bathroom remodel

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

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.