off any excess very simple and it looks amazing! It really pulled the blue color out of the blue pine. We tried to get the colors to go from dark to light from the entrance to the far end and this really does show that we succeeded. It took me about three hours and I took my time but it was probably too much effort. I managed to do only half the bathroom but it is fairly obvious where I left off at in the pictures. Then I insisted in helping with feeding the cows and sheep. Since the tractor is still broken we had to load up small round bales and put them in the bed of the pickup. Mr Professional came out to help me. I finally had to let him do all of the unloading after we fed the bull, the eaters and the sheep. He fed the female cows alone. I drove the truck. Annmarie said I should not have done so much. I ended up going to bed early and sleeping hard.

The big project was in removing the kitchen wall oven. Our new one is at the store and ready for pickup. So we took out the old one and then drilled 6 holes into the back wall space. That space is fairly deep, around 12-16” deep as there is an old chimney behind the wall. I told Mr Professional to just guess where the studs were and miss them when he drilled the holes! He missed every stud! You could touch one stud with your finger if you reached into the holes, but no stud was drilled! We even cut a 10×10” hole in the floor of the oven area. I ordered a steel heating register to be mounted under the cabinet to make a pretty hole for the heat to dissipate out. The six holes created a draft without the oven in place so we are pretty confident we have enough ventilation now. I suspect we still won’t use the self clean oven function but I should not burn up the oven with a prime rib accident again. The grate should be here this week.

On Saturday, I did not feel very well, the constant chest pain is back and my shortness of breath is worse. It has been almost 8 weeks since I caught Covid and I still cannot do what I want. I have plans to hit it hard in 8-12 weeks and am unsure if my body will physically let me do it! I am not super excited about having long term effects of a virus still bothering me. Mr Professional spent a good part of the day cleaning up and putting tools away. The breeze porch has become a huge dumping ground and we want to get the kennels set back up. Our two new dog destructible proof kennels arrived for the border collies and Gizmo needs his day location revamped. We even worked on adding the metal roofing panels to the interior of the closet. Probably overkill, but we used two scrap pieces to get it done and they would have gone in the garbage anyways. Annmarie cut me a few pieces to be laced in to augment the panels. We want to create an elevated bed so he can sit up in the window and lord over the entire farm from his vantage point. He will love it.

Bathroom update

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Mr Professional came out on Saturday so we could work on the bathroom. I needed to take Friday off to just rest, still getting over Covid and I just don’t have the stamina to keep going seven days a week without any rest. Normally, I just go and go and use my paid job as rest for my farm job. This is most certainly not the case currently and I am hoping I get back the preCovid stamina I used to have.

We focused on finishing the walls and casing out the windows. The top board for the little window will have to be cut and installed after we install the ceiling and crown molding. My hope is we can get the bathroom ready for the ceiling. The stained glass window is going to look great! Mr Professional said that since I installed the stained glass window I was going to want to install a second one in the original opening I had already installed. It took me thirty minutes to find a custom glass shop that would make a window to fit our already framed opening. The internet is a wonderful thing! I should hopefully get it ordered by next week.

The child informed me that she needed to work on our foot bridge for a physics class homework project. She needed to film a reason to use a lever, our front foot bridge has threadall and nuts to adjust the height of the bridge. Our bridge is getting sway backed and the child definitely had to use the lever to raise the bridge. We only managed to raise the bridge about 3/4” at every post and it made a visible difference. The bridge is a lot stiffer now and not as bouncy. I had obviously needed to do this last year! Yeah for education!

Today, Mr Professional and I worked on the ceiling. It is a tin ceiling snaps that snaps together and molds to the contours. It went in super fast and only took us about three hours to install. I only managed to mark up one incorrectly and we were able to use it later in the closet region. It turned out very nice! The color choice that Annmarie picked really brings out the blue in the wood and just pulls it it out in the entire room. We cleaned out the room, vacuumed up the floor and installed the sink stand. We drilled holes in the back of the stand for the drain pipe and both water lines. The sink and top are just sitting on the stand and still need to be attached. I have not attached them yet as I am not sure if attaching them will make it harder for the plumber or easier so I am just leaving them unattached. The natural sealant is coming in the mail and hopefully will arrive early this upcoming week so we can get it on the walls. Once it is up then the crown molding can go on. The closet door and the shelves will be the very last thing that get installed. I actually want to install all the new electrical hardware as soon as the walls are sealed. We have old style push button switches that would have been standard with knob and tube type electrical wiring. The bathroom is really coming together and starting to shine.

Upstairs bathroom is back on the list and work is happening.

Steve Hardin2 Comments

Well it is now 2021, we were fortunate to have a New Year’s lamb born yesterday. Unfortunately, it was in one of our young lambs that Annmarie did not think was pregnant, just fat due to her age, so instead of 6 ewes left we probably do have around a dozen left to deliver lambs. We kept quite a few 6 month old lambs this summer when we culled and they must have been old enough to get pregnant. Yes we do know they can pregnant that young but for the most part they tend not to in our experience.

I decided the upstairs bathroom needs to get finished. Due to Covid I have not been doing much this last month but I am having Mr Professional come out now and he does most of the work, cringingly I will add that I do a lot of supervising! This will make some people happy in my life but it is incredibly frustrating for me to stand around and do something for five minutes then sit down and wait or breathe. I vacuumed bugs off of the breeze porch five different times! We have a Dyson with a four foot rigid hose attachment and I kept vacuuming them up and dumping them outside all day. The chickens will not eat grease bugs or the black and red ones, this is a travesty as we have a lot of those bugs around the place. I ordered two cases (24 tubes) of silicone caulk last night as I will be improving the sealing around the inside breeze porch windows and inside siding. The bugs made me crazy yesterday, they kept dive bombing me while I was sitting around doing nothing.

