Friday, September 14, 2007

What I Did before Getting My Ass Back to Work

I've been wanting to post these photos for a long time now. The catch? I didn't get them until this past Monday. Unfortunately I neglected to take "before" pictures. Brandy was sweet enough to take these photos here with her wide angle lens.



This past Spring and early Summer I remodeled our upstairs bathroom. I had to. The toilet seemed as if it was about to fall through the floor and the vanity was a mass-produced piece of something you normally put in the toilet. So, apart from the tub/shower, I gutted the bathroom and started from scratch.
As it turned out, the floor had been rebuilt once before. Some water damage, primarily from the toilet, and a little from an earlier tub installation, had been cause for a previous effort to make things better. The sub-floor, luckily, was and is in very good shape. But the previous do-it-yourselfer pulled up a limited amount of floor where it was in the worst shape, filled it with a gypsum filler and installed the new vinyl on top.

I tore the whole thing out, leaving the subfloor behind. I installed 1/2" cement board on the subfloor and ceramic tile on top of that. I threw out the old vanity and built my own. I rewired for lighting, outlets and a wall heater (across from the tub - we used to have heat lamps - over the sink where they were much less effective). I built a medicine cabinet to replace the old metal one and put up a nice big mirror.

I found an abandoned, live, outlet inside one of the walls. I discovered that the toilet "closet" ring seal was nearly non-existent (my guess is the last "craftsman" decided to save $2 and used the old wax seal). I nearly panicked when I tried texturing the drywall work I had done, and ended up having to remove something like three gallons of "mud" from the walls before it dried on both the wall and in the damn texturer I rented from Home Depot (I resorted to canned touch-up texture in the end).

Bonnie is in love with this new bathroom. She takes a bath at the slightest provocation just so she can stare (honestly, this is what she tells me). I am waiting on cooler weather. It's too damn hot still to enjoy a bath.

But it is pretty.

2 comments:

Beth said...

wow - great job. I have a bathroom I want remodeled - the small one off my bedroom. It has an old, funky shower with a plastic lining - I want to have it tiled and doors put in. As it is now its just a shower with a curtain in front of it. I keep praying for hail in the bathroom!!!!!!!!!!

Yar said...

I still need to remodel our master bath. That involves an old shower too. Plastic floor and cultured "marble" walls. Luckily this one is on a slab - the floor work will be much easier than this one.

We have a glass door on the current shower (we added it to replace a piece-of-shit textured glass door). I love it but it's a pain to keep spot free with our hard water.