Day 8

It's been a little too long since the last update. Here's what has been going on since then.

I've kind of gotten to the point where there's nothing that can be done with the shower and floor areas until the old stuff is removed. Same for the countertops and cabinets. So I've been working in other areas. Mostly up high.

This weekend I painted the ceiling which is a surprisingly hard thing to do well. Along with that, I had to touch up a few details. What you can see of the light fixtures in the ceiling along with the heater weren't looking too well. A couple of fresh coats of paint took care of that and now they look as good as new. Right now I'm halfway through the second coat of paint on the crown molding.

Then I was able to move on to the doors, door frames and casing. I'd like to say that the power sprayer helped speed things up but it doesn't spit out paint in a smooth enough pattern for the doors and I had to go over it all with a brush. The only real tip here is that latex paint and a sprayer don't really mix that well but at least it will throw a lot of paint on the door quickly.

We also got the mirror off the wall. It was attached with a black adhesive that was a bit of trouble to get off. Once upon a time it was attached in five places, but today I think only one of them was holding on anymore. The mirror is 6 1/2 feet x 4 feet so it was HEAVY!

Anyway here's the latest. Our plans for tomorrow are to finish the second coat of paint on the molding, then start to work on the walls to get them primed and smooth because the next big task is to apply the plaster finish.

Day 4

Yes I know there was no day 3 post... I wrapped up a little late for that.

The wallpaper is taken care of now. The water closet had two layers, but the lower layer was SOLID. I had no idea it was there, except for the little bit peaking out from behind the cabinet. So I decided to leave it there. I could tell that the loose spots were removed and smoothed out with drywall compound and I'm going to leave it alone. It just damaged the drywall too much trying to remove it where I did. Since it's stable I'll leave it alone.

The cultured marble is off the bathtub backsplash for the most part. There's no real trick to removing it in one piece. Just cut the silicone around the edges and carefully pry it off. Everything attached to the ceiling has been removed to prepare it for paint, the medicine cabinet is down, and the crown molding has been sanded. At this point about the only things remaining are the shower itself, the countertop cabinets, and tile. I'm going to try and schedule a crew to remove all tile (shower and floor) and another to take care of the shower glass and take down the giant mirror sometime early next week.

But this weekend I have some work of my own to do. I plan on painting the ceiling and baseboards, and work on preparing the walls by repairing drywall and priming. We also need to figure out the hardware we would like to use because that makes a difference whether I will need to move the towel rack or not. We also need to figure out whether we would like to install a hand towel holder near the sink and another towel holder by the shower. I'm also ordering a new vent fan for the water closet because the one in there is loud and damaged from someone putting in a light bulb that was too bright for the fixture.

Anyway here are the pictures of what everything looks like today. It doesn't look like a lot but it took a lot of work to get here.



So far no real surprises. Nothing interesting hidden in the walls. Nothing written on the back of anything, except for the name of the builder and the order number for the cultured marble. No bad surprises either. You can see under the countertop in the next picture that there's a hole in the sheetrock. There's a good reason for that and I'll post more about it later.

Day 2

Today I just worked on removing wallpaper in the bathroom. The main part of the bathroom is nearly done - the floral stuff has been coming off pretty easily. The water closet however... that has been trouble. It has 2 layers of wallpaper and the older, ivy layer is very hard to remove without damaging the wall. It doesn't peel into two layers like the newer layer does. Tomorrow I will go get one of those wallpaper removal tools (I really don't know what they are called). Then hopefully I'll be able to finish up the water closet and be more or less done removing wallpaper!

The Bathroom - Day 1

Today we started the bathroom remodel. First there are a few before pictures to show off how scary it looks. Yes, that's Danielle celebrating something with the dog in the second picture.

The first thing to come off was all the baseboards. I was going to remove the door casings too but it really wouldn't do a whole lot. Only one came off, and that's the one that wasn't cut quite right by one of the closets. Next we took off the small cabinet in the water closet, and that gave us a great view of what the wallpaper looked like when the place was new. I think the older ivy pattern is better, but Danielle thinks the flowers are less scary. In the main part of the bathroom the layer with the ivy is already gone, so for the most part we only have one layer to remove.

After that we still had a little time left so I decided to have a go at the wallpaper. The wallpaper we have is the type that has a vinyl coating on the surface, so it's coming off in two parts. The good news is that it's been coming off MUCH easier than I've described. If you've ever considered removing wallpaper you've probably been told countless stories about how horrible it is, but it's really not that bad. The outer layer peels off, then a spray bottle with some Dawn dish soap mixed with water will loosen the paper layer below. It carefully peels off leaving the sheetrock below unharmed.

