Tiling the upstairs bathroom's floor

This last project was definitely a learning experience, but it was a complete success! The only regret I have about the whole process is that I didn't take a photo of the floor the way we'd been suffering with it for the past year, so you can see just how necessary this project was! As you read in my post titled "The lesson I'll never forget", I ripped up half of the original tile floor to get to the plumbing beneath, and it had since then been half tile (we left the tiles down where the toilet was) and half bare plywood with towels laid down for protection from splinters. We actually lucked out with the original tiles being so easy to rip up. Whoever installed them didn't stick the sub-floor down with mortar. If they had, I would have needed a jackhammer to get down to bare plywood. more on this later...

Over the last year I've been slowly gathering the necessary supplies to get this project done - a tool here, some thin-set mortar there - a month at a time. I had finally finished checking everything off my shopping list and got right to work. There were a few things that came up I didn't know I'd need, but that's normal for me!

#1: Get the cement-board sub-floor to fit


If you imagine the grey subfloor pictured here as white tiles, then that's pretty much what the floor was like for a while. This room was small enough that I just needed two 4x6 sheets of cement board. It took a little time, but we got all the little angles and holes cut out and the pieces fit perfectly.


Here's the second half of the subfloor installed. Each piece of cement-board is laid down on a good layer of thin-set mortar, then screwed down into the plywood floor with special cement-board screws. I made sure the factory edge was the edge that went in the middle of the room, a hint given free-of-charge from the greatest uncle-in-law ever!

#2: lay down a good chalk line and start from the center


After trying figuring out the trigonometry of the bathroom's floor to formulate where I should have the center be, I quickly gave up when I noticed that not a single wall was 90 degrees to any other wall. I figured I'd go parallel with the mirror-side wall, since it's the 'main' wall. Once you've got your grid laid out, if any edge of the floor has less than half a tile-width, just move the grid away from that wall half a tile's width in distance. There's no way I can illustrate this properly, so here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zoMABNoVHU


As you're laying the tiles, if ANY thin-set mortar gets on the tile, wipe it off with a damp sponge immediately. It won't set up too fast or anything, but it's easy to just keep going and forget, then you really need to work to get it off the tile.


There! That's the first 'quadrant' of the room done! (it was the first one I did because it was the only one that didn't require any 'fancy cuts'. Doesn't it look GOOD?!!


Working my way into the room toward where the toilet sits, each remaining tile to be laid into this corner here will need a cut that takes more than just a 'tile snapper' which can make straight cuts only. I was going to start tackling 'L' shaped cuts and notched cuts.


Fortunately, where there's a will there's wiggle-room. At this point I still didn't have any tool for cutting a circle-shape, so I figured out how much of the floor the toilet will cover up, and for those areas I decided to be a little more lenient on the quality of cut I made.


I got every single tile down! -except for the ones that needed 'fancy cuts'. Those are next.

#3: Fancy Cuts

The tool I'd been using to snap the tiles in two was only able to make one straight cut along the entire length of the tile. To make an 'L' shaped cut, this tool is useless. To take a notch out of the side of a tile, it was more than useless.

I tried a 3/4" masonry drill bit so I could then go in from there with a special 'rod saw' blade made for tiles. The drill bit dug a little dimple into the surface of the tile, then the heat split the tile in half.

I tried a masonry jig-saw blade in my electric jig-saw. The blade started burning - literally turning black and red hot, then about half way up the second cut, heat split the tile.

I tried using the rod saw, and I would still be sawing away at it and be about 1/4" through. This reminded me of someone digging out of jail with a teaspoon.

I took all these tools back for store credit, and spent less on a wet saw. Yeah! Got the job done in seconds!


Power tools: sooooo refreshing! Here's all the 'fancy cuts' the room would need. In my right hand (stage left) on top is an 'L' shaped cut for the corner of the room with the inverted corner (to the left of the vanity). Under that is the cute little notch I made to allow for the toilet's water pipe. In my left hand (stage right), are the two tiles that would go around the air duct.


