Tag Archives: bathroom

Bathroom Update: Day 486

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Wow, the days are just flying by. It’s now been 486 days since we first ripped out gross, nasty carpeting in our bathroom.

And as you know we’ve been renovating the master bath ever since.

About a week ago the bathroom looked like this from the same vantage point.

Astute observers may notice three things. 1) The ipe flooring is in! 2) The back wall is finally blue. 3) Umm, where’d the toilet go?

Well, to answer the last question first: we were toilet-less in that bathroom for a few days while we finished installing and sealing the flooring around it. Thankfully our roommates didn’t mind us using their bathroom for a few days. We couldn’t even shower in ours since – yet again – our shower doubled as a storage unit.

A few days later Mark and his friend installed the new (to us) low-flow toilet that we picked up at ReBuild. The new one is a huge improvement over our old toilet which had a bad habit of running all the time. (Insert corny running humor here.) Plus, it only cost us less than $50 as compared to $100+ for a brand new one. (I’ll post pics of the new toilet soon. Spoiler alert: it looks like a toilet.)

Back to your other observations. The back wall is finally blue!

If you recall, for a long time the back wall was a pinkish hue – or “sand dune” if you ask the paint company.

The sand dune really didn’t “go” with the blue paint (called “babbling brook”) in any way. Really, I should have known they wouldn’t go together based on the names alone. Since when do you find sand dunes next to a babbling brook? Here I was, thinking we would be all fancy and modern with an accent wall and instead I was committing a faux paux with my mixed up ecology!

Plus, not only did we not like the sand dune color, it was also was a matte finish, not semigloss like the blue, so it wasn’t quite appropriate to have in a moist bathroom environment. Speaking of not liking our color choices, we don’t particularly love the blue color, but at least it’s all consistent now.

Oh well, our modern design attempt failed and now we’ve got a bathroom that screams “it’s a boy”.

Sometimes the back wall sort of looks like an accent wall anyway, depending on how the light hits it. You’ll see what I mean in the the last photo below. It’s an optical illusion (brought on by the camera’s flash) because those two walls really are the same color!

But the big news of course is that we finished flooring installation! You’ve already heard about many of our flooring struggles along the way, but I wanted to mention some more of the fun things we had to do to complete this project. When I say “fun” really I mean “extremely tedious and frustrating.”  And when I say “we” really I mean “Mark”. If it were up to me I would have just continued the flooring as we had been doing. Line up the rows of wood, cut them to size, and nail down. Floors are squeaky? Eh, no one will notice. There are gaps in the wood? It’s okay, it will look aged. A little bit uneven? No worries, it’s just a bathroom.

But that’s just me. Mark wanted to do it right. Apparently doing diy home improvement projects brings out Mark’s perfectionist side. Who knew? Plus, he’s really been the brains behind the whole flooring operation and I’ve been mostly the assistant and flooring organizer. We are well suited for our respective roles.

Well organized piles of flooring

One task that Mark tackled along the way was replacing a bit of plywood subfloor near the shower that had been weak from years of use. He reinforced the supports underneath with additional wooden braces and cut a custom piece of new plywood to fit the space (in the photo below this new piece of plywood looks different because it actually has a rubber coating to make it water resistant).

Once we got the flooring to that section, he also decided to add shims to reinforce (and raise) the floor further as it was still a little uneven.

We figure there are a few ‘hot spots’ in the bathroom, like in front of the sink and toilet, and this one, where everyone will step when getting in and out of the shower. Even if nothing else is perfect in the bathroom, we’d like to at least get these spots right!

For uneven floors, we’ve been told there’s some kind of floor leveling product you can buy – I’m envisioning a thick goo that spreads itself out and acts like a glue. We opted for the less expensive route of using shims that we already own and they seem to have worked out great thus far (fingers crossed).

To encourage you to “ooh” and “ahh” a little more, here is another shot of the floor before the toilet was re-installed.

