Workarounds Are Great Fun!

About halfway through the bathroom remodel, I went to start the truck one morning. I put the key in the ignition and turned it when I felt something strange. After one or two clicks during the rotation of the key in the ignition, it felt like it just gave out and the key was turning freely. Something had obviously broken, and I couldn't start the truck. I immediately thought, "Uh oh, FATAL failure!" How can I drive it if I can't start the engine?

The key will turn into the "On" position, but the "Start" position is never engaged, thus the truck doesn't start. I put the truck in neutral so I could push it out of the garage because I needed something on the wall the truck was parked really close to when I realized, "Wait! If I pull it out, I won't be able to push it back in the garage." (Our driveway is sloped.) Luckily, I hit the brakes early enough that I could still close the garage door. So, for the the past two months, we were forced to deal with only having the Rav4. It really wasn't that bad on us, it was just annoying to have a 5,000lb hunk of steel in our garage that I couldn't move.

A few weeks ago, my brother and his family came out to stay at our house for a few days and my Mom and Dad came over as well. My brother and my Dad went outside with me as Rob was showing us his truck and I later showed Dad the problem my truck had developed. My Dad in his infinite automotive wisdom figured that if I put the key in the ignition and turn it to "On", open the relay/fuse box under the hood, pull out the relay for the starter motor and jam a piece of wire into the two leads for the starter motor, it'd start the truck. Lo and behold, it did! Thus, starting my truck became a process where I did just that. Every time I started the truck, I had to pop the hood. The few times I went to the gas station and had to start my truck this way, I wondered how many people thought I was driving a stolen truck. I used this method for about 2 weeks when today after church, I decided "Enough of this nonsense."

Actually getting it fixed properly would cost too much, but Dad had mentioned it'd be pretty easy to wire up a push button to start the truck instead of using this method all the time, so today I went to the auto parts store and bought the stuff I needed to do just that. Some 12 gauge wire, connectors, and a marine push button for a boat's outboard motor. After about an hour of sweating, here's what I ended up with.



After I got that installed, I figured, hey if I'm going to Mickey Mouse this thing, I may as well own that I'm Mickey Mousin' it right? So I convinced Cass to cut me out a stencil with her paper cutter machine and spray painted a label for it.

Finished! Enough...Part 2

So, one "Grrr" moment I have to tell you about before the rest of the story. On Friday, before installing the door, I started installing the trim for the showerhead faucet and handle. The showerhead was fine. The controls? Not so much.

This shower handle actually has two controls, one for volume control, the other for temperature control. There's one small screw that Delta gives you to install the temperature handle. The screw that came in our kit was the wrong screw. It doesn't fit the universal valve that Delta's website said I should use for the shower trim kit we wanted! Unbelievable. So we had to call Delta and tell them we needed the right screw. I just have a feeling that they're going to send us the same screw.

Sunday

To be honest, we had aspirations of grandeur for Sunday, but we did nothing. I wanted to completely finish the bathroom. All there was left to do was install the new overhead light and hang the new door. We did neither of those things. We went to Lowes to get the right door for the bathroom after church, but after that I just had no energy. I took an 1.5 hour nap and the only reason I woke up was because Cass came and woke me up.

So, on to the good stuff! I love before and after shots! They show you just how much difference all those dollars, sweat drops, and wasted weekends afforded you! In this case, I'd say it was worth it all. Some of the before pictures now that we see them with fresh eyes are actually a little embarrassing.

Before	After
And just for fun...

Yeah, we love our new bathroom!

Finished! Enough...Part 1

Well as the title suggests, the bathroom is finally, FINALLY finished enough that I feel like I'm done. The only things left to do are to put the new overhead light in and paint and hang the new bathroom door. I would've gotten everything done over my three day weekend had I not caught a weird bug on Thursday. It didn't really affect me much in terms of feeling sick. I felt like I was over it by mid day on Friday, but for some reason on Sunday I had absolutely zero energy to do anything after church. This will be a pretty long post, so I've made it a two parter. At the end, there will be before and after shots! :-)