This is how the notches are made. Just a bunch of parallel cuts, then the little pieces just tap right out! Thanks to the wife for this action-packed shot.







And here's the floor with the tiles completed, all stuck down firmly into the thin-set mortar. Time for the next step...

#4: Grouting

After letting the thin-set mortar completely dry for about two days, and having made sure there is NO thin-set mortar drying ON the tiles, we are now ready to go in and grout. Grout is not only a noun, it's also a verb. I grouted the room with grout. If it were also the name of a location, then "Grout Grout grout." would be a complete sentence.


It looks messy but there's honestly no other way to make sure you've spread it in deeply enough to completely fill the valley between tiles. It's better to use a little extra grout and be sure. Plus, if the wife walks by and sees just how messy it is, it'll look EVEN BETTER when you're done!



Every 45 minutes to an hour, I'd have to come back in to sponge off the tiles to remove a little more grout. It was a balancing act between slowly getting the tiles clean, and not getting the grout lines too wet (this would over-saturate the cement in the grout mixture and the grout would dry crumbly), so I did this about 4 times over the remainder of the day.


Almost done here, there was just a little grout haze left on the tiles each time it dried up.


The grouting has all been wiped off the tiles, and is now going to cure for the next two days.

#4: Finishing touches


Reinstalled the threshold.



Installed wood trim around the floor, AND the toilet is back!



The best finishing touch: my new toilet handle!

After all this was done, I put down a bead of caulking along the bathtub edge of the floor, and it is now in tip-top working order. Next, is to replace the cruddy-looking shower surround. Maybe I'll tile it...

The Clubhouse

We've got a nice, calm 1/4 acre back yard, fenced in. It's the perfect amount of space. Enough room for the kids to really tire themselves out, and not too much grass to mow.

The coolest thing about the back yard is the shed with a clubhouse on it. The previous owner had a shed, and then he built a clubhouse on top of it, and added boardwalks going around it and leading to a slide. There was originally just the handrails with no balusters, so if a 2 or 3 year old were up there, there’s a good chance of them falling through, under the handrail, and dropping about 8 feet to the ground. I went to the lumber store and priced around for the 1x1’s or 1x2’s I’d need, and it came out to be a little more than I had on hand, plus I’d need nails, a workbench, a circular saw, etc… remember this is my first house, EVERYTHING is a clean slate here, including my tool collection!

Here's how the clubhouse/shed was originally. The steps would swivel from toe to heel, the paint was cheap and peeling, but the lumber used was good, the roof is well made, and the slide is new! See the open gaps under the hand rails? Not very good for my kids then ages 2 and 5.

Economizing is key, every step of the way. I went to work finding out the most affordable (or even free) ways I could accomplish this goal. I was at work, walking outside (it’s what I do during the warmer months to get my brain awake and burn off some of the junk I shouldn’t be eating), and saw a bunch of wooden palettes stacked up. I thought “hmm… free lumber!” My boss said I could take a few if I wanted, but they recycle them and get some of a deposit back on them, so I couldn’t take very many. I think at the time I somehow figured I needed about 15 palettes to harvest enough wood to make balusters for the entire length of handrails around the clubhouse. My wife’s grandpa heard I was looking for free palettes, and the very next day I had all that I needed, and then enough for many bonfires afterwards!

The free time I had for the next few days was spent getting familiar with my new wonderbar (like a crowbar but flat), my wife’s uncle’s hand club hammer (a mini sledge hammer), my work gloves, and a simple hammer for pulling out the nails from the pieces of wood after they were separated. 3 or so days of work later, I had the wood set aside and ready for use.

All this free lumber from 15 or so free palettes and only three days of hard work. It came up with a nice variety of plank sizes & thicknesses.

