Bathroom. Done.

I've been wanting to post final bathroom pictures for a while now, but I wanted to wait until it was completely done and, well, we got it about 90% done and then stalled. We had a hard time finding a towel ring/TP holder set that we liked and since the bean only recently got over her obsession with habit of unrolling every roll of toilet paper she sees, we weren't in much of a hurry. So that explains why I'm finally wrapping up this project about 6 months after it was done.

The last update I posted, we had just finished installing the toilet and "just" had the vanity to do. We debated right up until the last minute on whether we should put a vanity or pedestal sink in, assuming it wouldn't matter much to the other parts of our remodel. In the end, we decided on the pedestal, since a cabinet for the same price would be lower quality composite wood. We also think the pedestal makes the tiny room feel less cramped. I had read online that installing a pedestal sink was "graduate level DIY" which I sort of took as a challenge. How hard could it be, right?

Well, first of all, we had to install bracing between our wall studs behind where the pedestal would sit. Now, when we removed the old vanity, the drywall was pretty damaged and required patches in a few places. We had already patched, mudded, sanded, primed and painted the wall to make it as pretty as it could be, but now we had to open 'er back up.

I wish we had taken pictures of this step, we were both just so anxious to finally have a sink in that room (and frustrated to have to repeat work) that we forged ahead. It only took a couple hours to cut a section of drywall out between the studs, screw in a piece of 2x6 lumber, and patch the drywall back in. Then more of the long process of mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, and painting (again!)

If you haven't done this before, the base of the pedestal is screwed into the floor, while the sink is held up by long screws that go through the back of the sink and into those aforementioned 2x6's. I had read that getting everything to line up was difficult, but this process went fairly smoothly. (Of course, we were very careful to measure, mark, and measure again before we started.) The hard part was the plumbing. Oh, the plumbing!! It took weeks and weeks along with I don't remember how many trips to three different hardware stores to finally get the plumbing to line up. Thirty-five years ago, plumbing was made from a different material than it is today and the old sink drain was in a different position from the new one and, oh yeah, you can't really see behind that pedestal while you're installing all those tees and elbows. Ugh! What a headache! (Also? Plumbers putty? Totally a steep learning curve with that stuff. After getting all the plumbing to line up, we excitedly turned on the water and got a puddle on the floor.)


But we finally figured it out. I L.O.V.E. this faucet. So much so that we special ordered the pedestal (with just one cutout) to go with it. Love.

We still had one big hurdle to jump and that's this little guy.


Why is this pipe sticking through our wall? We can't even figure out where it leads to, but it was hidden behind our old cabinet and needed to be hidden again. I took a stab at building a box to encase it, but when I was driving the nails into it, the whole thing sort of fell apart. I put the hammer away and went on strike for a few weeks. Then, the boy stepped in and worked some magic.


Ahhh.

Add the final touches we put on a couple weeks ago, and I'm calling it done.




What did that before look like again?


Oh right. And now:


When we started this project, I don't think either of us were convinced that we would actually be able to pull it off. We went into it with the idea that we could always hire a contractor if we got in over our heads but, thankfully, that didn't happen. We did the whole thing by ourselves and every time I walk in there I'm sort of surprised and definitely proud that we did.

Oh, and do you remember the buckled wood floor that originally tipped us off to the leak in the bathroom? After months of waiting it out, the floor has dried out and shrunk back down into place. That section will probably never be the same again and a couple boards sit a little funny, but at least there's no longer any danger of someone tripping over it! A happy ending all around.

I should probably make a throne joke

It seems that the tasks that have taken the longest in our bathroom have had the least impact, but those that have been quick have made a big difference and so it is for grout. Aside from the long dry times involved (a couple days for the mortar to set before grouting followed by a few more days for the grout to cure), this went fairly quickly and of course makes a huge difference in how the tile looks.




I have to be honest, I almost hurt myself patting us both on our backs after we got to this point. We had walls and floors--almost done! In fact, this project languished for a few days while we thought about what to do next. I thought we'd just drop the toilet and vanity in place and call it a day, no need to rush. After a couple days, we started to remember some of the little details. Like moulding. Floor moulding is nice to have.



So there was painting, measuring, cutting, nailing down and caulking of the moulding to do. THEN we could finally drop the toilet in. Twice. We did have the foresight to buy two wax rings because we thought we might need a second try at getting the thing in and we were right. Centering an awkwardly shaped (and heavy!) piece of porcelain onto a hole that you stop being able to see midway through the process isn't the easiest thing, but I think the thing's sealed up now. I hope, hope, hope that it is since I have no plans to repeat this remodel anytime soon.