Friday

The first order on business on Friday was to finish painting the ceiling. Both coats only took about 90 minutes to finish with an hour wait in between coats, so that was a quick win. Next up was the shower door! This was my first time installing a shower door. It was hard work getting the holes drilled for the wall jambs but it was a very straight forward installation otherwise. The bottom track just gets glued to the shower curb with silicone, then there's 3 screws per wall jamb. Since we used porcelain tile which is super hard, it meant I had to buy a special bit to drill the holes. Similar to the hole we had to drill for the shower head pipe in Tiling the Walls, Part 2, this diamond grit bit had to be water cooled while you drill the hole. So, it comes with this really silly looking box that slowly drips water onto the bit while you're drilling. It work well, right up until the bit broke while I was drilling the 5th of 6 holes I had to drill...of course. So we had to spend another $10 on another bit, but I got the last hole drilled and got the wall jambs screwed in place. Once those were in place, all I had to do was cut the top railing to length and put it in place. This part went so well, I could scarcely believe it. The railing was level and I had cut it to about as perfect a length and one can get it. I just had to do a touch of filing to make it fit the contour of the tiling, but after I got it in place, even though it just floats above the wall jambs, it doesn't move at all. Perfect fit. Everything was going really well up until I put the glass doors on. Cass caught a rather telling and hilarious photo of me when I realized some of the not-so-square square angles I had to deal with. After I got annoyed, I then realized I had the ability to adjust the doors to accommodate. What joy! So I did that and now I won't say it's perfect but it's pretty darn good.

Saturday

My next order of business became caulking all the seams in the room. The shower door and where the tile met the drywall and the ceiling all needed to be caulked so it would be water tight and so that it'd look nicer. That was a rather uneventful job, but I can definitely tell you that the As Seen on TV "Pro Caulk" tool works pretty darn well. I picked one up because I already knew I'm absolutely horrible at getting a clean caulk bead and figured what could it hurt?

Next up was the toilet! So exciting right? This wasn't the first time I'd been involved with a toilet installation, however much like most of this remodel it was my first solo attempt at it. This was actually the easiest and fastest thing I did all weekend. The soil pipe's flange was in near perfect condition and I'd already cleaned it off literally months ago. I gave it one last cleaning and inspection and got to work on the bowl. I already knew the floor was not perfectly flat. That's nearly impossible to accomplish on a tile floor. So, I picked up some toilet shims to make sure it wouldn't rock after I'd installed it. I put the hardware in place and installed the wax ring and just plopped that sucker down. Once the wax ring was seated and I got the shims in place I tightened the thing down and voilà. After caulking around the base of the bowl, I set to work on installing the tank. The innards of the tank came pre-installed, so all I had to do was put the o-ring in place and bolt it to the bowl. Finally, the water line. >.< D'OH! This toilet is a couple inches taller than our old one, so the water line was too short. So, that warranted another trip to the hardware store. Once we go that, the toilet was done.

See Part 2 for the rest of the story and the before and after pictures!

A Bit More Painting Done

Just wanted to quickly report out that the walls have been painted in the bathroom! Yessss. Cass was AWESOME and put the majority of the first coat on while I was outside mowing the lawn and we both painted the second coat. Now I just have to paint the ceiling. Normally, I'd be a little annoyed about having to paint the ceiling because ceilings are just about my least favorite surfaces to paint. However, this ceiling is TINY! It's only about 20 square feet! So it should be quick and easy. Now, if only I knew when I'd have time to paint it....

Let the Painting Begin

This weekend was such a nice change of pace from the last few weekends. Over the week, just doing an hour or two here and there, I prepped the bathroom walls for painting. Mudding and filling holes in the drywall, etc. Saturday, all I did was sand the joints and refill them where necessary. This meant I could do a bit of work, and then I had to wait for it to dry before I could work any more on it. This was like heaven for me! Basically, I didn't have a strict time table that required 8 or more straight hours of intense labor! AWESOME!"

After I finally deemed the joints ready, Cass and I taped all the edges of the tile. We then taped some plastic drop cloth to the tile so there was absolutely no possibility of getting paint on the tile. I wasn't about to spend all that time, sweat, and money just to ruin it by dripping paint into the grout lines which would be impossible to clean out!

There were a few spots on the ceiling I was a little concerned about how they'd look despite my phenomenal skills at mudding (rrrright), but it's funny how bad it looks before you actually paint it. After we got a couple coats of primer up on everything, the joints looked so much nicer. ::Huge sigh of relief::

As I mentioned above, Cass and I were able to get a couple coats of primer up on the walls before the end of the weekend. We did that on Sunday. (I think the picture on the right is after the first coat.) I know I've said this before, but it's so nice to just work and make solid progress with no hold-ups. The only mishap was when I was taking the roller cover off the roller, I dropped the wet roller cover onto the floor outside the bathroom. Luckily, because we used this same area for filling the paint tray, we put down some plastic on top of the carpet. Phew!