There will be plenty of pictures of that tomorrow - we made great progress today and Danielle is amazing at this part of the project so we're ahead of schedule. We will probably be busy removing wallpaper for at least another day or two before moving on to something else. My goal was to keep the bathroom useable for as long as possible, but that won't be the case for very much longer.

The calm before the work begins

It's no secret that I've been doing a lot more planning than actual work this spring. That phase will come to an end soon. So far for the bathroom I have every major source of materials figured out, except for the shower glass and granite and I do have a couple of places I'd like to talk to sometime soon. The good news is that if everything works out I won't have to look far when planning for the kitchen work. The final unknowns are just in the details. Hardware and sinks. I may actually go with Lowes for the sinks because they seem to be a lot more competitive than the place I stopped by earlier, but there has been a second place recommended to me who I plan on visiting.

I also have a detailed project plan to work to. It should take about a month to do the bathroom and another month to do the kitchen. So right now I'm just waiting for the semester to wrap up and for timing to be just right... it'll happen soon.

Where have I been???

It's been a while since I posted. Way too long, so where have I been and what have I been up to? It all comes down to one thing. This spring I've been given a wonderful opportunity to work with the flight test program back in Seattle until sometime in mid-April or so. It's been an enlightening experience learning a part of the program and company I've never been involved with before, and being around live aircraft every day (as opposed to building them) is loads of fun. So during the interim I've been planning and learning. LOTS of planning!

For the master bathroom we'll need more or less everything. Flooring, shower tile, cabinets, doors for the hamper, something for the walls... everything is going except for the mirror and the jetted tub. Even the tub will need work since there's no access panel to the pump and whatever else makes it run. Fortunately the layout will remain the same. Danielle and I have put a lot of time and energy into figuring materials out, and I've worked hard figuring out exactly *how* to demo and rebuild a bathroom.

There's a lot of stuff out there you never think about. Like the shower pan - I had no idea what was under the tile, but it's a complex system built and designed to keep moisture from getting to the cement board. My biggest concern with the project is removing the existing tile. It's not original like the stuff I removed about 6 months ago that was a total nightmare, but that was a bad enough experience so that I'm going to try farming that part of the job out. The shower tile shouldn't be a problem since on the floor there it's installed on a mud bed that sits on top of a plastic barrier. Pull up on the barrier after you remove the tile from the walls, and out it comes!

Enough about the details - here are some pictures of what the materials we're considering look like. The marble is already on order so that's taken care of. The pieces arrange in a pattern and are of several shapes and sizes. It matches with the cultured marble in the bathtub much better in person. The two materials will not be next to each other anyway since only the actual bathtub part will remain. The front is seen in this picture which will be replaced with a wood panel.



Cabinets - we both like the dark wood look from an earlier post. The walls will be blue (to match what the bedroom) venetian plaster. Glass mosaic, countertops, shower tile and accessories are up in the air. Here are the samples for the shower tile and glass mosaic.



To be honest I'm not completely happy with either. The bottom set of samples look nice, but may be a bit too dark (but might give a good contrast with the walls...) For the top one the shade of blue seems odd. We will continue looking at tile after I get back in April.

In the meantime I'm going to be on the John Bridge Tile Forums a LOT because there's tons of knowledge to be gained there and I want to have a good plan for moving forward with this because after the bathroom is done we're moving on immediately to the kitchen!

Broken Garage Door

On our way out to a New Year's Eve party yesterday one of the garage door springs broke. I fixed it this morning, and here's a quick writeup on how to do the job yourself.

First the damage... this is what I came home to.


One dead spring, one broken safety cable. It's important to replace the safety cable because it's what kept the broken spring from flying into the wall, one of the cars or the door. If the spring is strong enough to hold up the garage door it's strong enough to do some damage to you or anything in the garage.



First open the garage door and secure it with a C clamp through the track. To attach the safety cable, first run the loose end through a hole in the framework by the garage door opening (you can see it in the last picture). Now thread the straight end of the cable through the middle of the new spring. Attach it to the framework indicated below by wrapping it through the holes and securing the loose end.



Now you can attach the spring assist cable. Secure the loose end of the cable in the framework located at the top of the garage door. Now wrap the other end of the cable back through the pulley attached to the spring.



The last step is to attach the looped end of the cable to the peg at the bottom corner of the garage door.



Now you can remove the clamp in the garage door track and reattach the garage door opener.

The first time you do the job it will probably take about an hour. But if you have to do it again the job goes by much faster. This is the second time I have repaired this kind of garage door and it took about 20 minutes.

Congratulations! You've saved yourself at least $100 or so by not needing to call someone out to service it.