To save money on tools, my dad gave me his work bench, and my wife’s uncle let me borrow his circular saw. Once all the pieces were cut to length, I took them down to the clubhouse and went to work hammering them in place, using a 4” block of wood for spacing, and my new level to make sure they were perfectly vertical. The 'yield' I got from the palettes was half 4" wide, and half were 6" wide, and some were 2x4's... So I decided to put the balusters up in a wide-narrow-wide-narrow pattern, and saved the 2x4's for other important things...

Just one of the "more important things" I used some of the 2x4's for...

There was originally a fireman’s pole on one side of the front, but I removed this and covered the side up with balusters. Maybe when my kids are old enough for it I’ll put it back on… For now, it looks like the pole might make a pretty awesome tether-ball pole...

The clubhouse now with balusters! And the steps are now reinforced.

Now the fireman pole is gone and the hole filled in with balusters,
...and there's a very young mastiff pup named Lola come to see!

My son was now able to relax and have a good old time up in the clubhouse without my wife or me worrying about him falling through.

Of course once I got the balusters up, I still wasn’t quite happy with the overall “look” of the clubhouse. I went out and bought some medium dark brown paint and spent the next several evenings painting. As I was in between painting sessions, I splurged and bought a little disc swing for underneath the boardwalk, a plastic toy steering wheel to go where the fireman’s pole once was, reinforced the flimsy steps, and there was still… something… missing…

SWINGS! I researched for a couple days on how to build a swing set: make an a-frame using one long horizontal 4x6 beam and make diagonal legs using 4x4 posts, and hold the 4x4’s together with a horizontal 2x6 plank on each end. Simple! …But I wanted my a-frame to come off from the clubhouse’s post, becoming part of the building, instead of just building a separate a-frame swing set. I mean, ‘anybody’ can do ‘that’. So I went to Lowe’s with my Uncle-In-Law (he might as well be a professional lumberjack, we’ll say that much!) and got all the metal brackets I could find that looked like what I needed to fix the wooden posts together, got a bunch of strong wood-screws, all the lumber I needed, a couple swings, a trapeze, and all the hardware for them that I needed, 4” and 6” bolts and nuts and a new drill bit (a spade drill bit) to drill through 6” of wood.

My U-I-L helped me get the a-frame put together, and the installing process went a LOT smoother and easier than either one of us expected. When we finished, I remember us saying to each other “Man, that was easy! Did we do it right?!” The hardest part was getting the huge frame up in place. It was basically a HUGE letter A (except without the horizontal support plank yet), with a 10 foot long 4x6 beam coming out perpendicularly from its peak. We had it sit on it’s end, legs down, one of us got up in the clubhouse, and the other had to lift the frame up onto its feet, trusting that the main joint would hold while the to-be horizontal 4x6 post headed towards the person in the clubhouse with his arms reaching toward it! Fortunately it worked. I think it was my U-I-L who was up in the clubhouse, he held the beam in place while I climbed the step ladder and screwed about 18 wood screws into it and the clubhouse's post through metal brackets. The only thing I didn’t factor in was how far the feet would sink into the ground. The 4x6 started out perfectly horizontal, but now the a-frame end is probably 2 or 3 inches lower. Eh… win some lose some.

The swing set is installed and holds two adults and a kid on the trapeeze. I know it does. The first thing my U-I-L and I did once it was installed was to test it to make sure it was safe for the little kids. Now I could finish painting!

Once the swings were installed I could paint the rest of the clubhouse while the kids were enjoying their new swings. Before I knew it, though, the warm weather receded and now I just have to wait for spring to paint the a-frame of the swing set addition.

Almost done. I'm thinking the 2 feet of extra overhang could be used for a climbing rope or something......

Next on the list: the upstairs bathroom tile floor...?

