Mistake is My Middle Name

Howdy folks. Well, this weekend was a little less productive than I'da liked, but what can you do? I know what I'll do differently next weekend, take breaks. By the end of this, some of you will undoubtedly be thinking, "Really, that's all you got done?", but (brace yourself, here comes the excuse) I'm still really new at this and don't really know what I'm doing. Not to mention I fly a desk all week, which isn't exactly manual labor.

Saturday, I woke up bright and early around 7am which was mistake #1. Got ready and headed off to pick up stuff we ordered from a couple different Home Depots, S. Canton and Northville. Unfortunately, no one store had enough stock of everything we wanted...go figure right? I got home around 10ish, unloaded all the stuff I bought and no, that picture isn't of everything I bought. It's more like half. By then I was already pretty tired, but I had a goal that I actually thought was achievable, even for me! Build a wall, raised sub-floor for the shower, and lay down some cement board for the floor. So, I got right to work, mistake #2. Should've taken a nap...lol.

I cleared out the garage so I could use it as a workshop and got started building a wall that would accomodate the prefabricated recessed shelf thingamajigs. Mistake #3 was taking The Tile Shop's word for it that these prefabricated thingamajigs were made to fit inside studded walls that were 16" on center. Now, I'm no carpenter or anything, but by golly I know what 16" on center means (my brother would kill me if I didn't) and these things were NOT the right width for a 16" on center studded wall. They were about 2" too short. I measured and cut the studs and put them together centering the two studs that were going to have the shelves nailed to to them. Long story short, I ended up building that stupid wall three times for failure of properly measuring everything before nailing them together.

Mistake #4 was building the wall in the garage and then assuming that a 3x8 foot wall would fit around the banister and up the stairs. With some creativity and a dent or two on the walls later, Cass and I got the wall upstairs. I finagled it into place and grabbed the mini sledge. For having such an unnecessarily hard time with measuring where the studs were supposed to go, I was impressed at how snug the wall fit in place! Perfect! I hammered that sucker into position and got started nailing it in place. Now, at this time I was really hurting. The wise thing to do would've been to take a break and come back to the wall refreshed. However, I was determined to get that wall in place so I grabbed the hammer and nails. You guessed it...mistake #5. If you've ever had to drive nails up into the ceiling joists, you know that it's not a very graceful process. Having to overcome gravity, it usually involves swinging the hammer in the general direction of a nail and hoping you hit it and fatigue happens really fast. Yyyyyeeeeah.

You'd think that since it was now well into the afternoon and I obviously needed to take a break that I would've called it a day. Mistake #6. I wanted to build that sub-floor! How hard could that be? It actually wasn't too bad until I realized that common framing nails are 3 1/2" inches long and studs are 3 1/2" wide. I needed to toe-nail the studs together, which I'm not very good at. Finally I get the frame built and the plywood cut to size only to then realize that I need to cut a hole out for the drain and have no tool for doing so. I should have stopped because it was 7:30 pm and just saved that for Sunday, but I didn't, mistake #7. I went to Lowes and got a rotary tool with a couple bits for wood and cement board, came back, and started cutting out the hole. I finally finished, cleaned up the garage, and put the cars back in around 10pm. 15 hours and essentially never really took a break except to eat lunch and dinner.

Sunday, I installed the subfloor. That was all the energy and pain tolerance I had enough to do. By 4pm, I felt awful. Next week, I'm gonna spread out the work over two days.