We sort of thought we were on the home stretch at this point since all we had left to do was the vanity. Oh boy, what a headache that ended up being. I'll tell you all about it next time!

A-tiling we will go!

Before the recent blog silence, I mentioned that we were remodeling our bathroom. I'm excited to share with you the first update on the work we've been doing.

Why is it that the work that takes the most time while remodeling a room is the stuff that makes the least difference in how it looks? I could show you step by step pictures of how we spent the first couple weeks into this bathroom redo, but they'd honestly all look the same. After days and days of patching drywall, taping, mudding, mudding, sanding and mudding some more, followed by primer and two coats of paint, all you can say is, yep, there's walls there! We're limited to doing all of this work on weekends in between social/family obligations and a few hours of naptime snuck in during the week, so its been slow going.

Moving on to the part I've been most excited for--tiling! We chose large (12"x12") porcelain tiles that were affordable without looking too cheap. Even though we were told it would be more difficult, we were committed to laying them on the diagonal because it really dresses up our budget tiles. The first step in pulling this off was to carefully plan the layout. We first found the center of the room, then drew diagonal lines out from there and finally outlined the position of the first tile in the center.



Next, it was time to mix up the mortar, which was just like using a huge hand mixer.



One tip we read online that really helped us was to use a piece of 1"x2" lumber screwed into the subfloor to lay the first row of tiles against. We carefully lined it up where the edge of the tiles would go and used it as a guide to get the first row of full tiles down.



We let those dry overnight, removed the 1x2 and then the real fun started. We did a sort of dry run by laying all the tiles into place before mixing up more mortar. We were lucky enough to borrow a tile saw and the boy was a superstar tile cutter.

Marking the tile cuts was a bit more challenging than it would have been if we had just laid the tiles straight across, but we were able to make use of a homemade tile marking tool--two pieces of 8 1/2"x11" paper strategically cut and taped back together in a 12"x12" square (you can see it in the picture below). This guy was folded into the shape we needed, then placed on top of the tile to be cut for easy marking.


The boy did the cutting with the saw which put me in charge of making the odd shaped cuts with tile nippers. I attacked this job with vigor (and no gloves) until I felt something strange on my hand and realized it was a blister that had opened up. I ended up with several of the worst blisters I've ever had and the boy had a little scratch from a jagged piece of tile, but otherwise we ended the day unscarred with a floor that looks eerily similar to the "dry run" picture above, but now those suckers are stuck down--hopefully for a very long time!

The next big thing

We, like most homeowners I imagine, have a list of projects we'd like to complete around our house. We even have them prioritized and roughly scheduled for the year that we plan to complete them in. Our townhouse's 1 1/2 bathrooms definitely need a complete redo (they're all original circa 1975--blue sinks! Almond toilets!), but we have a few other projects we'd rather complete first and had put the bathrooms off for a couple years. We've recently learned, if we didn't know it already, that sometimes houses have a way of screwing with your priority list.

Let me tell this story a different way. If our house had a nickname, it would be Niagara. You may remember that we discovered and repaired several water leaks when we redid the floors a little over a year ago. And the floor is where this story starts. Our beautiful new wood floor started to bubble up in the hallway, just a few feet outside of our half bathroom, a phenomenon that I now know is called cupping. A few weeks later, that area of floor completely buckled. In hindsight all the clues were there, but it took us a good while to track this floor damage down to a leaking toilet in our half bathroom. We should have noticed, but didn't, that water was leaking from the bottom of the toilet tank at an alarming rate, flowing between, around, and under the old, cracked floor tiles and wreaking havoc on the subfloor below.

All this is my drawn out way of saying that we're remodeling our bathroom. Not that we have a choice--once we pulled out everything that was wet, soggy, and rotting, there wasn't much left and nothing to do but try to put it back together. Well, let me show you what I mean.

Here's our bathroom before we started ripping stuff out.

The bottom few inches of drywall around the toilet had to come out, but luckily we were able to save the rest of the drywall in the room along with the subfloor, but everything else had to go. Since there's a good chance that our walls were originally painted with lead based paint, we tried to be very careful about containing the mess that we made. We sealed off the room with plastic, cleaned up with TSP at the end of each day and showered before holding the bean.



After a long weekend of trading off between demolition and bean care, we were left with this.



I always reach a point during big projects like this where I start to panic. Late in that first weekend of work, I looked at the empty room and had to lay my head down. Neither of us have taken on a project this big before and the confidence I felt at the beginning waned a bit when the reality of the work ahead of us settled in.

Nothing to do but put it back together, right?