In retrospect, I wasn’t ready to start this project. Before I build any furniture, I go over every step of the process in my mind. I try to predict what problems I’ll inevitably run into and come up with several different ways to solve them. That way I can develop a realistic project plan in terms of materials, budget, and time. I did that with the kitchen remodel last year and was able to pretty much stick to the plan. This project was different. The whole thing just sort of happened. I put together a rough plan, but it wasn’t very well thought out. As a result, it took longer and cost more money than I had hoped.

To see the phases of our remodel, and to learn from our many mistakes, browse through the following posts:

• Bathroom Remodel 1: The Plan
• Bathroom Remodel 2: It Begins
• Bathroom Remodel 3: The Hard Work
• Bathroom Remodel 4: Progress
• Bathroom Remodel 5: Tile
• Bathroom Remodel 6: Almost Finished
• Bathroom Remodel 7: Finished

We pretty much started our bathroom remodel on Saturday, July 10 and officially finished on August 8. We were without a toilet for three days. The rest of the time, we had a functioning bathroom. More or less. We spent about $700 more than we had planned due to some unforeseen plumbing issues. Actually, they were technically foreseen but not entirely understood. Plumbing issues are expensive issues. What really dragged out the process was my slow progress with the drywall work. I hate working with drywall.

We went with white subway tile on the shower walls.

All in all, we were without a toilet for the better part of three days.

I know there’s technically no difference between a motel and a hotel, but for whatever reason I’ve developed my own definition. If the door to my room opens to a hallway, it’s a hotel. If it opens to a breezeway, it’s a motel. Motels are a little sketchier in my opinion, but hey; if it saves a few bucks, I was willing to give it a try. After all, we were merely sleeping there. So on Tuesday night, we checked into the Savannah Suites motel. The rooms were only $35 per night.

While we waited for the manager to unlock the office, a girl asked us, “do you live around here?” I thought that was a little odd. Who (besides us) stays in a hotel/motel in their own town? The wife answered, “yes,’ and the girl told us about how her and her husband and their dog had been sharing a room there since February. She was waiting because she had left her bible in the office. Who takes a bible into a motel office? When we were finally allowed entry into the dank motel office, I overheard the guy in front of us boasting that he’d been there for four months and knew everybody. Apparently, we had wandered into a pit stop for tramps and transients. It was like a hostel, but without the charm of adventurous youth. Our room reeked of equal parts depression, desperation and depravity. The broken table leg seemed to epitomize how everything there was just a little off.

Since we were officially slumming it, I thought we’d fit in better with the locals by drinking wine out of the always-elegant, and sometimes romantic, plastic wine goblets. If only we’d had some Boone’s Farm or Thunderbird, we’d have fit right in.

There was a funky smell in the room that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The wife walked around all bundled up in layers because she had convinced herself there were hidden cameras in one or more of the vents. I didn’t notice because I was busy waging a TV volume war with the guy on the other side of the wall. We eventually fell asleep to the reassuring flicker of the cheap bathroom light. At one point during the night, I woke up and figured out what the puzzling smell was. It was the acrid odor of old vomit. Needless to say, we didn’t spend another night in the Savannah Suites motel.

We stayed at a nearby Days Inn the next two nights. To my satisfaction, our door opened to a hallway. The wife got to hang out by the pool while I was busy hanging the sheetrock over the cement board in the shower back at the house. It was pretty nice at $45 per night. But then again, I’m easily seduced by free breakfast. The only drawback was that, even though the room was clean, the maid had not noticed a large pair of white underwear hanging on the towel hook behind the bathroom door. If I hadn’t been alert, I might have had a moment like the bathroom scene from Planes, Trains and Automobiles. After being reassured by the wife that she wasn’t cheating on me with an overweight gym teacher, I carefully removed them from the door and tossed them in the trash.

On Friday after work, we finally installed our new toilet. It felt good to finally have a functioning bathroom again. We bought the Glacier Bay HET ($100) to save a little money, but I didn’t care as long as it worked.

I have a personal motto that I’ve been living by for many years now: “You can do it right, or you can do it twice.” After the wife and I realized that it took three to five turns of the knob to properly flush our high-efficiency toilet, we called Home Depot to see if it’s possible to return a commode that’s been used. To our surprise, the customer service guy replied, “just clean it and box it up as best you can.” So we stashed away our toilet and our shame and went back to the store.

After installing the Consumer Reports-recommended American Standard Champion 4 ($230), we once again had a functioning bathroom.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet (x2)
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

After two hotels and two toilet installations, my motto is truer than ever.