In this photo, the final row of flooring had yet to go in. Boy did those last few rows give us trouble! In fact, many rows were time-consuming stress-inducing and expletive-causing. Especially the last few. Because of the uneven floor issue, and our ongoing problem with mismatched flooring widths, and our interest in precision around the toilet, it took us over 3 hours to complete the final few rows of flooring.

Yes, you read that right. In what has become our motto during diy projects over the past year: Everything takes longer than expected.

But it doesn’t matter how long it took us. It’s finally done! And it’s beautiful! We love it. And it actually makes the baby-boy-blue walls more bearable.

Next steps. Here’s what remains to be done in the bathroom that will undoubtedly take us at least twice as long as we expect:

-Stain trim pieces including window and mirror trim
-Cut new trim pieces to size if we can’t find the old trim
-Attach trim
-Re-attach bathroom door
-Build thresholds
-Stain and install thresholds
-Build shelves for closet (remember the closet?)
-Finish mudding wall that was patched
-Prime and paint patched wall
-Reapply tung oil to entire floor

Will be back with more updates soon!

Bathroom Renovation: The Sink

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In the previous Bathroom Renovation saga I explained that we had encountered a few issues along the way. Issues 1, 2 and 3 were: inconsistency with tung oil application (a non-issue, really), gaps where the widths of the flooring don’t match up (a much bigger issue), and the bathroom closet (a new diy challenge).

(Don't) Mind The Gap(s)

I’ll explain how we resolve those issues once we figure it out ourselves, but for now it’s time for you to meet issues 4 through 101: the sink.

Our sink is a fairly basic (blah) pedestal sink. I mean, it’s okay. It’s served this bathroom well over the years and we’d be happy enough if we could just reuse it as part of our new master bath since we can’t afford our fantasy custom-built vanity. But no. This is a story of encountering problems at every turn. No matter how hard we tried to re-incorporate it into our new bathroom – and we tried very, very hard – the universe had other plans. Let’s re-live the sink journey of the past few weeks, shall we?


The first issue: the copper anchors that had once held the sink to the wall were now sticking out of the wall in an inconvenient location. We would re-use them to re-anchor the sink to the wall if we could, but with the new flooring underneath, the sink would be raised up too high to use them. In fact, these bolts would definitely be in the way.

So we borrowed a friend’s sawzall and cut them off in a jiffy.

Problem solved. That was easy! Hoping this was a sign the rest of the renovation would go smoothly, we kept going with the flooring in the sink area.

Having completed enough flooring past where the pedestal would sit (with only a few flooring-related bumps along the way), we switched our attention back to re-installing the sink. After all, it’d be nice to get the sink out of the bathtub.

Great, now we can't use the shower either! What part of this bathroom is functional?

We both agreed: if we’re going to reuse the pedestal, we have to at least upgrade the cheapo plastic faucet handles. In case you don’t remember what they looked like:

Really, we couldn’t have reused the faucet even if we wanted to (which, just in case it wasn’t clear, we definitely didn’t want to), because whoever installed this sink hacked together their own non-standard supply lines that we cannot easily duplicate.

Not your standard supply line

And thus began the hunt for a faucet… Oh, and say hello to the next problem.

In what has become the norm in this house, we learned that this sink is not your standard bathroom sink. In addition to the weird non-supply-lines, this sink had an 8″ wide faucet opening, with separate hot and cold faucet handles, instead of a more common 4″ or 6″ wide spread that are all attached. Now, this isn’t actually a bad thing; I think sinks with separate handles actually look classier and are probably more appropriate for a master bath. But that’s also why the faucets cost so much more. The cheapest faucet for our sink is about $90 at Lowe’s, and jumps up pretty quickly to well over $250 for really nice ones. Compare that to about $25 for a low-end faucet for a more common sink, and decent ones in the $60-90 range and you see why we were concerned about our wallets.

For example, some of the options we had included the following faucets from Lowe’s, all of which cost over $150.

