Cass's Craftiness!

Hello followers. I don't have any news for the bathroom remodel right now. I haven't done anything except buy a bunch more cement board. This week was my last week of working at the Help Desk. Since I fell ill late in the week, my energy's just completely gone to be working on the bathroom.

Anyway, I just wanted to update everyone to say I start my new Business Systems Analyst job this week. If you're thinking that title sounds familiar, it may be because that is the same title my wife has. We now have the same job just in different departments of ITS. I'm über excited!

I also wanted to show you a cool wall hanging that Cass and her craftiness made. Cass found this idea on Pinterest and we both liked it enough that she wanted to give it a try. The idea's really simple but time consuming. You drive a whole bunch of nails in the shape of a state and a heart (or whatever shape you want) inside the state (like where your hometown is) half-way into the wood plank and wrap a long continuous thread around all the nails between the inner shape and the state outline.

We bought a few 2oz boxes of 3/4" long 18 gauge wire brads. They're about $1.30/box from Lowes. Cass started hammering the nails in and quickly discovered she didn't enjoy doing this very much. Needless to say I hammered a bunch of nails in for her, probably about half of them. There were a bunch of really tight areas where it was really hard to hold a nail to get it started. This is where a pair of needle-nose pliers comes in really handy.

Cass recently bought this Silhouette Cameo cutter machine that she used to cut out the shape of Michigan which she just taped to the board temporarily to use as a template to follow for the nails. We're really happy with how it turned out. Cass is going to do two more. One of Texas (where she was born) and one of California (where I was born).

I hope you have an awesome week! I'm expecting to! ^_^

Shower Pan is Finished!

Finally! I'm making steady progress again!

Saturday was a bit of a slow day because I wanted to actually mud the shower pan, but unforeseen difficulties with the shower curb slowed things down a bit. More on that later. I started off getting the shower liner measured and cut. I think I bought a 6'x6'ish sheet of the liner and only needed about 5'x4'. As luck would have it, the leftover plywood I had from making the shower's subfloor was 5'x4' exactly, so it made the perfect template! After I got the liner cut and nailed into place, I installed the second piece of the shower drain that locks the liner in place and allows water to drain if it reaches the liner. Now for the fun part. I had to make the decision about the curb. I couldn't use the assembly I got from the Tile Shop because of how my shower floor is elevated from the rest of the bathroom floor. (See my post from Mar 5th) So, I had to improvise! I decided I'd make the curb myself out of wood. I knew that this needed to be a hefty chunk of lumber so I figured a couple 2x8s and a 2x6 (to accommodate the raised subfloor) would work.

So I cut the lumber to length, positioned it in the place it'd actually be sitting to ensure a perfect fit, and glued 'n screwed it together with 3 inch decking screws and liquid nails! By that time, I had a 4' long, 8" tall, and 4.5" thick piece of wood. Now I just had to figure out how I was going to cut the top of the curb to size with a slight pitch toward the shower. At first, this didn't seem like it'd be a problem. Then I realized..."Crap, I don't have a big enough saw to cut this whole thing!" The thickest my circular saw can cut is something like 3 inches and my table saw will only do a little more than that, but neither will cut 4.5 inches! So, I had to improvise on my improvisation. I cut 2/3 of the way with the tablesaw at a slight angle. I then cut the rest with my circular saw! I blew a 20 amp fuse in the shed's fuse box (and yes I mean FUSE box) with the tablesaw but I'd say it turned out alright after all. I thought I'd blown the motor on the tablesaw! I mean, the tablesaw's older than I am and the way it chugged down when it got stuck on a knot made me fear the worst! But, I replaced the fuse, flipped the switch, and it sprung back to life! What a trooper. Even though I seldom use it, I love that saw!

Next I installed the monstrous curb! I used up the entire tube of liquid nails on gluing the boards together and gluing it to the floor and walls. I also used 12 screws to lock that puppy in place. If that curb were a bridge, I'd have no problems driving my truck over it. It's that solid! All there was left to do was wrap the shower liner over it and nail that into place.