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 6: Almost Finished

Before work on Tuesday morning, I removed the only toilet in our tiny house.

I ended my last post by sayaing, “I’ve had a bad feeling about this project from the beginning. So far, every step forward has resulted in another step back. I don’t really mind that as long as it means more work instead of more money. Still, I’ve been expecting bad news and I’m afraid I’m going to get it over the next few days.” I was right. I met the tile guy on Tuesday morning at about 8:30 am. He said he couldn’t do anything to the shower walls until a plumber comes in to fix the faucet drip and re-pipe everything. He agreed to come back the next morning. I finally got a plumber to the house at 4:00 pm and he agreed to do the work the following morning. I arranged with the tile guys to come after lunchtime so they wouldn’t be in the plumber’s way. As a result, all they had time to do was put the cement board in along the walls and floor. That pushed the entire project back at least a day.

After a long day of work on Wednesday, I decided it would be best for me to patch the walls above the shower area so the tile guys’ thinset will fill any gaps along the bottom seam. It looks simple, right? It’s not. To begin, I had get the wife to help me snap chalk lines 18 inches above the cement board.

Since there’s no way to really score the plaster (and the cement board behind it) in a way that makes it easy to snap off, I carefully set the depth on my circular saw and cut as straight a line as I could. This threw an amazing amount of dust in the air. I had to stop cutting a couple of times to let the dust settle because I couldn’t see anything at all. At one point I actually pressed my mouth up against the window screen so I could breath a little fresh air. The neighbors must think I’m some kind of freak. I finished making my cuts with my new Dremel Multi-Max and very carefully removed the old plaster and nails.

As I’ve mentioned before, nothing is square or plumb in my house. Moreover, the thickness of the plaster varies every few inches, sometimes dramatically. In order to hang 1/2 inch sheetrock and have the surface be flush with the existing plasterboard, I had to custom cut shims for each individual stud. I would lay the new sheetrock into the space and use my carpenter’s square to get a proper depth measurement. Even with that kind of attention to detail, the seam still comes out uneven in some places. There’s really not much you can do but accept the fact that you’ll be spending all of your available free time over the next few days applying and sanding drywall mud. I learned to accept that sad fact during the kitchen remodel last summer.

When all the new sheetrock was hung, I put on the corner bead and taped the joints. Unfortunately, I only had enough mud on hand to do about a third of the project. Since it was 11:00 pm, I decided to just call it a night. The tile guys come on Thursday morning to lay the tile. They grout on Friday morning and then the plumber comes back to install our new shower fixtures. Most importantly, the new toilet goes in on Friday afternoon. It’s only been a couple of days, but I’m already sick of roughing it. I could never make it in the third world.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 5: Tile

We’re planning to run the new bead board as high as the tile in the shower, which is about six feet tall. That will leave about two feet of wall space between the bead board and the ceiling. Although I tried to talk myself out of it all morning, I decided the light fixture needed to be moved to the center of that space. I got out my keyhole saw and electrical tools and took care of it. It’s a little extra work, but it’ll look better when it’s done. I learned that lesson from the ceiling fan fiasco during the kitchen remodel.

The part of the job I’ve been dreading is the tile demolition. If this was a modern house with modern building methods, it wouldn’t be so bad. But my walls are not sheetrock; they’re plasterboard. That means there are horizontal rows of gravelly backer board throughout the house. On top of the backer board is 3/8 inch thick plaster. Whenever I hang a picture in my house, I have to pre-drill a hole, insert an anchor, and pray that a crack doesn’t form. As annoying as that is, it’s nothing compared to the way the tile is installed in the bathroom. The workers nailed a sheet of steel mesh directly to the studs. On top of that mesh, they applied an inch of plaster cement and capped it with porcelain tiles. What is the point of this? A bomb could go off in the tub and the shrapnel wouldn’t make it through the wall to the bedroom. Look how thick this stuff is, and this isn’t counting the cement that oozed through the mesh.

The only way to remove the tile is to beat it into submission with an eight-pound sledge hammer. I had to rear back, being careful not to shatter my toilet, and hit the wall hard enough to crack the tile but not go through the entire wall. The last thing I need is to have a hole in my exterior wall or crack the plaster in my bedroom.

