Mr Rainman

Bathroom day 7

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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.

Bathroom day 2

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No plan survives first contact. It snowed last night, a lot. So I had to spend 2.5 hours outside digging out our walk way and then hooking up our snow blade. I almost never use the snow blade so it had sunk down into the ground on the attachment side and I had to pull it out with the tractor. This of course meant that I could not lock it into place until I dug the dirt and grass out of the way. So the plow took me about 25 minutes to hook up by itself. Once I had it hooked up I went to town on the driveway. You have to be careful not to dig into the gravel because the blade will tear it up. I did pretty good but the driveway is a little wider now near the road.

The elk came down with the snow but they appear to be staying on the upper hillside and the upper CRP. The wheat field is fallow this year so they cannot damage it. They also appear to be staying out of the bottoms. There really is not any food there but I thought they might try and find it and tear up the fields but so far they are not. Last time they came down in a huge group they started tearing up the snow and ground to get to the grass. They made a mess of my hay field.

Mr Rainman picked up some longer 2×4 and some 2×6. We are going to make the closet hall wall a 2×6 deep as it was already! This will make it a lot easier to fit the pocket door and to have something to nail into when applying the wall. I ordered the frame yesterday and it should be here early next week.

One of the surprises was how much I am going to have to rewire. Now that the walls are open all of the stuff that was done blind will have to be updated and secured. I need a different type of electrical box to be able to slide it in and out to account for the plywood/schluter/tile thickness. I may even have to mount the boxes after I put up the plywood as I am unsure if they will come out 1.5 inches. I am pretty sure they only adjust up to one inch. I need to move the electrical outlets to the left and right on one wall. I need to move the fan switch and light over two feet so you can reach it when you enter via the pocket door. I need to install 10g wire for the 220V electrical heater in the ceiling and wire in a switch. I just thought of this, the location for the switch was going to be in the cabinet but I was going to put it on the side where the pocket door needs to go! That means I cannot put a recessed box in the wall, I will have to put a box inside the cabinet, good thing I just thought of that, disaster averted. I have already removed the hall lights and fixed their anchors and tightened them back up. They are perfect now, for the last 18 years they have been a touch saggy, I was probably the only one who noticed. I also have to lower the light over the sink, I used the old electrical box and it was three inches from the ceiling. Not aesthetically ideal I am told, so the new light height has been marked.

I had the wife go into the room yesterday and I marked out the three in shower cubby locations and heights. The medicine cabinet/mirror cannot go over the sink as the plumbing is in the way, I was going to move it two feet to the left. You would not be able to see yourself in the mirror while standing at the sink so this was shot down. The sunken medicine cabinet is going over the toilet and we will be finding a mirror for the bathroom. This is why the project manager has to have early input, it saves a lot of retro job changes later on.

We did discover an “ugh ooh” yesterday. The floor under the tub and back wall cabinet is shot. There used to be a toilet where the cabinet was previously located. Mr Rainman almost fell through the floor over by the tub drain and I almost fell through floor over by the old toilet spot. So it looks like we will have to tear out at least three feet of subfloor and reinstall new subfloor. This will make running the power much easier. So it is what it is. The wife says I should have expected it. She is right, it has really been quite a while since I truly tore into the bones of the house and this room was a parlor before and they just pieced together two more walls to make it a bathroom. If I had truly known how bad the walls were I may have prioritized the bathrooms. I know now I should have added that second bathroom upstairs on year 2! Not waited until the teenager was out of the house. Well, it is getting fixed now and we will reinforce the walls and run full intact studs the length of the wall, not pieced together things. They had a window in the wall of the bathroom and just pieced in a couple of 2×4 chunks when they took it out. No sill plate or box for the window, now in their defense it is a non-weight bearing wall but still it makes it a lot easier to set the window. They just cut the shiplap on both sides and slipped the window in place.

I am hoping on day three we can get the floor torn up and I can see whether we need to purchase one or two pieces of 3/4” plywood subfloor. Milo stayed home with me and he is so used to staying with Annmarie at work that he refused to let me out of his sight all day. He spent most of the day trying to get into the bathroom. Once he figured out we would not let him into it, he laid out in the hallway and supervised our progress.

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

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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.