Bathroom Renovation Phase One: Five out of six ain't bad

One of Kris’s long-term goals has been the renovation of our bathroom.  Over the years, our appreciation of the knotty pine motif has steadily dwindled, as I mentioned in our last episode.  Late winter, when Kris came upon the perfect vanity for the bathroom, was the moment the bathroom renovation graduated from the Collection of Dreams and Grand Plans to the already crowded Active To-Do List.  If there is one thing my attention span likes, it is a shiny new thing.

That is not to say that I jumped onto this project immediately.  The February arrival of the very handsome white vanity with two sinks and marble top and backsplash was quickly followed in March by the upside-downing of the world.  What had once seemed like a restful March break turned into one where I worked every day on the effort to transition our literal brick-and-mortar school to an online academy.  Adjusting to teaching history online went on for weeks.  That handsome vanity began to blend into the background as it filled our upstairs hall area.  By mid-June, with the school year successfully ended, it was time to me to take a couple weeks of vacation and see if I could make a dent in that Active To-Do List.

Hair by quarantine.  Reading glasses by Grasshopper Shop.  Elizabethan-era powder face makeup by sheetrock mud and 220 grit sandpaper.

An important part of any bathroom renovation is the plumbing work, and I have been forbidden by Kris to take on any plumbing work beyond the skills needed to brush my teeth and take a shower.  That meant, we needed a professional, and who knew how busy or not busy plumbers would be during the pandemic?  Kris called up our favorite, Ron Brown Plumbing, and were quite surprised to hear that they could send someone as early as the following week!  The minor demolition of half the bathroom moved from last in on the Active To-Do List to next up, just like that. 

So what would this job entail?  On the checklist were the removal of the old vanity, patching up the tile floor, opening up the wall for the plumber, patching various places where sheetrock tape had failed and pulled away from the wall or ceiling, covering up an ancient water stain around a ceiling heat vent, and testing out a new paint color in anticipation of the second half of this renovation project.  As mentioned previously, the whole renovation has been split into two phases, with the installation (and first the design) of a new shower, new tub, and potentially new tile falling into the second phase to come in the medium future.  So sheetrock taping, mudding, and sanding, taking things apart, and painting – these are all things I actually enjoy, and off we went.

Post vanity removal.  I forgot to take the full "before" photo.  Rookie blogger mistake.

Tearing things apart is fun, there is no doubt, but it gives less immediate satisfaction to carefully disassemble in hopes of reconstitution later on.  In the strange timeline employed by this blog, you can look back but one episode and find the delayed, though elevated level of satisfaction that does come when the productive destruction is redeployed for service in a new capacity. 

This poor piece of sheetrock could not believe that his time was up.  Sorry buddy.

While removing the trim boards framing the lower shelf, we made one of those exciting time capsule finds that sometimes happen when you renovate a home.  Such archeological discoveries always give exciting clues to the age of the house.  When renovating the Bethel house (built in 1860), we found all sorts of strange goodies from the pre-Civil War era, including a local form of currency called “Nails” (not kidding), empty bottles of prescription opium, and various household trinkets and doo-dads.  At my childhood home in Saco (built prior to 1800), we found things from various eras of previous renovations, but the one that sticks in my mind actually came out of a garden near the house:  an 35-pound cannonball.  It is basically a small iron globe that I, of course, have hauled all through my life for the past 20+ years as one of my prized possessions. 

So what did we discover stuffed (or accidentally lost) behind the wooden vanity?  I know the suspense is killing you.  It is difficult to draw out a moment in a blog because you could just skip down a line or two, but I’m trying to do it anyway.  Still with me?  Feast your eyes on this:  a basketball card of small forward Bernard King playing in the twilight of his Hall-of-Fame NBA career with the Washington Bullets.  Yeah, this gem really does give a clue to the age of the house.  The early 1990s seem a lot less exciting archeologically than the Revolutionary or Civil War eras.  So it goes.

Basketball, the one place that slaps a "small" tag on men who are 6' 7".

The doubling of sink capacity meant opening up the wall so that a professional plumber could make the proper changes to our infrastructure.  That’s not too rough.  Find some studs, cut into the sheetrock with a utility knife, and remove the screws.  No saws-all as I had no desire to also saw through copper water pipes.  The plumber wasn’t coming that soon.  Also, I think that is the first time I have ever written or typed the word saws-all.  It looks fall less angry and capable of chaos in text than it does when you hear the word.  After the very professional splitting and redirecting of our water and drain pipes, I was left with an interesting couple of pieces of sheetrock to install.  This led to one of my favorite tasks in all DIY work, drawing up a plan.  Like all good lists of materials and on-site plans, it was created on a building material, in this case, the sheetrock itself.  Measurements were taken (twice of course, to follow the old adage), pipe locations were noted, and the shape of all the cutouts were determined.  I can say that was one of the more intricate pieces of sheetrock I’ve had to install in my time.  Like so much of renovation work, it is problem-solving.

I do love a good sketched schematic.

Because the tile floor was installed after the original vanity, it was installed around the original vanity.  Fortunately, we had kept the extra bathroom tiles that were passed down through generations of previous owners (okay, like two owners).  The tile install was pretty simple.  Only two small hurdles cropped up.  The first was finding out that my score-and-snap tile cutter was in a scoring slump, and really only break tiles.  That meant the tiny one-inch channel of tile would be filled in by not one but two pieces salvaged from it failed attempts.  No big deal.

Filling in the missing tile.  This is underneath the new vanity, so no one will see it anyway.