This process was grueling. I laid a thick blanket in the tub to protect the cast iron. After knocking off some tiles, I had to pick up the pieces with my hands. I could only fill a box with so much debris or else I couldn’t carry it to the front yard and empty it into a wheelbarrow. This stuff is so heavy that I’m amazed the floor hasn’t caved in. After the tiles were off, I bashed the cement until it crumbled into a million tiny pieces. I son discovered that you can’t really pry the mesh off the wall. Anytime you find a spot to use levergae, the tool rips through the mesh. The best way to do it is to rip gashes in the mesh between the studs with the pointed end of a three-pound hammer. Then you pull on the mesh with your hands and a small pry bar. After much toiling, you get this.

After hours of work and dozens of cuts (and maybe a few tears), I finally saw some progress. I measured success by the fact that the window didn’t shatter during my belligerent assault. Such success was tempered by my disappointment in the damage I did to the wall above the tile. I scored the seam with a utility knife before pounding away, but that didn’t do anything. Now I’ll have to remove about 18″ of plasterboard from above the tile area and replace it with sheetrock after the new tiles go up.

I only did two walls. I was afraid I’d damage the plumbing on the third wall, so I’m going to pay my tile guy to do it. He has more experience with this process than me. I put in new insulation and tacked up some plastic over the bare studs so we can still shower.

The wife is going to try to prime the ceiling and upper walls today so I can see where my mud work is subpar. Tomorrow morning, the toilet comes out and the tile guy shows up. To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

I’ve had a bad feeling about this project from the beginning. So far, every step forward has resulted in another step back. I don’t really mind that as long as it means more work instead of more money. Still, I’ve been expecting bad news and I’m afraid I’m going to get it over the next few days.

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 4: Progress

Finally, the mud work began. As I’ve written many times on this blog, I hate doing mud work. I’ve gotten better at it, but that doesn’t make it pleasant.

It’s not putting on the mud that’s so dreadful; it’s the sanding. To minimize the dust in the house, I had to do it with the bathroom door closed. If I wear a breathing mask, I can’t wear my glasses or they’ll fog up. It’s just as well because they get so coated with white dust that I can’t see anything anyway. This is how thick it comes down.

After sanding, I had to put on another coat of mud, let it dry, sand it down, and repeat as many times as necessary to get a smooth finish. And since I have a single-bathroom house, I couldn’t shower in between stages. I don’t know how, but I managed to get the room (and myself) cleaned before the wife got home.

I hoped that I could scrape the crack in the ceiling and patch it with tape and mud over it. But when I starting taking off the plaster, I saw how damaged the area was. I quickly realized that I needed to cut out the cancer.

Fortunately, I had some spare drywall in the garage. Unfortunately, modern drywall is nowhere near the thickness of 50-year-old plasterboard. That meant I had to shim the ceiling joists to level the insert. As annoying as that was, it wasn’t nearly as annoying as what was about to happen. We have loose (non-asbestos) insulation in the attic. Since the pitch of the roof is so mild, I couldn’t reach all the way into the narrow corner to remove the insulation above the cracked plaster. That meant I had to cut out the ceiling and let it fall all over me. I itched for days.

It took some time, but I cut shims for the ceiling and got the new drywall installed fairly flush with he existing surface. I put some tape and a rough coat of mud on the joint, but I didn’t get a chance to sand it because we’ve been entertaining guests for the past couple of days. It was nice to take some time off.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

The tile guys come on Tuesday. That means we have all weekend to finish the mud work, remove the sink and vanity, demo the tile, and hang the new bead board. It would be nice if we could prime the walls and ceiling, but that’s a lot to do in one weekend. The way these old houses were constructed, it’s going to be tiring and time consuming just to get the tile and backer board/grate off the walls in the first place.

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 3: The Hard Work

I can’t really blame the former owners for wanting to spend as little as possible on a house they were preparing to leave, but I would have been too embarrassed to attach my name to such shoddy craftsmanship. For example, fake wainscoting graces the lower part of the walls. They could have bought real bead board for a few dollars more, but they took the cheap route so they wouldn’t have to cut it. This is emblematic of most of their work on the house. Whoever cut the bead board messed up the math and missed the outlet. A bad patch job covers over their mistake. An off-white outlet on a pure white wall accentuates the error. Ironically, they could have hidden the mistake with wood filler if they had used real bead board.

The bathroom vanity is cheap, but nice-looking. The sink neither matches nor fits the base. I’m guessing they got it for next to nothing because the porcelain was chipped. We moved the light fixture to the kitchen and replaced it with a nicer one, so that dilemma has already been addressed. The tub area has brownish-yellow tile that’s been cracked and caulked many times. When the previous owners reframed the closet door and window, they broke several tiles and glued them back on. That’s just lazy.