The Lesson I’ll never forget

We made the purchase of the house and got the keys, and we had our apartment for a couple months still. The wife and I used this time to our advantage for painting the kids’ rooms and other things that were SO much easier without furniture in our way. My daughter’s room, once peach-orange, is now pepto-bismol-pink. My son’s room, once painted with the local school’s color theme, including black, is now, with the help of three coats of thick high-quality primer, Wedgewood blue. I replaced most of the curtain rods, I took down old ugly light fixtures and replaced them with new ones, same with the ceiling fans (the one above the master bed was installed incorrectly, and the electric work on these fixtures around the house was sloppy at best).

One particular thing I wanted to fix in this period of time before we moved in was the upstairs bathroom’s cold water flow. Or lack of. The hot water would flow nice and fast, but the cold water was just a trickle. To draw a bath to a good temp, it would take probably close to 3 or 4 hours, and a shower was pretty much completely out of the question. The toilet, also connected to the cold water supply for this bathroom, would take around half an hour to fill after flushing. The previous owner (PO) had lived with it this way since they renovated the room, 4 to 6 years before we moved in. How? I haven’t the slightest. There is a makeshift shower in the basement, which I had to use once before fixing the upstairs bathroom, and I couldn’t imagine having to use it once more, let alone obligating my wife to! 4 to 6 years with low-pressure cold water in the upstairs bathroom, affecting the shower/bath, sink, and toilet. That’s the 1 in the 1.5 baths in this house! We figured after checking out how the water travels through the house that this being the last room in the house that the water reaches, there had to be a clog in the cold water pipe somewhere between the upstairs bathroom, and the first-floor bathroom just below it. This sort of problem could be caused by someone striking a copper pipe with a hammer while putting up the walls and squashing it closed, or at a weld point some of the soldering metal might build up inside the pipe while it’s melting, creating a clog undetectable from the outside of the pipe, or a similar problem with glue if they’d married the copper pipe to a PVC pipe. So we had to get in there and see what was going on with the cold water pipe. The process went this way: Step one was to remove the bathroom sink vanity cabinet to gain access to the floor. This is MUCH easier to type than it was to accomplish. The PO apparently had a very unhealthy relationship with caulking. The vanity countertop was not only held down by bolts, but it had been sealed in like fort knox with white caulking! With old houses, there are no ‘true’ 90 degree corners. This is ok if you bear it in mind while installing corner-hugging cabinetry, but this vanity’s countertop had true 90 degree corners. The PO had made up for it’s lack of fit by filling in the gaps (up to 1/2” gaps) with caulking! So I spent a good several hours working on removing the caulking, nearly slicing my hand open several times in the process. Once we got the countertop removed (after disconnecting the sink & faucets – I’m learning!), step two was to neatly disassemble the structure that held the drawers in place. With that removed, and wrestled up into the attic for short-term storage, we were down to bare floor with a drain and the water pipes sticking out. The base flooring was jig-sawed just enough to let the pipes through, and now step three, we had to remove the wood from around the pipes. So the world’s best Uncle-in-Law and I took to tearing the floor apart, looking to see if we could figure out where the problem was. The plan was to cut a rectangular panel out so we could inspect the pipes beneath the floor, solve the problem, and then place the piece of wood back down in its place. Oh if only it had been this easy! It became evident that this was not going to be an option when we discovered that the floor was diagonally laid 2x6 planks (‘true’ 2” x 6” planks), made of wood that could pass for hardened steel. My U-I-L and I jig-sawed our way though the planks around the pipes to see if maybe (hopefully) the problem could be detected at that spot; maybe one of the joints that ran the pipes up into the sink was faulty? Unfortunately there was no eureka moment at this stage. The rest of the bathroom floor had had ceramic tiles laid down (ugly UGLY tiles, but a job well done), and the sub-floor there was regular old plywood. I called down to my wife,
“Hey sweetie, you don’t like these ceramic tiles in here do you?”
“NO! They’re ugly!”
“So I’m going to be eventually replacing them with new tiles right?”
“I guess, yeah!”
“OK!”
I looked at my U-I-L and said “grab a crowbar and a hammer, we’re stripping this floor!”
OK, ok, so maybe we deliberated a little longer than that, I think we thought it over for a day or so. My U-I-L and I walked through the house, and we were determined that the problem area in the cold water pipe HAD to be somewhere in the upstairs bathroom floor as it forked out to go to the toilet and sink as it’s straightest path went towards the shower. This was the first and last junction where there was any problem. This HAD to be it. I chipped off the first floor tile, then got to about half-way to the shower, then worked my way over towards the toilet. We took turns, the U-I-L and I, and we cleared the floor of tiles and cement baseboard down to bare plywood all the way across the floor from the vanity, alongside the shower, up to the last few feet where the toilet is. I figured we’d leave the toilet in place for the time being. Pri-or-it-ies.