Sure, they’re nice faucets, but nearly $200!? Are you kidding me?

Despite these outrageous prices we were still convinced the old sink with a new faucet would be the best route for us, so we bought the lowest-priced decent-looking faucet at Lowe’s and went home to install it. Which brings us to the next issue. (What is this, #47 or so by now?) We couldn’t get the old faucet handles entirely off the sink. As in, we either didn’t have the right tools or the right brain power to figure out how to take it apart. (I think it was a little of both.) We put out a few calls to people with more tools and brains than us and a few days later Mark’s friend came over to help us move forward on this project.

Okay, I realize this story is getting a little long. Stand up and take a stretch break for a second… Ahh, that was nice.  Okay, ready for more?

After Mark and his friend (our hired help) spent about an hour taking apart the faucet – yes, it really did take that long – we discovered yet another issue! The old square faucet had left a square stain on the sink itself that would be visible with the smaller round faucet that we purchased. See the stain around the center hole?

As is often the case in situations like this, Mark’s response to the sink’s discoloration was a lot of expletives. My response was to laugh. Sometimes you just can’t fight against the universe! We were obviously not meant to reuse that sink.

By this time in the project, not having a sink in our bathroom was getting pretty old. Talk about a long and boring story: this was our reality for weeks on end! Brushing our teeth and washing our hands was relegated to the kitchen sink or our roommates’ bathroom. (Or, if you’re Mark, you simply stop brushing your teeth.) I refill water glasses at bedtime from the showerhead. Plus, our toilet is still leaky and the floor is only installed half-way. In the grand scheme of life problems, these aren’t really big issues. I know that. Certainly not worthy of complaint. But forgive me when I say there are times when I would like to get back to at least a standard middle class American bathroom. With a sink.

I know this post is already picture-heavy, but just for a laugh, here’s what our bathroom’s been looking like these days:

So this weekend’s task was to repeat the mantra everything happens for a reason and to get ourselves shopping for another sink, preferably with a faucet already attached. And what do you know? We found it. And installed it. With not a single additional issue.

Really?? Really!!

Here it is, our new (to us) pedestal sink that we found yesterday at ReBuild. Okay, I’ll give credit where credit is due. Mark found it. And he deserves a HUGE thank you. This sink is bigger than our old one, as in taller and wider, and with a deeper sink basin. It really commands a presence in the bathroom like all good master bath sinks should.

We’re thrilled with the new addition to our bathroom, and even more thrilled that it actually cost us less than the new faucet we bought (and can now return) from Lowe’s.

Here’s the breakdown of our sink budget:
Mark’s friend’s time to get the old sink faucet apart only to learn we can’t use it $20
New (to us) pedestal sink with faucet from ReBuild $65
Supply lines $10
Transportation costs for driving around trying to find sinks and faucets for the past month $5-10?
Being one step closer to a master bath we can be happy with? Priceless.

Bathroom Renovation: Day 449

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Remember that day, weeks ago, when we tackled our bathroom renovation with renewed gusto and I nearly declared it would be done within a day or two? Well, it didn’t quite happen like that.

It all started off well. After optimistically gathering all our flooring tools, organizing a few bundles of wood by size, and rolling out the underlayment paper, we started in on the first row.

We even got all professional-like and made measurements to ensure we’d be square once the hallway portion of the bathroom opens up into the bigger area. We didn’t want to risk having this flooring look crooked when we walk through the office. So, for instance, if the office flooring is crooked, we’ll have to match it in the bathroom. (Am I foretelling? You’ll have to wait and find out!)

You may recall that we weren’t sure if we would have enough wood to complete our project. We’re always conscious of avoiding waste in our lives but now even more so; we make every flooring cut with the next row in mind. As in, when we cut a piece of wood to complete the left part of the row, the cut edge of the ‘wasted’ piece could be used to start the right part of the next (or a future) row. Smart, I know!

