Bathroom Chronicles

This was written over the course of about a month in fits and spurts. If you want to avoid all those nasty, descriptive words, I'd suggest visiting the gallery and be done with it. Otherwise, keep in mind that everything appears in reverse order so if you want to read the story from the beginning, scroll to the bottom of the page and start there. I'm using a fairly limited blogging engine which doesn't have the smarts to display things in any other order, so sorry about that. I'm never using this thing again if it makes you feel any better.

Enjoy. And if you want to offer any words of encouragement (too late) or sympathy (the wounds are still fresh), feel free to contact us at the following addresses (displayed in super-secret internet-bot-avoiding format):

jennquintenz AT alumni.usc.edu
jberry AT alumni.usc.edu

I'm very sorry about the lack of updates. It was a good idea -- bad execution. Unless you have a dedicated blogging staff, I don't recommend trying to do both during one of these projects.

But what is this? An update? Does that mean...?

Yes. Yes it does. We are done, and here's the proof from the doorway:



And from the tub:



Here's a quick rundown of what transpired (you can probably follow along in the gallery -- I believe most if not all of this is documented there):

Day Five: Grout - Andrew mixed a couple pales of grout and he did the shower walls while I mentally prepared for the floors. When my turn came, I moved fast. So fast that while Andrew and Jhenn raced to wipe the shower clean before the excess dried, I had to wait twenty minutes before the grout in the floor set up enough to do any wiping (I would have helped in the shower but even with only two people it's kind of crowded). Granted, there are a lot more lines of grout in the shower than the floor so my speed has nothing to do with skill unfortunately.

We called it a day after spending a good amount of time scraping the grout that had gotten caught in the shower tile texture. There was no easy way out and we were exhausted.

Days Six Through Nine: Scraping - I don't look back on these days fondly. These were work days in every sense. I went to work at 6am, got back at 5pm and started scraping the shower. Andrew came over and finished installing the fan/light/heater and the over-mirror light fixture. I scraped. When I finally finished the shower, I moved on to the peeling paint. And I was soon joined by Jenn.

Days Nine and Ten: A Different Kind of Scraping - The previous occupants decided to paint high gloss paint directly onto existing high gloss paint without any primer. It didn't work well. If you looked at it funny it peeled. So Jenn and I scraped and scraped and tried to keep each other from tearing the drywall down out of pure frustration. On the eleventh day we called it and moved on to patching.

Day Eleven: Patching - The tub install had required the removal of two sizable chunks of drywall on either side of the tub itself. So I cut some drywall to fit, installed it, and Jenn plastered over the seams. We also patched up the hole where the old light fixture lived and a small strip that allowed us to run some cable to the fan/light/heater.

Thinking we'd be priming later that night, we started to get excited. The end was near!

Days Twelve and Beyond: The End Is Not Near - We discovered that the plaster was taking longer to dry than expected. This didn't come as a huge shock. We'd had to lay it on pretty thick to get a smooth result. But waiting for things to dry became the new frustration. Here's a quick rundown of the next several days. Imagine you're watching time-lapse photography. Maybe it'll be more interesting that way.

- Plaster dries, we raise our hands in thanks.
- Sand plaster - entire house now covered in fine, white film.
- Discover that we could do a better job with the plaster, apply some more.
- Wait.
- Sand plaster (see "fine, white film").
- Add texture which boasts a two hour drying time. Instructions clearly written by liars as it takes around four or five hours to change color (which is supposed to indicate its dryness). In some places it never changes color.
- Wait.
- Prime walls and ceiling. Primer supposed to be dry in 1 hour. More liars at work at primer instruction-writing facility.
- Thinking we're ready to paint the ceiling, we notice that the primer -- a chemical designed to bond to anything -- is not adhering to one portion of the ceiling. That one portion turns out to be the badly-executed patch by the previous owners. We rip part of the ceiling open and re-patch. This is hands down the most difficult patch we've had to attack and requires -- you guessed it -- more plaster!
- See "fine, white film".
- Finally, it's dry. Finally we re-prime.
- Finally we paint color onto the wall -- a rich, chocolate brown. We stand back and admire our work. You'll notice there's no brown paint in the pictures above.
- Realizing that a bathroom the size of ours becomes a cave when painted a dark color, we return to Home Depot and find another color.
- We re-paint the walls!
- We wait.