There used to be a built-in cabinet and mirror attached to the wall, and they just painted over the old glue and damaged plaster. The ceiling was worse. They mudded over cracks and holes and never sanded. They just painted it all with white wall paint. And they never reported (nor addressed) a leak in the roof that waterlogged and ate through the plaster. That’s illegal. Since we’ve owned the house, the crack has gotten bigger and finally started to open.

We recently got a free roof for the house and garage thanks to a 30 second hailstorm back around Easter. Once the leak was permanently fixed, we decided it was time to fix the ceiling. And since the bathroom is going to be covered in drywall dust anyway, I figure I’ll go ahead and put a skim coat of mud on the walls to smooth them out.

As usual, one domino knocks over the next and we’ve been out pricing tile for the shower area and floor. We ordered small, hexagonal black and white tile for the floor and six inch, white subway tiles for the bath tub area. I’ll put white bead board on the walls up to about five feet and we’ll paint the area above it light gray. The finished room should look bright and airy, which is important for a small, single bathroom house.

We’re hiring out the tile work. They show up on July 12th. Here’s the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

There’s a local company that refinishes old cast-iron bathtubs. When we call them to come to our house, it means we’re done.

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 2: It Begins

Getting the grout haze up is a pain, but it goes away quickly if you wipe it with a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water.

As usual, we spent the next couple of days applying more mud to the walls and sanding and painting. I put up another coat of red and my wife painted the built-ins with bright white primer. The electrician came out on Friday to finish the wiring and put in our lights. We used to have this light fixture in our bathroom. It was probably a bargain bin item the previous owners bought just before moving:

It didn’t fit with the white and chrome accessories we have in the room, but it matches the faucet and hardware we’re putting in the kitchen. We decided to move it to the kitchen and I replaced it with this fixture. Naturally, it hangs too low now, so I’ll need to move it up the wall a bit. That means I get to do more mudwork in the bathroom when the kitchen is finished!

Here, you can see that we flipped the light upside-down and hung it over the window:

In a perfect world, I’d hang a similar light with 4 bulbs that’s about the same width as the window, but you just can’t argue with free. The electrician also installed this ceiling fan:

It hung low enough that we were very aware of fan blades spinning right above our heads. What’s worse, it didn’t put out very much light. We returned it on Saturday morning and I installed a new fan/light combo.

I must say that from my experience, Lowe’s will take anything back. All I did was remove the fan blades and throw everything back in the box (more like on top of the box). After a quick inspection by the electrical department manager, they gave us our money back. In an age where it seems like all retailers are trying to outsource complaint resolution and nickel-and-dime their customers to death, it’s nice to see a big box store be so accommodating. We’d tried to go there over Home Depot as much as possible after that.

I mounted the new fan higher than the old one and we bought frosted globes to match the globes on the light above the window. The rest of the day, we sealed the grout, painted all the trim a glossy white and painted the shelf space above the refrigerator inset. As usual, I put on a couple more coats of mud. I think this should just about do it. This isn’t a new house and the walls will never look perfect. I just want to mask the more obvious imperfections:

I also constructed a transition piece to cover the step up from the dining room to the kitchen. It’s made of laminate, so it’s not an exact match with our authentic, honey oak floors. Still, we had to get a little creative to make something that’s the right height and still maintains a low profile. I glued it with liquid nails:

It came out pretty good, I think. I keep reminding myself that the point is not to make something that looks so good that people notice it. The point is to make something that looks so typical that no one notices it:

This is how the room looked at the end of the day on Saturday. We think the new fan looks great:

On Sunday, we had a bunch of finish work to do. I trudged down to the crawl space to drill a hole through the subfloor and into the mock wall behind the refrigerator. I had always suspected that the rear of the room had been extended on top of an old concrete stoop, kind of like a smaller version of our front porch. After drilling a 5/8” hole through 5 inches of concrete, I confirmed that suspicion.

Boring that hole wrecked me. I don’t have a hammer drill, so I was hunched over in an area barely big enough to squat, pushing up on my drill with all of my strength. I was showered with concrete dust the whole time and had to take a couple of breaks just to catch my breath. The hole is for the water line to the refrigerator and a cable wire. We decided it would be nice to put a little flat screen tv above the refrigerator so we can watch the news while cooking. It’ll come in very handy during football season when we cook for guests.

I also replaced the dryer vent. When we bought the house, the inspector specifically pointed to the vent as an example of shoddy upkeep. I ripped out layers of caulk and put in a modern unit that will keep pests out of the house.