Sunday, I admired what I'd done the previous day for a little while and made sure it was dry. Then, I cut to size the shower pitch guide spokes that you use to make the slope to the drain in the shower floor. The only thing left to do was mud the shower floor and rather than talking about it, how about I just show you? Here it is!

Click the video below. There is sound, just be patient.


As you saw in the video, I nailed a board to the studs and strategically placed some nails to hold the camera in place while it took the video! I was quite surprised how well it worked!

Mudding the shower took me about 45 minutes. Hopefully next week I'll be able to hang the cement board on the walls and start tiling early May!

The Man with the Pan

Today, I venture into the unknown! Today, I use the right material for the job. Today, I got the pre-pan done! After last week's trial an error with the rapid set concrete mix, I went to the Tile Shop on Saturday and bought the concrete and ad-mixture they recommend for laying the shower's pre-pan. Sunday (today), I actually did it!

From the moment I sliced opened the bag, I knew this was going to go much better than last try. This stuff was more like sand, whereas the previous (unsuccessful) mix was more like powder. The video and materials I've watched/read about building a shower pre-pan said that the concrete has to be the consistency of wet beach sand and obviously this material seemed like it'd be just that after mixing in the water and ad-mix.

So I added the water and special ad-mixture they recommended, 4 quarts to one 80lb bag of the mix. The guy at the Tile Shop said that one bag covers 10 sq. ft. at one inch thick. After I poured out the contents of the bag into my wheelbarrow and put the water in, I gotta say I was a little nervous that I wasn't going to have enough. I have a 4x3 foot shower which means 12 sq ft, but the pan is only supposed to be 1 inch thick out at the edges. It tapers to 1/4" at the center where the drain is so that water can't just stand. It has to slope towards the center.

I grabbed my garden hoe and got cracking on mixing everything up. It only took a few minutes of mixing and a bit more water mid way through to get to the consistency I needed. Since the bathroom is quite small and I didn't want it to rain on my concrete, I had to do the mixing in the garage. This of course meant that I got to shovel the mix into a 5 gallon bucket and haul it upstairs! Joy of joys! Hauling nearly a hundred pounds of concrete upstairs in a bucket is one of my favoritest activities! Luckily I have two buckets, so I was able to haul the vast majority of it up the stairs in one trip. I was feeling pretty strong!

I got the stuff upstairs, and dumped it in place. My intention was to try and spread it out fairly well as I dumped it out, but trying to evenly pour 50lbs of concrete out of a bucket ain't exactly a walk in the park. Obviously, I knew I'd be spreading it out with the float in a minute, but in my mind at the time the less work I had to do at this point the better. Wouldn't it be great if the stuff just formed itself into a perfectly sloped pan when you pour in place?

I kept one of the buckets nearby while I got to work on molding the pan just in case there turned out to be extra material that needed to be removed. Somehow, I just didn't think that'd be the case though. Once I spread things out, knowing that you're supposed to pack it down, I was still a bit worried I wouldn't have enough. Beforehand, I had marked a chalk line one inch up from the floor on the studs, so I knew how high the edges had to be. Once I had the edges filled and packed to an inch high I worked my way inward towards the drain.

A couple minutes into it, I felt like I was getting that hang of it. This stuff was really quite easy to work with. Even for a newbie like me. I'm sure glad I remembered to put a sponge in the drain. I would've had a lot of concrete in the drain had I forgotten to do that!

This was my first shower pan and I'm pretty comfortable saying that I'm the first Eaton in my immediate family to attempt this. (I could be wrong though, my family's got a history of being pretty handy.) If this shower turns out, which I think it will, I'll make Eaton family history! Even if it doesn't turn out, I'll still make Eaton family history, just not in the way I wanted to.

The whole process only took me 1-2 hours. Oh yeah, remember how nervous I was that the 80lb bag wouldn't be enough? I ended up with about an inch of material in the bottom of the 5 gal bucket! I'd say that's pretty much perfect!

Vocation Alteration

Hello family and friends. As promised in my last post I need to talk about this job interview/presentation I had two Mondays ago. It was for a Business Systems Analyst position with the eResearch department of ITS at U of M.

Photos are a selection of slides are from my presentation.

