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!