At this point, my wife and I had been in the final stages of vacating the apartment, moving into the house. My wife needed my help loading the U-Haul truck and I had to leave. My U-I-L said if I was OK with it, he could stay at the house while I went and cleaned out the apartment, and he could cut through the floor and open up a panel while I was gone. I was baffled that he was asking permission to do me a HUGE favor, and sputtered back at him “Yeah, that’d be ok!” Fast forward about an hour or so, I got a phone call from him:
“Hello?”
“Hi, I got the floor up, I can see the pipes where they split, I’m going to go turn off the water and cut into it, I just wanted to make sure you were ok with that before I started cutting.”
“Yeah, that’s fine, thanks very much!”
So I hung up and started packing more stuff from the apartment into the U-Haul truck. Fast forward less than 5 minutes, I got another phone call from him:
“Hello?”
(long pause)
“Hi, uh…”
“Hi there! How’s it all going?”
“Umm… well I’ve got some really good news, and then I’ve got some really really really bad news.”
“ok?”
“Well, you see… the good news is I got your cold water running perfect.”
“WOW! That’s great! Thank you!!”
“And well the bad news, we just tore up the floor in your bathroom for no reason at all.”
“…huh?”
“I went to close the water valve to shut off the water before I cut any pipes open, and the valve knob turned about a quarter turn then stopped closed.”
“hmm?”
“the main cold water valve in the basement that feeds the whole house was barely open all this time. That’s why the water was low on pressure.”
“b..b…but… the rest of the rooms in the house have good water flow…?”
“it was open up enough to have good pressure up to the ground floor, but the pressure wasn’t enough to make it all the way upstairs.”
“Oh, no! So we just… for no reason…”
“yeah.”

At this point my wife was in absolute hysterics, laughing herself into a fit that took her to the floor. I think they call this 'ROFL'. I was chuckling because for one thing I didn’t know what else to do… I was going to rip the floor up eventually anyway, those floor tiles were so horrible we couldn’t stand them, but the replacing process had sort of been pushed into effect now. The other reason I was laughing, and not getting all red-faced and furious about the waste of my time and resources, was because I was thinking about the PO living with this for the last 4 to 6 years!!! The lesson I learned here is if I EVER have ANY water pressure issues, ALWAYS check the valves FIRST and FOREMOST! Lesson learned.

At least I thought to leave the toilet in place!

Turning a House into a Home

In early 2009, I moved my family into a beautiful 1940's brick house. There's 3 bedrooms (actually more like 2 bedrooms and an office with a bed in it...), 1.5 baths (I refused to even consider any houses with ONE bathroom… You know, the wife and a 6 year old girl who’s just going to be spending more and more time in there… maybe I should have got a house with 2+ baths…?! We’ll see. There's a nice large living room, a glassed-in sun room / patio in the back yard, a front porch (complete now with rocking chair) with a porch swing (generously left behind), and -oh, yeah- there's a cinema in the basement! In the biggest room in the basement, the previous owner (PO) had painted a whole wall white, put up red curtains around it, and on the other end of the room is a digital projector hooked up to a surround sound receiver with speakers. All this was left behind when we moved in! All I added was my dvd player and voila! Instant cinema! He'd even left a futon on the small stage at the back of the room beneath the projector!