I did manage to get the inside portion for our bathroom window cut. The plan is for me to finish the rough frame, install it and then Mr Professional and I will mark the stairway side by drilling the corners, blue taping the seam, cutting away the Sheetrock with a razor blade with a vacuum going then we will cut out the wood shiplap. Our “window” is a stained glass piece that will look out into the natural light coming into the stairwell. It will be about eight feet above the stairs and protected from approach by a moving overhead fan, no one will be peaking. The bathroom Is in the middle of the house and has no natural light so we thought this was a good way to just come some ambient light into the room and display our purchase from an Oregon Coast trip made in 2020. It will be our version of shining some beautiful light on 2020!

We got the room cleaned up prior to starting as it had “acquired” some items over the last year, cleaned up the horizontal surfaces and floor of dirt and debris. We collected tools, emptied out 12 month old construction supplies into the outside dumpster and then spent about an hour trying to figure out where the cut pieces we had leftover went! We figured that out and figured out which ones we wanted to discard and then started in on the closet area. It doesn’t look like we got much done but we actually installed 11 pieces of wood yesterday. Of those five had to be be custom fitted with more than a single saw cut. It is progress and this is a great thing!!

Our chickens are going gangbusters! We have 27 hens and they are old enough now we have two sizes of eggs, small and extra large. We are collecting almost 16 eggs every day in winter with a light bulb, on a timer, that gives them 17 hours of light a day. This is what I would expect of my summer production so I am not sure what the summer is going to look like. I usually only get about 30% production in winter and 50% in summer. Unfortunately, these chickens don’t like to go into the coop at night so we end up chasing 3-7 chickens in due to them missing the automatic door opportunity. The raccoons will solve this problem eventually.

The mild winters have been great for our bird populations. We have about 50 quail living on the property now and I have it on authority that there are at least 18 rooster pheasants running around on New Year’s Eve. I see the pheasants all the time running around the stubble fields. The pigeons have almost been controlled and the only other nuisance bird causing us issues is the Eurasian ring necked Dove. It is starting to overtake the property and push out the native mourning doves. This will have to become a 2021 issue to correct. We are hopeful that the quail can triple this year! I would love to have a few hundred quail running around on the place, they make us smile every time we see them! We holler out “Quaillyyy” whenever we spot them.

I had to do an update to the lamb count. My version is a 6×9 spiral binder with scribbles. I consulted the wife’s new spreadsheet, I missed a set of twins so that correction will be included below.

  • Lamb update
  • 28 lambs born
  • 18 ewes delivered
  • 17 pregnant ewes (I counted Jan 2, 2021)
  • 8 single lambs
  • 10 twin lambs
  • 1 bummer lamb
  • 27 lambs on the farm
  • 156% birthing rate
  • 150% production rate (goal >150%)
  • 100% survival rate at birth
  • 100% survival rate at 2 weeks (20/20)

Rain again.

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Last weekend was no exception to the rain all the time theme.  It rained Friday night and our triticale hay was on the ground.  I went to Pendleton and tried three different stores looking for the bolts needed to attach my front tire.  The tractor place did not have them as they are a fine thread 1.5 pitch 14 mm x35 mm.  No one had one that was that short.  I ended up buying ones too long and taking them home and cutting them off with grinder, flattening the cut and chasing the threads with a nut I purchased.  This does not taper the end for ease of inserting.  It took me about 35 minutes to get all four bolts in and tightened up but I did it, otherwise there was going tot be no tractor use this weekend.  I had to go up around 1500 into the far pasture and turn it again until the clouds and lightning strikes got too close.  It did not rain until I made it back to the house and was headed inside.

On Sunday Mr Professional and I worked on the upstairs bathroom.  We had gotten >1/2” of rain on Saturday and the hay needed to dry out before I could do anything with it.  We worked on closet area and the back wall.  We had to go out and get more lumber from the old chicken coop so we could keep lining the walls.  I got behind as I was the one digging out bug damage from the boards with a nail so we could finish the installed boards easily.


As we were working Mr Professional wanted me to install a window where the light access panel is located to allow in some natural light.  The bathroom has all interior walls.  He then suggested a stained glass window as all our lights are stained glass.  We then talked about adding it between the lights on the opposite wall of the mirror.  I actually liked the idea but this level of change requires input from the design boss.  I drew out the area on the wooden wall and when Annmarie got home we pitched it.  She liked the idea and I had a stained glass piece downstairs that was unused.  It was in a cupboard and we purchased it many moons ago at a yard sale or auction, I am unsure which all though I think yard sale.  The window will be removable and the hole will be directly across from the hallway fan and above the fan blades.  We will have to use blue tape to protect the cut edge of the Sheetrock and tape a bag to the outside wall to catch the mess.  It’s going to be hard to not get Sheetrock dust all over the house.  I want to be able to remove the window so I can easily clean the top of the fan as an added bonus.  This got me to thinking about the shelves I want to add to the bathroom and I may make the shelf holders out of horseshoes.  I can weld them up and make sure they are all the same size.