To finish the interior of the built-ins, we needed to hide a horizontal support beam and the framing for our faux wall above the cabinets. I angled some thin plywood to make a hollow beam that ties it all together. This is the view from inside the cabinet where the washer and dryer will go:

Since we’re stacking the units in such a small space, we needed to be able to plug in the dryer before stacking it. And since the longest cord you can buy is a 6-footer, I had to make my own with 9 feet of cord. It was tough work, but we got the washer into place. We failed several times to get the dryer into the closet. The pesky culprit was the dryer vent tube, which kept popping off when we lifted the unit. Luckily, my wife is just small enough to squeeze through that gap on the right, and we eventually got the units stacked. This is how the room looked at the end of the day on Sunday:

I think I’m finally done with the mudwork, at least as long as the cabinet installers don’t chip the plaster.

My wife wanted to make sure the units don’t rock during the spin cycle, so she ate her dinner on the kitchen floor. It’s odd, but we’ve gotten to the point where it’s enthralling just to watch an appliance in action. It reminds me of the scene in The Money Pit where Walter Fielding (Tom Hanks) starts crying because they finally have stairs.

UPDATE: Kitchen Remodel 6: Cabinets

It’s a blessing and a curse.

I like the look and layout of this design, but it involves a lot more detail work than I had planned. The faux cabinet doors on the left will hide a full size door with access to the stacked, front-loading washer and dryer. The faux cabinet and shelves on the right will be a false front for a hidden, slide-out pantry. The refrigerator will extend about four inches farther into the room to give the cabinets depth, and it’ll all be topped with crown molding to add a formal look. The built-ins will be made with pine and beadboard so it blends our new kitchen in with the rest of our old house.

I was swayed when we realized it would be cheaper than framing a closet for the fridge and buying a pantry that matches our new cabinets. And since I have some experience designing built-in cabinets, I wasn’t too intimidated by the complexity of the project.

Deciding on a course of action for the rear kitchen wall allowed us to configure the chronology of the rest of the remodel, and we got started. After work last week, we patched the divots and cracks in the wall and ceiling with mud. On Saturday morning, we sanded until the entire floor was white. While the dust settled, we went to the hardware store to get the new sub-floor and the finished plywood for the new cabinet design. The mortarboard is pretty heavy and annoying to work with, but it’ll hide the imperfections in the floor and give us a more level base for the tile. Here’s what the room looked like at the end of the day on Saturday:

On Sunday, we drew out where the new cabinets, counters and backsplash will be:

There’s no use spending a lot of time repairing the area behind the cabinets. We’ll get it all nice and flat, but it doesn’t have to be flawless.

We also got started on the rear wall where we had a lot of sheetrock patching to do. It was raining off and on all weekend, so we brought the sawhorses into the kitchen and worked in there. It was pretty cramped, to say the least. This was the room at the end of the day on Sunday:

As you can see, there will be some space behind the new refrigerator wall. By building it this way, we don’t have to move the dryer vent and outlet.

We changed our plan a little on Monday morning. We took down the faux wall framing and did more sheetrock work on the top right corner of the rear wall area. I also moved the junction box and rewired the old light fixture. After that, I tightened and replaced the framing. After a lot of measurements with the tape and the level, the cabinet area eventually came together. This is what the room looked like after we cleaned up on Monday night:

It’s all coming together pretty well. On Tuesday, the electrician is updating our fuse box and adding/moving a few outlets. We’ll spend the rest of the week skim-coating the walls and finishing the new built-in cabinets with crown molding and filler/caulk.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

1. Disassemble the dining room table and take it to the garage
2. Move all the appliances into the dining room
3. Relocate the hot water heater to the crawl space
4. Demo the existing cabinets and the rear closet walls
5. Remove the tile floor
6. Resurface the ceiling
7. Lay a new subfloor
8. Center the oven plug and add new outlets
9. Re-frame the rear wall
10. Move the dryer vent
11. Sheetrock/mud the rear wall
12. Repair and paint the walls
13. Tile the floors
14. Install cabinets and counter tops
15. Move all the appliances back into the kitchen

Our plan is to paint the whole room with primer on Thursday after work. You can’t tell how well you’ve smoothed out the walls and ceiling until everything’s the same color and the shadows accentuate your mistakes. We’ll do any remaining work on the sheetrock on Friday, and we’ll paint the room red on Friday night or Monday morning. This weekend, we’ll tile the floor.

UPDATE: Kitchen Remodel 4: The Transformation