This whole plaster-sand-texture-prime-paint business took about a week. Maybe more as I've blocked out most of the associated memories. I'm only able to tell you about this much because I wrote despairing journal entries detailing the whole mess.

OK. That part about the journal entries was a lie. I was way too frustrated to write journal entries.

Day...I Have No Idea: You Think You're Nearly Done But You're Not - We moved the vanity into the bathroom to see how she fit which turned out to be "not very well". There was a gap between the countertop and the wall at the back of the vanity so we discussed possible solutions which included shimming the front of the vanity, sawing off a portion of the back of the vanity, and torching the condo and walking away.

We ended up shimming the front of the vanity a little and then affixing a thin strip of wood to the wall just below the vanity line to serve as a platform for a line of silicone sealant. We bolted the vanity to the wall and sealed away.

We installed the trim. Not much to say about that.

We installed the toilet and discovered that the hose that feeds the toilet was too short. Not only that, but they don't sell longer ones. Anywhere. I had to create my own! Does that seem fair?!

We installed the storage cabinet. Possibly the easiest thing we did in the whole bathroom.

I hung the mirror. Then I installed the medicine cabinet only to discover that -- should I want to open the medicine cabinet -- I'd have to move the mirror down 2 1/2 inches. Which I did. There's a story about anchors here but the wound is too fresh.

I spent last Sunday installing the faucet which I imagine will take an hour tops. (If I've done anything well over the course of this project, it's ignore recent experience.) It takes four hours. There are leaks. Those leaks are fixed. Parts are missing and then discovered attached to previously-installed parts. And I find that the pull for the drain doesn't actually fit through the vanity because I followed the instructions which said to center the faucet in the hole. Had I moved the faucet forward, the drain pull totally would have fit. But at this point, silicone sealant is drying on the faucet's base and I'm tired so I decide we don't need to control the drain right now. Maybe next year.

Jenn installed the towel bar, hand-towel ring, and toilet paper roller. And she caulks the toilet.

And here we are. I would sum up, but reliving the last several weeks has taken a lot out of me including -- but not limited to -- my will to live. Rather than continue and risk my life, I'll leave the summing up for another time.

Sorry for any misspelling or grammatical errors. I'm only an English major and know nothing of such things. What's proof-reading? I'll never know.

Sorry for the long absence. It looks like we were off in our projections by about four or five days...four or five will-sucking days.

But now we look back to the time when we had a room with a tub, a new mixer, and a very bare, very concrete floor...

When it comes to tile, our experience can be summed up in one project for the house on Beachwood Drive -- the one very large but very rectangular room on Beachwood drive. Our current bathroom, while smaller, lacks those other defining characteristics which makes us happy to have (a) access to a tile saw and (b) access to Andrew who has tiled three bathrooms, and recently at that.

Jenn lined 'em up and Andrew laid 'em down. I learned all kinds of new terms like "field tile" and "bullnose" which, for some reason, everyone else seemed to have in their vocabulary.

I have an MFA.

Jenn spent a good long while laying tile out in order to find the best pattern. I was surprised this was necessary seeing as it looked random before she went to work and it looked random after she finished. But I was assured that there was some benefit (though the exact nature of this benefit is still in contention).

Andrew started by doing something that I wouldn't have thought of. Instead of starting the shower tile with the lowest row, he measured where the lowest row would end and screwed in some wood braces on which the rest of the tile would rest as they were mortared in place. This kept the whole wall of tile from sliding down into the tub which I thought was a neat idea.

