It has only been 45 days on the bathroom project over the course of 26 weeks now. Mind you I told the wife it would only take four weeks. I may have been a little off on my estimate. Normally, you can take my estimate and multiply by three and be spot on. That is not the case this time.
I only needed to install the sink plumbing and I would be done with all water in the bathroom. To do this I needed to change out the wall supply valves so they were 3/8” outlets. I figured this was going to be fairly easy as the nut and crush washer were going to stay on the copper pipe and I just needed to change out the valve body.
I should know better by now. I am cursed when it comes to plumbing. I changed out the first valve without incident. I then did the second valve, again fairly easy. I figured that I should check both valves before I hooked up the sink in case I had a slow leak around my swap. I went back to the main water shut off in the laundry room and opened it up. I got distracted by something and was in the kitchen when I thought I heard a weird noise coming from the bathroom. I went into the bathroom to a fountain. I had both valves pointed to the ceiling and the second valve I had not closed. I was spraying water all over the wall, the light and ceiling. Luckily, the floor slants towards the toilet so the water was just pooling on the floor. I had about 1/2” of water on the floor. It took me another hour to get the bathroom cleaned up and dried. I did not get electrocuted when I cleaned all of the water off of the light. Neither valve leaked once I actually shut the valve.
I hooked up the sink without any further incident. I even cut the Pex pipe and used the parts Delta sent me to get a seal on the Pex. I wanted to run the water but the drain was not yet installed. So I tried to install the drain from the parts I had on hand. Nope, it was not going to happen. Sixty dollars later and two trips to the local store and I had purchased enough parts to be able to plum the drain. I then did turn the water on and it did indeed work and drain perfectly. This entire endeavor took me a whole day. I just do not get along with plumbing, we are enemies.
Well it seems like day 22 and 23 just came and went with hardly any progress. On day 22 we finished tiling the third wall in the main part of the bathroom. That entire back corner will be hidden behind a custom cabinet that will be built after the bathroom is functional. We had a lot of mud left to use but I needed to get to Hermiston to pickup our shower pan that had just come into the store. We have been waiting for two weeks to get this last essential piece of the Schluter. So I picked up several other pieces of metal trim, some All-set, mortar bags, gloves, and more Kerdi-tape to seal the pan to the wall. I had to stop at two different stores to find everything I needed. Home Depot does not carry disposable bags that will slide into the mortar bag. We are using a 100% epoxy grout and it will destroy a grout bag every time we use it. I ended up having to order some online and have them shipped to the house. I suspect they will arrive before we will need them.
So Day 23 was going to be the day we finally catch up and can just hammer out the rest of the project. All we had to do was some plumbing, cut the shower pan and then set it all. Once it was set I would almost be done with the Schluter system, it would just be tiling.
Mr Rainman and I found all the tools and parts, drilled a hole in the floor for the drain. We forgot to mark the Schluter when it was installed so we knew where the drain was in the floor. We went back to old pictures and calculated 15.5” from the wall. I failed to account for the fact that I had to put 2×6 boards behind the long wall due to the brick chimney being there. The hole was off by 2.5”, it was too far to the right. This actually ended up working in our favor as we were able to cut the original piping and replumb to get it to fit. We dry fitted the pieces. We glued it all back together and it looked great. I was the one who had to crawl under the house.
Now it was shower pan time so we watched a couple of videos, cut the pan to size and then Mr Rainman says, “shouldn’t we have used mud on the drain like the picture?”. Well yes, we should have and I don’t have any more spare ABS fittings to fix the mistake and we cannot install the drain pan without the plumbing fixtures. Mr Rainman had to leave fairly early and I cannot mud the drain then crawl under the house and get it all assembled. It does require one in the bathroom and one under the house.
So instead of plumbing I cut the bottom tiles for the course we set the day before and called the wife. There have been some unforeseen delays and a few redos but the bottom line is my time estimate is off by at least 2-3 weeks. I am out of PTO and I have to get back to the paying job. Lent is coming up soon and the wife is gone and busy almost the entire Lent season every evening. She was looking forward to having a shower in our own home. We are the new proud owners of a pop up shower that attaches to the deep sink in the laundry room. It should be here next week. I am pretty sure I can set it up in the laundry room, if not it can go in the mud room. The drain is a garden hose that just goes out the back door. Now, this being said it does not slow down progress or mean that the completion date can be pushed out further. It is just a convenience.
So now the race is on to get it done within the new timeframe and not need to push out that timeframe again. Time will tell.
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!
This really wasn’t my day all week. We have had a plugged tub drain since Sunday. I have poured two different treatments of lye down it. I have used the plunger and unknown amount and then used an industrial concentrated size Liquid Plumber. I did manage to get the water to trickle drain after purchasing a $20 rotosnake to try and clean out the drain. I could not make the second ninety degree corner with the snake no matter what I did. So Annmarie and I each took a shower and the water did not drain. On Tuesday, I called for a plumber and was able to get a service time on Thursday afternoon. We both ended up showering at our mother’s houses. I even crawled under the house one evening and looked for a clean out to use the rotosnake in, there are none under the house.
Today is Thursday and the plumber came out early in morning while I was in town. He called and said it was fixed about 20 minutes after saying he was headed out to our house from Pendleton. The reason the water would not drain was because the tub drain lever had gotten moved to the closed position! I have not taken a bath in over 30 years and it simply never occurred to me to check especially since Annmarie was gone all weekend. I am grateful the tub drain works. It does work well as I had to clean it today after the mess I had made in it.