In the hallway section of the bathroom, which is just about 3′ wide, we realized we could use the full lengths of our wood – with not even an inch of waste – by putting them down in a certain pattern. Because ipe is such a dark wood and the pieces were lining up pretty well, I think it’s hard to even see the pattern. Can you see it below?

You may be saying, I don’t see the pattern (or if I do, it doesn’t look bad), but I do see some pieces that stick out like a sore thumb! There are two reasons for this: The ipe has a lot of color variation – which we like – but there’s another reason they look so different from each other. By the time we got as far as the photo above we had already run into issue #1: We were inconsistent with sealing the flooring with tung oil. Some pieces had been sealed with two or three coats, and had dried out for weeks. Some pieces had only been sealed with one coat and hadn’t dried long enough for another coat. In fact, they were still sticky and smelled like citrus (our tung oil is cut with citrus and thus our bathroom smells like an orange grove). Some pieces were entirely unfinished and we figure we’ll just seal them once we’re done. So, really, this isn’t such a big issue in the grand scheme of things. Just keep in mind when you see photos that the unfinished wood typically looks lighter and doesn’t have the sheen of the sealed wood.

We had also run into issue #2. Gaps. Lots of them. Turns out we weren’t the only ones being inconsistent. Surprise, surprise, the flooring pieces weren’t always the same widths! Sometimes one piece would be shorter or longer than its neighbor by as much as a sixteenth of an inch. A sixteenth of an inch may not sound like a lot, but believe me, it’s visible to the naked eye, and can mess up a straight line of flooring very quickly. We later developed a workaround for issue #2 (which simply involves measuring the flooring widths before putting them down – can you say duh?) but we hadn’t yet discovered that technique at the time.

Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s talk about issue #3, shall we? The bathroom closet. Take a lookey here, at our beautiful bathroom closet.

I’m being sarcastic in case you can’t tell. Doorless, trimless, open-faced plywood shelves. I sort-of painted it white a year ago in a half-assed sort of way, knowing that one day we’d get around to deciding how to pretty it up.  For the past year, the yellow color that I didn’t quite paint over at the bottom (and top) served to remind us of how gross our entire bathroom used to look.

Here’s another look at the closet, back when I thought using cabinet doors we picked up for free would be a good idea. Mark vetoed that idea pretty quickly.

Once we got our flooring down to where the closet began, it sparked a bigger conversation about the function and aesthetics of the closet. With any home renovations, our goal is always to keep in mind the words “value added”, since we know we’ll sell this house one day. So, even if the closet had trim and a door and it was fully painted, would these cheap plywood shelves ever look value added? The answer is no. I mean, can you even use the word value in the same sentence as plywood?  We briefly considered drywalling over the closet so as to not have to deal with it. But there wouldn’t be much fun in that, would there? So we decided to demolish the shelves and build something from scratch.

So, the closet quickly became Distracted Side Project Of The Day! Time to put the flooring on hold and do some demolition.

Out came the shelves. And the strips under the shelves.

The demo wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t made easy either due to this gross gluey substance used to hold the shelves in place.

With all the shelves out I could then mud the closet walls, (which I later sanded and re-painted entirely white).

We couldn’t make any more progress on the closet that day because we needed to let the mud dry. Also, we’ll need a trip to a hardware store as we need materials for building the new shelves. Oh, and we need a plan. I’ve determined that those are good to have, too. I’ll give you a hint and tell you that we have a fun idea that involves using leftover flooring for the shelving but I’m skeptical we’ll have enough leftover for that.

We also didn’t make much more progress on the flooring that day because, well, we were both feeling pretty done with all the issues. Mark’s expression sums it up pretty nicely.

So, day 449 of the bathroom renovation was a wrap. Why am I calling it that? That was the number of days we had been in our house, and, if you recall, we started renovating the bathroom from pretty much Day 1 by removing the carpeting (and putting in a window not too long after).

In the next bathroom post I’ll bring you up to speed with days 455 and 464 of the bathroom renovation. Here’s a spoiler: it’s still not done. Hang in there with us!