So far pretty much EVERYTHING I’m doing is a first for me. I got some experience helping/watching my dad finish a couple basements (lumber frame & dry wall), and helped my pastor demolish & restore the interior of the parsonage (a bunch of general household work & painting), so I’ve got a little idea on how to do things, and enough sense to know when I need to consult with Youtube, friends and relatives for advice. As far as my tool collection goes, it’s growing at a nice affordable pace, and when I’ve needed more sophisticated (expensive) tools like circular saws or the such, I’ve got with relatives & friends who have them and are willing to let me borrow theirs for the brief amount of time I need them. As convenient as this is, however, this just doesn’t stop me from wanting my own big tools… It’s a guy thing. You never know, what if I need to cut some lumber to length at 3am? You JUST NEVER know!

One quirk I’ve realized about this house is the interior walls. I’m used to drywall. My parents’ houses were all 2x4 frames covered over with drywall. This house is the same, except they’ve added a 3/4” thick layer of a VERY coarse sort of drywall-cementboardy-crumbly stuff. Because of this, drilling any holes has been VERY difficult! The drill bit sometimes travels sideways about 1/8” before it really digs in, making plotting the holes VERY challenging, especially when it’s for something I want to end up level! So far, however, a combination of brute strength, fast learning and determination have helped me succeed.

The projects I’ve faced & successfully completed so far are:
- painting the kids bedrooms,
- putting together NUMEROUS pieces of Ikea & Target brand furniture
(hutches, medicine cabinets, tables & chairs),
- replacing most interior door knobs, curtains & curtain rods,
- renovating the outdoor clubhouse,
- painting and renovating the upstairs bathroom (floor is in-progress),
- replace old ugly lights and ceiling fans with new lights and ceiling fans,
- install smoke detectors throughout the house
(the PO had one at the top of the basement stairs [with no battery],
and one at the base of the main staircase, and that’s all)
- and MANY variable jobs like using a wood chisel to get a door to close without sticking, or building up a door hinge with pieces of plastic so the latch engages the latch-hole… things like that.
- And there was one project that taught me a lesson I won’t ever forget…

more on this later, in a blog post all to itself...

The projects I’m looking at doing some time soon are: (as I complete these jobs in the future I'll come back to this paragraph and make links to posts about the job getting done. If the job is not a link, it has not been done yet!)
- finish the tile floor in the upstairs bathroom,
- make a hollow stand for the downstairs bathroom vanity,
- take down wood paneling and install drywall in downstairs bathroom,
- install new medicine cabinet in downstairs bathroom,
- possibly relocate downstairs bathroom entrance
and create extra closet-space in the process,
- finish front patio
(railings & balusters, replace arch fascia, bead-board ceiling,
install lighting, install a mailbox instead of the heat-thieving mail slot),
- get the water softener to work,
- lay down new coating on garage & sun-room roofs,
- have breaker box brought into better working order,
- replace ugly drywall in garage & paint it,
- run better electricity to garage,
- improve garage door openers
(we have two garage doors: one has no in-garage button
and only opens & closes from use of car remote,
the other has no car remote, and only opens and closes
from use of in-garage button),
- finish the inside of two closets upstairs,
- possibly finish the attic,
- improve front yard landscaping,
- put vegetable garden in back yard,
- plant fruit trees & bushes.
[in the basement we have a movie room with a media room behind that, a laundry room, and a man room – tools & gun-cleaning, and there’s a storage room at the end of the man room, we call this the cave]
- run lighting into “the cave”,
- have sump-pump installed in corner of man-room
- everything else I forgot to mention

Since I started this blog after having already done a lot of work, the first few articles will be of projects I did when we first moved in, then the rest I will post as I'm learning. This should be interesting!