I proceeded to go outside and finish the gate extensions on the corral. The two cows that needed to go to the butcher tomorrow are wild and one is the crazy jumper. My helper is out sick so this was a solo job. I was able to sort the four cows in the ram pasture fairly easily. I left one in the back pen and put the other three out in the horse stall area so they could see each other. I was able to get the rest of the herd into the barn lot pretty easily. I needed to get crazy #34 into the trailer, that cow had jumped out of the corral twice in the last year and avoided getting slaughtered both times. Now that the corral gate and wall extensions were completed I figured it was a done deal. I figured wrong.
I had to call Annmarie to come help me and to bring the border collie. I guarded the area leading to the spring because the temporary panels I normally use are in two separate places doing other jobs. The spring area needs to rebuilt after the flooding and I just have not done it. After five tries the cows went into the back barn area. It still took us several more tries to get number 34 into the corral with eight other cows. The one cow I had already sorted off was too small. There were two huge steers in the corral now so we proceeded to try and sort everyone off. We got it down to just those two and then got them into the chute but one ran into the trailer, turned around and can back into the chute causing a pissing match between two angry steers. They ended up popping the gate into the third offset pen in the corral. I had not extended that small gate as the cows were not supposed to go in there this time.
By the time I got around Annmarie was hollering that the cow was stuck. Yep, #34 had tried to jump the gate and got his front foot jammed down beside the gate on top of the gate hinge. Despite the cow trying to pull down the fence, no amount of pulling was getting that foot loose. I had tried to push the foot up, then got a rope and tried to pull it up over a board. After about three minutes I placed a frantic call to my nephew who lives a couple of miles away. I think the only thing he understood was I needed help ASAP and it involved a cow as the cow was bellowing and shrieking two feet from me. I was able to pull back on the railroad tie while #43 was trying to rip it out of the ground. The cow was beyond all reason.
We ended up putting two ropes over its head, one was perfect and went over the horns but the other went over one horn and the cow’s neck. At this point not getting gored through the corral fence was barely possible. We tied off both ropes to separate railroad ties. I unbolted the gate and attempted to get it off the hinges. Crazy #43 managed to kick it off and then fight the ropes. We had to take a break and get the other cow in the trailer. That crazy cow kept trying to get over the trailer divider the entire time we tried to get #34 into it.
When we went to get #34 in, he got away and managed to get out the downed gate about three feet and now truly raising hell as he could sense freedom. I ended up using the tractor to push him back through the gate and then got one of the ropes stuck under a tire. Annmarie had to cut the rope. Luckily, it was the old rope, not the brand new one she had gotten out of the tack room. We managed to get the rope tightened down and the gate open to the chute. #34 ran down the chute by himself and Annmarie slammed the door shut. There are still two ropes around him that will not be back until after the steers get butchered. The trailer looks like a bouncy house with both steers in it. We put an extra strap across the back and left it backed into the corral.
This is a stupid problem. We are definitely going to be taking every single crazy cow to the auction in the next month. Once the calves are weaned. We need calmer cows. The corral is hard to jump from one area to the next. You have to climb a seven foot wall every time!
While I was moving cows I noticed that the white ram in Alcatraz had some abrasions on his forehead. I fed them then went around to the back of the pen and noticed that the gates were falling down! I did not have time to fix it so a little redneck twine was utilized. It only needs to hold for another day.
Holidays are the best because I have four days off in a row, but they also suck because I have four days off in a row. When I rolled out of bed this morning I did not want to dig a ditch but one still needs to be dug. I am getting Mr Rainman to come out tomorrow. The plumber wants to replace the line back at the junction which means digging out another 25 feet and potentially having to build a wooden support for the heat pump so we can tunnel under the four feet of the old concrete pad. The pad is pretty broken and cracked so I would not feel safe without supporting it before tunneling under it. We just need to get to the foundations of the freezer room so we can drill a hole into the room from underneath. This will let us run new Pex pipe and should stop us from having to run a heat tape. I remembered tonight that I have a small portable sump pump so I will break that out in the morning and we won’t have to do the bucket emptying that I have done the last two times. I should have remembered it earlier.
I only have about 2 hours of mowing on the fields left but I stuck with dragging the disc around in circles today in an attempt to get the field ready. I now have all of field 2 disced and now want to run the arena groomer over it all to smooth it out then plant with my cultivator/seeder. I am going to plant grass on the East side of the field as there is still moisture in the ground and plant some leftover triticale seed I have in the 1.5 acres on the West side because it is much dryer on that side. I would love to get about 4 more days in field one to finish the ditch and embankment work. I want to create a second ditch and embankment on the inner field about 20 feet in. I am going to run a fence on top of the second berm so I can run the animals into it after it is harvested. At the rate we are flooding lately the additional berm will be needed.
I think it will take two days to get all of field 1 disced. Then one day to disc field 3 and another for field 4. So I have about 120 hours to get all of the fields ready and planted. No problem with my other full time job in the midst of a pandemic. Luckily, I have a couple of helpers and I am going to have them working quite a bit this month until we can get it all done. We are seeing a lot of quail all over the property. We have found three dead deer on the place in the last three weeks. No signs of injury, I suspect that wasting disease is present in our area. I have seen two live does and a little buck this weekend. We still have at least one bunny rabbit. It lives in the machine shed and sneaks out to eat. We know there was a second one around but we have not seen any baby bunnies.
Stewart Creek Somethings 