Schluter

Bathroom remodel day 17

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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 9

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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.