PS – You may notice some changes going on around here on the blog. Subtle ones at first, like a new WordPress template and header image. One day soon there might be some bigger changes, too, like the name and even the focus of the blog. What? Is nothing sacred anymore? Stay tuned…

Bathroom Flooring: Ready, Set, Go!

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We woke up this morning with energy to tackle our last big home renovation project: the master bathroom.

I found myself getting caught up in the excitement of renovating, especially since we haven’t done any diy renovations since the completion of our master suite. But mostly I got caught up in a dream of what the bathroom will look like one day. In my dreams the bathroom looks clean and modern, it feels like a spa. My dream includes a big claw foot bathtub, surrounded by candles and soft music in the background. There’s also an eco-friendly dual-flush toilet in the dream, and plush organic towels awaiting me when I return from the bath.

Wait. Wrong dream. We don’t even have a bathtub, and the main eco-friendly feature we need right now is a toilet that doesn’t leak. Back to reality.

I had no false hopes that we would complete the project today; that would be ambitious even for us. You see, there’s still a lot left to do including: laying flooring, moving pvc piping to install a light centered above the mirror, installing a new toilet, painting or staining and installing trim, painting the fourth wall (‘accent wall’ gone amiss), patching some drywall, and re-sealing the floors.

Here’s what our bathroom looks like right now.

This is what it has looked like pretty much since we moved in and tore out the carpeting and added a window.

No joke. We have been living on sub-floor in this master bath for 1.25 years. YEARS. Okay, that’s technically only a year and a quarter and doesn’t warrant a plural. But still.

So, we worked for a few hours today and made some small progress. Let me guess, you’re probably expecting an “after” photo right about now. I mean, isn’t that how these posts are supposed to work? Maybe I’m not doing this blog thing right. Usually there’s a before and then there’s an after. Well sorry folks, all you’re getting is the “before”. Hopefully the “after” will happen in reality sometime this weekend, and then will be dutifully reported on this blog.

But here’s a little teaser on the flooring back when Mark was sealing it with tung oil.

Beautiful hardwood ipa -pronounced epay- which is apparently a wood flooring appropriate for bathrooms. (We’ll see how well it stands up to Mark-I-don’t-need-to-dry-my-feet-before-getting-out-of-the-shower-Weber.)

I was originally rooting for tile flooring. We even bought all the materials to install tile, (boy are there a lot of materials and expense that goes into it) but then returned them all after my poor footsies shivered all winter long last year. So maybe tile wouldn’t be the best choice in our cold house. Okay, I agreed on installing the ipa.  In part because it would instantly kick our bathroom style up a notch. This wood is typically at least $5/sq foot! But you know us. Why pay full price when we can get it for less? We found a former flooring salesman selling some on Craigslist for a great deal back when we first moved in, but here’s the kicker: we were only able to buy just about enough for the bathroom. We think. We hope. So we’re doing our best to avoid any wasted pieces and praying we have enough to finish.

Will we have enough flooring? What will we do if we’re only one foot short? Will Mark kill Melissa for insisting on putting flooring in the bathroom closet and wasting two square feet of it? You’ll just have to wait until next time to learn what happens next in our flooring saga!

A few of my favorite new things

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There’s a lot of new things going on here.

  • As I write this I am sitting in my new office, looking at a new view in the backyard.
  • Next to me light is streaming in from our new window in the bathroom.
  • Our front yard has a new sign explaining what the heck the hay and leaves are all about, and it also receives sunlight in new places.
  • I have nine jars of preserved food newly put away (apple butter, pickles and pasta sauce).
  • For the past few days our house has hosted a new guest – it’s first non-couchsurfer guest.
  • Mark’s new chainsaw has provided us with a lot of firewood.
  • We have a newly-created pantry shelf in the stairwell between the kitchen and basement thanks to Mark’s handiwork.
  • We also have a new idea about flooring on the second floor: cork.