I had to do a presentation on a technical topic (of my choosing) to a non-technical audience. Since photography is a passion of mine, I decided to do the presentation on "How Aperture Affects a Photograph" which my audience really seemed to like! They also really liked the fact that I used Google Presentation for my slideshow instead of PowerPoint since U of M has "Gone Google!" The photos are of some of the slides in my presentation.

So like I mentioned last time, I was told on Friday 3/30 that I would have to present this on Monday 4/2! Yikes! The hiring manager asked me on Friday if I'd be up for doing the presentation the next Monday and my thought process was pretty much this..."Whoa! That's not enough time! I was always given at least a week in college. This isn't college stupid, it's the real world. Crap! I can't tell her 'no' or suggest a different day because then I'll seem incompetent and that I'm not confident that I'm able to meet deadlines." I said..."Monday's perfect!"

I told Cass that I wanted the whole weekend to work on this, so the bathroom remodel would have to be put on hold for a weekend. Not only did I have to come up with the material for the presentation, I needed to take/make the photos I was going to use in the presentation as examples. For example, I took a couple photos of cars driving on i-94 for one illustration. I went out to the pedestrian bridge over i-94 in Belleville to get a good vantage point for the cars driving by. I got a few funny looks from drivers probably wondering what the heck I was doing. I also wanted a series of photos for another illustration that involved a falling baseball. I wanted to illustrate that differences in shutter speed by changing the aperture. So, I set the camera up on the tripod, tossed the ball in the air a bunch of times, and tried taking the picture at just the right moment. Not as easy a task as I'd hoped. I ended up taking over 100 pictures in that exercise and ended up with a handful of usable pictures and whole bunch of pictures of a blank white wall.

I finished a draft of the presentation on Saturday afternoon and we went to have dinner with my parents. I practiced presenting it to them and got some useful feedback. Dad really seemed to like my illustrations on Depth of Field. On Sunday, I practiced presenting to Cass again and put the finishing touches on it.

Monday (4/2) comes and my interview is scheduled for 11am. Right off, I could tell my audience seemed excited to learn about a photography related topic, maybe except for Peter (one of my old co-workers who was there for my interview). I'll bet he already knew everything I presented. Hopefully he at least enjoyed my pictures. Felt to me like it went without a hitch and I had a really satisfied feeling that I'd genuinely done my best. I also had some great feedback about the presentation and my skills in general from my audience.

After all that and a week and 3 days of anxiously waiting, I got the job! I just signed my offer letter yesterday (4/12)! I know there were a lot of people praying for me and I thank you from the bottom of heart for that!

I start the new job on April 30th.

Slow Goin' These Days

Ok, many folks may be wondering why the renovation (if you've been following the blog) has suddenly grinded to a snail's pace. Well, there are a few reasons. Two weekends ago, I did absolutely nothing on the bathroom because I was told that Friday that I had homework that was due on Monday. By homework, I mean I was given the chance to do a presentation as a job interview and they wanted me to present on Monday. So I worked on the presentation all weekend and the bathroom got put on the back burner. More to come on that in the very near future!

Then of course this was Easter weekend which meant I had limited time to do anything. We had Memaw and Papaw over on Saturday and we were going to Cass's parent's house on Sunday after church. I'm not complaining, though! It was a great weekend.

I was able to get something done on the bathroom, but it was waaaaay less than I was hoping. Hence I didn't really take any photos. I wanted to do the pre-pan for the shower floor. I got as far as you see in the picture. I got the drain installed and put down tar paper and the wire mesh.

I bought the mortar mix that Home Depot said I should use for the pre-pan. When I got home, I got everything ready because the stuff I was told to use was called "Rapid Set Mortar Mix" which worried me. So, I get started mixing the stuff using the recommended amount of water. As I'm in the middle of mixing it I start to notice this stuff is already setting and I haven't even got it out of the bucket yet! It started hardening into concrete rocks before I even had the entire thing mixed! Unbelievable. I tried to put some down and see if I could break up the rocks that had already started to form, but there was no chance of that. So I had to abort and put the mix back in the bucket. So, I've now got a bucket of a whole bunch of hardened concrete rocks! Awesome.

I'll be re-grouping this week, and probably take another stab at doing the pre-pan next weekend. Stay tuned!