Andrew and Jenn applied all the field tiles in the shower and then moved on to the floor where they did the same thing. Then they carefully measured all of the spaces for which tile needed to be cut, recorded those measurements in a complex but efficient database, and trucked some uncut tile and the list of measurements over the Jhenn and Andrew's house where the tile saw was set up and ready to rock. Andrew showed me how to cut a tile and I did about three quarters of the rest until I could no longer reliably use my hands to hold anything (the tile saw does a good bit of vibrating).

We returned home with the newly cut tile, Andrew and Jenn mortared in the pieces according to the master plan in both the shower and the floor and we stood back to admire the work.

Next up...grout.

Since the gallery now contains pictures that document the process for the next several steps, I probably won't be adding any more pictures until we get to something new. Just FYI.

We have been busy. The project moves forward. All I'm going to say is that it's difficult to work a ten hour day, come home to a night of working on the bathroom, and then muster the will to write about it. But the work week ended an hour ago, and I'm sure that I'm going to feel up to droning on and on about minor details come tomorrow.

If not, expect some pictures. You know what they say about pictures. Makes me wonder why the heck I got an English degree.

[Update:] After some thought, I decided to update the gallery. It's now (a) flashier and (b) current. I'll do the chatting later. Enjoy.

This was another day that I left early and came home late, and while I was gone...magic happened.

Andrew put up a layer of plastic over the studs and then added hardibacker over that.





Jenn and Jhenn used a chisel and a "tile bully" to get the last remnants of the mortar and newly discovered linoleum layer (!) off the floor. The repercussions of this are still being felt in forearms and ankles.

Next up...TILE.

This was supposed to be the plumbing day, and for the most part, it was. But I left for work at 5:45am and returned at around 4:30pm only to discover that, in addition to a new condo shut-off, a toilet shut-off, a new shower mixer, raised shower head and tub spout, installed tub and drain...we had also begun electrical work.



The cats were happy to be locked in our bedroom. Or maybe I'm getting that mixed up.



Originally, electrical involved moving the over-mirror light and adding a new fan. But with Andrew's help (and Jenn's insistence), we had enlarged our plans to include a fan/light/heater. On top of that, we took a look at the condo's circuit map and discovered that our office is on the same circuit as the bathroom. Andrew realized we could fix this back at the fuse box, and told us that having the heater in the bathroom was a good reason to do it. We said okay.



When I got home most of the wire had been pulled, the fuse box had been modified with our split circuit, and Andrew had installed an access panel in the closet that allowed him to fiddle with the fuse box more easily. That was pretty much the end of the day.

Jenn and I started early in the morning by taking down the shower doors, the door track, the towel bar (that constantly spills our towels to the floor), part of the cabinet, etc.



Then Jhenn and Andrew came over and we went to work:





Andrew, with the help of Master Sawsall, discovered that builders prefer Michelob. And then prefer to drop their bottles in walls and seal them up.


Jhenn and Jenn made short work of the floor. I -- clearly the most masculine of the group -- made dinner.



Thus ended Day One. Day Two was largely left to the plumber. Or so I thought...

I always forget how much effort it takes simply to get a project off the ground. We spent three days solid on shopping. I'm a devoted researcher but the sheer number of things that must be on hand for renovation is staggering so I am forced to turn off that part of my brain for most of the experience. Jenn, thankfully, is fully operational in this mode.

I end up pushing the cart.




Here's the short list: Shower/Tub System, Sink Faucet, Toilet, Vanity (includes sink and cabinet), Storage Cabinet, Bathtub, Fan/Light/Heater, Light over mirror, Tile for shower (including ends, decoratives), Tile for floor, Morter, Grout, Spacers, Sealant, Hardibacker, Shower bar, Toilet shut off valve. I'm sure there's more. I just can't keep it all in my head.

Next up...DEMOLITION!

On January 1st, we gutted our bathroom. Our bathroom in our one bathroom condo. With the help of a couple of knowledgeable and motivated friends we are working to get this thing both back on line and in a style that does not hail from the early 1980s before Monday of next week. Yeah. That's fast. But the bathroom is small. And our power is great.

I just wanted to post a couple of quick pictures from the first days. I'll try to update the blog daily with progress reports.

Wish us luck.