Some photos to help you visualize some of these changes are below.

The “before” on our bathroom.  The tape on the walls was us trying to draw out how big a window we wanted.  The walls are an ugly yellow and the poor quality of light and ventilation added to the yuck factor.

The photo below is the “After,” or more accurately, “During” the renovation stage, which we’re still in.

We initially picked up a used window at ReBuild, after being convinced by an efficiency expert friend that the difference in efficiency between a new and old window are negligible.  In other words: It would be better to save $ and resources by buying a used window than a brand new one, despite the tiny gain in efficiency we might get from a new one.  (Windows in general are super inefficient – we’ve done ourselves a disservice in the energy department by putting a window in where there used to be an insulated wall. But the gains in happiness and aesthetics are well worth it for us.)  I was thrilled with the decision to get a used window until our contractor saw it and explained that it was actually a window from a commercial building and wouldn’t install properly in our house.  After another trip to ReBuild to return the window and check out other ones, we gave up and went to everybody’s favorite big box store: Lowe’s.  There we were able to find a clearance window of the perfect size for only twice the price.  Lesson learned: sometimes buying used wastes time and effort.  Silver lining: on our second trip to ReBuild we found a beautiful bathroom medicine cabinet for only $20 that would have cost well over $100 new.  Score!

We have beautiful views out the window – it’s amazing how such a small change makes a huge difference in the bathroom.  Now if we could only get the wall put back together!

I now have a desk set up in the room behind our bedroom (next to the bathroom).  We’re still not sure if we’ll ever knock down that wall and expand the ‘master suite’ – for now we continue to live in an unpacked space that feels temporary at best. The views out the window are into the backyard. Now that the tree is gone, it’s a great window for watching the sunrise.  To you perceptive blog readers: yes, that is a disposable coffee cup.  No, I’m not drinking coffee these days, nor are we generally purchasing one-time-use products.  The cup belongs to our otherwise eco-friendly contractor.

Mark got a new chainsaw (thanks to Mark’s parents!) and has had ample opportunity to use it this past week.  Our backyard view used to be taken up entirely by this box elder tree.  The pros of this tree was the privacy it afforded while seasonally full of leaves, and the squirrel corridor from one tree to another across our backyard.  The cons were many.  Box elders are typically considered “junk” trees – they don’t offer much value to humans or other creatures as far as food, habitat or aesthetics, they drop thousands of seeds that sprout up everywhere and have persistent suckers that will keep coming back even after the tree has been cut down.  This tree was ~50 feet tall and rotted through the middle.  After cutting it down it stank like an unclean bathroom and bled red sap.  Stranger things have happened.  Goodbye old tree.

Mark had some help from friends (thanks Noah and Chris!) with cutting down this tree as well as a big limb off a silver maple in the front yard.

This is what the front yard looked like after the huge branch came down, nearly taking our porch with it.

This is now what our backyard view now looks like.  You can see Mark in the distance talking to our neighbor (arms akimbo – that’s him!) in our neighbor’s huge garden that abuts ours.  The garden will be thrilled that we’re letting tons more light in without the tree.  Next project: make wood chips from the smaller branches and chop up the big pieces for firewood.

I painted this sign and put it in the front yard as a way of explaining to our neighbors that the mess on our front yard is intentional.  We’ve gotten a lot of curious looks from passersby, but no inquiries as of yet.  The “350” sign is in honor of last Sunday, 10/10/10, “a day to celebrate climate solutions,” brought to us by the nonprofit global organization 350.org.  In 188 countries worldwide, people performed community workdays on 10/10/10 to implement solutions to the climate crisis.  We performed our own mini-workparty at our house by continuing the garden planning and expansion, and participated in some of the events in Burlington in the afternoon.

The final pic for today is of the 350.org workparty celebration in Battery Park.  We all gathered around the Solar Bus and posed to add our spirited photo to the multitude of event photos being broadcast around the world.