The second hurdle was realizing that while the previous tile installer had graciously left a bag of tile grout mixture with a handwritten note that read “This is your tile grout,” they did not think to include the mixing instructions for the grout.  “But you have the Internet!” you just exclaimed to your screen before you remembered that A) this is a blog and I can’t hear you and B) I am describing things that already happened.  Oh, I tried the Internet.  Without a brand name or any product identification (but thanks for the authentic “This is your tile grout” proof of ownership), I was forced to rely on the generic ratio advice of the DIY experts of the internet, and they did not come to any consensus.   

Fine.  I began with a 1:1 ratio of powder and water and proceeded to adjust from there, using precise measurements.  The area I needed to grout was small, essentially around one and half tiles, so I only used a cup of water and a cup of powder.  The Internet advice that I like best was more outcome-oriented.  You want the grout mixture to resemble a cake batter in which your stirring utensil will stand up on its own in the mixture when it is the right consistency, proclaimed one DIY blogger.  She wasn’t sure her advice was going to be very helpful because she was unsure of how many tile installers also baked cakes.  What a very peculiar thing to ponder.

Perhaps the best tool for mixing powder and water?  Probably not.

After making scientific measurements of materials that would have made Tricky Dick Parker, my high school chemistry teacher proud, the consistency was quite watery.  I carefully measured more powder, added it to the mix, and kept stirring with my bare hand so that I could squish the little pockets of powder apart.  Not much changed.  More powder.  More stirring.  Repeat.  By the end, I was just pouring straight from the bag into the bowl.  Ratios were blown out of proportion, scientific conciseness was out the window, and my small mixing bowl was filling up.  Each time, the powder would stiffen up the mixture only to have it return to liquidity with ample stirring.  “Dude, you are only filling like six cracks!” you exclaim out of frustration.  This time, I heard you, though your message had to travel back in time.  Yes, eventually, I just gave up trying to stand a putty knife up in my not-a-cake mixture, scooped it out with my hand and slapped it down in the cracks.  After a few minutes with the grout float, the job was done.  Mixing was by far the longest part of that job, far longer than even searching the basement for the surplus powder.

What else?  Well, the rest is relatively mundane.  As our vintage 1991 house approaches 30 years of service, things are starting to deteriorate.  We recently had to replace the roof (with longer-lasting shingles).  We refinished the soft pine floors in the kitchen and dining room.  Sadly, they have already been refinished once and are now thin enough that we no longer have the option to do it again.  So it goes.  The other 25-30 year issue rising up is sheetrock tape is beginning to separate.  In various corners and walls and ceilings, you will see the telltale cracked line that says, “Uh, I can take it no longer, the forces of the age are tearing me apart!”  Tape seams are a bit dramatic.  That said, they are unsightly.  Of course, the Internet was there to suggest the perfect tool for the job, the Tape Buddy Drywall Taping Tool!  Of all the silly looking tools that show up for sale, this one actually looked like it might work.  And if we have had one strategy for surviving the quarantine, it is spending our way out of it (spoiler: see the next episode of this very blog entitled “DIY Goes Digital”).  The Tape Buddy sounds like it is only sold in late-night TV ads, but I will vouch for it.  As advertised, it lays a perfect layer of mud onto strips of sheetrock tape.  You just pull, cut, and place!  I feel like I could record my own late-night ad.  I actually like mudding and sanding sheetrock, but taping is a pain in the ass.  No longer.

Roll of tape in the back, compartment in the front filled with mud, and the tape comes out the front with a thin schmeer.  How much would you pay?!  Sadly, I did not get a photo of it in action.  A second rookie blogger mistake.  You should probably stop reading this digital rag.

The final big task was painting the ceiling and half the walls.  Half because we will tear out one of the walls of the current shower in phase two.  A project that I can leave half-finished?  My kind of job.  No sense in going crazy just yet.  There is enough of the new paint color on the walls to make the bathroom feel fresh and new, if you stand in the right place.  After days of pushing the very heavy vanity back and forth in the bathroom to set up the ladder and work in the various corners of the room, it was time to set the vanity in its final working position.  I was assured by the plumber that it was going to be easy to reconnect the two cold water lines, the two hot water lines, and the two drain pipes.

Now I think five out of six is pretty good.  In baseball, that’s a solid day at the plate.  In Powerball, that gets you a cool million.  In a half-renovated bathroom, it is less than thrilling.  In the process of building out the wall, the vanity had been pushed roughly a quarter of an inch further from the wall on the right side.  The two drain pipes are PVC, unstretchable and immovable.  The left side hooked up just fine, but I could not pull that quarter of an inch out of the PVC no matter how hard I tried.  It looked like I was going to get a chance to do some plumbing after all!

After a quick chat with Mark, whom I now consider my personal plumbing consultant, I knew what I had to do.  I was off to Freeport Hardware for a rubber no-hub pipe connector.  The idea was to cut the drain pipe where it runs horizontally out of the wall and then connect those two halves back together again with this connector, thus yielding the quarter inch.  Despite the rumors of my past plumbing failures, on this day, I triumphed.  One hundred percent of the water that splashed gloriously into the new sink exited down the drain, around the bend, and through my tightened connector.  I am back, baby!

The extra quarter inch came from installing the connector to the right near the wall.

 

Does a hack saw and a six dollar connector restore one’s faith in my plumbing ability?  Kris and I may disagree on that, but hey, if you need a medium-sized plumbing job done slowly, I’m your guy.  I’m not sure I can promise you odds of success anywhere near five out of six, however.  For that, I’ve got Mark’s phone number.  Thanks for reading.

The almost end result.  Still hunting down the right mirror, towel rods, and clearly a toilet paper holder.