We'll probably paint during the week and (fingers crossed) the goal for next weekend, shower door and toilet! Gosh, I am sooooooo close to being done!

Phew! Tile is Finished

Wow, I thought installing tile was difficult. Grouting with two-part epoxy grout was even harder.

Thankfully, I asked my Dad to come and help with this part. If I had tried to take this on myself, I'm 100% positive it would have been an irreversible disaster. My first order of business was to clean the tile off as much as possible. There were still a few clumps of thinset stuck to the tiles and I didn't want those to get mixed in with the grout and discolor it or possibly compromise the water tight seal. After that, we decided we should go to Home Depot and pick up a couple items for the cleanup and hopefully find someone who had any tips of tricks for us installing this type of epoxy grout. We only accomplished the first part unfortunately. We couldn't find anyone at HD who'd used this product...of course.

So, we came back and watched YouTube! Not just any 'ole videos on YouTube though, we found an official installation video from the grout's manufacturer and watched it. We felt ready to have a go at it after that, sort of. We mixed up and used only one bucket at a time which proved to be about the only way it would work. The epoxy in this grout starts to set a lot faster than your typical grout. We had about 20-30 minutes of time where the grout was easy to work with and after that it'd get really sticky and would pull itself out of the grout lines if you weren't careful with the float. On top of that, you can't let this stuff sit on the face of the tile for too long otherwise it'd dry and become really tough to wipe clean. Since we were on a tight schedule and couldn't really take a break fatigue started becoming a problem, so Dad and I had to tag team on installing the grout and wiping down the tile. I'm not sure one thing was easier than the other, but it seemed to help.

After what seemed like 12 hours but was actually about 4 hours of grouting and simultaneously cleaning, we finished grouting the shower walls. By that time it was 3:30pm and we hadn't eaten lunch yet. We decided it was break time and asked Cass to run out and get a couple more buckets of the grout and some mineral spirits to help with cleaning up the excess grout that fell off the walls onto the shower floor before we could grout the floor. After our MUCH needed break, we got back to work and cleaned the shower floor as mentioned above and proceeded with grouting the floor. This, thankfully, proved to be much simpler than the shower walls though we still faced the same challenges with the grout setting quickly, getting sticky, and having to clean it up as we worked.

We finally finished with everything somewhere around 6ish, and it felt so good to be done that even as I write this, I'm breathing a sigh of relief just thinking about it. Afterward I almost felt sick from all the hard work. It felt to me like we'd taken the same amount of work I put into the tile of over the four day memorial weekend and condensed it into 8 hours. O_O I think that all that extra effort using epoxy grout will pay off though since we won't even have to seal it.

Many many thanks to my Dad for helping me out with this (and to Mom for lending him to me). There's no way I would have been so ambitious in our tile design if I didn't have every confidence that you'd help me accomplish this! We truly have something to be proud of because of your help. :-)

Check it out!








FYI, this isn't my last post about the bathroom remodel. We're not done, yet. :-( I still have finish work to do on the room itself like drywall mudding and painting, installing the shower door, bathroom light, and new toilet amongst a few other things, but let's be honest. The tile is really the main feature, right?!?! ;-) And it was the hardest part so I feel a real sense of accomplishment about it.

Tiling the Walls, Part 3

Spoiler alert! I'm finally done tiling!!!!! What an enormous undertaking. I wouldn't recommend taking on a project of this magnitude as your first tiling project.

I had to finish the crown pattern on the shower head wall and the shelf wall. After 4 days of straight tiling last weekend without being finished, you can imagine my disdain for tiling by this point. But my motivation was how close to being finished I finally was. Once I got this crown up, I could put the mortar away.





These were tricky because all four edges of the square recessed shelves are tapered inward so no matter how you install them, the shelf will drain. So, I had to cut the tiles with a slight taper, AND I had to be super precise when cutting the sides because they were going to be what held up the top tiles. CRAZY!


The last thing I had to do was put in the threshold. We found a nice tan(ish) colored marble threshold that, while the color doesn't match perfectly, we think looks really nice.




Alright, here's what you really want to see right? The semi finished product pictures! Obviously, they're not grouted yet, but they're done enough that you can really see what the shower will look like!















All I can say is, Phew! We couldn't be happier with how it looks.