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.

Tips for Remodeling Vol. 1

Ok, so I've decided it'd be fun to start posting things that I learn from remodeling for my own reference and to share.

1. When buying new fixtures, shop around! We found a nice shower door that we want and looked at prices at Lowes and Home Depot. The door we wanted was $590 at Lowes and $544 at Home Depot. Then I looked at Menards, $259! WHAT?!? Sure it's a bit of a drive, but guess where we're buying our shower door!


2. Toilet bowls make a really loud noise when you throw them as hard as you can into a big metal dumpster! Just sayin'...




3. Reciprocating saws are evil, DeRanGed power tools that (I'm guessing) were developed by a man who thought that the other existing types of saws didn't give him enough of an adrenaline rush but he also had enough sense to know that a chainsaw would be overkill..... and I LOVE 'EM!


4. Finally, don't expect that the house was built like you think it was and that everything will go as you hope. Just don't, 'cause it won't.

A Little Less Action, A Lot More Talk

I ended up doing very little actual "work" on the bathroom remodel this past weekend. Most of our attention was focused on picking out our materials, fixtures, tiles, etc that we're going to use. Oh boy, shopping :-\! Actually, I've enjoyed shopping for this stuff...mostly. Toilets are kinda boring.

Saturday, I needed to get rid of the waste from demo during the past two weekends. My truck was filled higher than the bed walls with bathroom stuff and the crappy rotted doors from when I built new shed doors in Summer 2010. I never took them to the dump, so they were just leaning against the back side of the shed for nearly two years. After going to FPU on Saturday, I loaded up the old shed doors into the truck, grabbed my shovel, and Cass and I went to the solid waste management site in Ypsi Twp. It took me what felt like 5 hours to unload the truck, but I'm guessing it was like 10 minutes. I had everything in there; the shower pan, tiles, drywall, toilet, etc. My truck was my construction dumpster for the past two weeks.

Once I got the bed emptied, I wished I'da brought a broom...whoops. Oh well. Cass and I then took off to patronize Home Depot, Lowes, and the Tile Shop. We've found just about everything we think we're going to get for the bathroom. Sorry for the secrecy, but we're going to keep our ideas and choices of the new stuff semi-secret until the "big reveal". That is unless you've figured out where we keep interesting ideas/things we find for the bathroom. ;-)

After shopping on Saturday, we got home in the evening and I decided not to work on the bathroom. I did do a little bit of work on Sunday. I tore out a spacer wall that was just there to make the shower space exactly 48 inches wide. The 2x4s at the bottom of that wall were pretty nasty from water damage. I also pulled up the raised portion of the subfloor where the shower is because it was reeeaally rotted and ugly. The builders built said box to raise the shower subfloor for the shower pan. I was hoping that maybe I could make the shower subfloor flush with the regular bathroom subfloor, but I figured the builders must've had a reason for doing that. Turns out I was right. Because the shower is the part of the bathroom that is suspended above the staircase, there wasn't enough room for a p-trap to fit completely underneath the subfloor so they had to cut a hole in the subfloor to accomodate the drain and build a 2 1/2" box to raise the shower subfloor.

That's all for now. I'm going to "turn it around" this weekend and begin building things to put in the bathroom like a new raised subfloor and a replacement spacer wall.