Tag Archives: master bathroom

Men plan and the gods laugh…

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My annual birthday week book buying spree was interrupted, as you know, by the long-awaited master bathroom remodeling project. At the time, I pinned my hopes to get back to the world of dusty, mote filled shops during the next block of leave I usually take during the first week of July. Then, of course, there was the repeated county inspection fiasco that set us back by a matter of weeks. 

That sad story brings us to where we are now – the first week of July – when I once again have vast sweeps of unallocated time that I planned to use for chasing books. Here, I am, though, tethered to the house while work in the bathroom continues.

This summer won’t go down in my personal history as the best use of vacation time I’ve ever experienced. Given how many small change decisions it’s helpful to be able to discuss and make on the spot, the only real alternative was to cancel out my leave this week and log in for another session of working from home. That thought was even less enticing than just pissing away 4 days of leave doing piddling odds and ends around the house. 

After last week’s water system blowout, I’d be wildly uncomfortable being away for any real length of time. I’ve snuck away for a few appointments during this process – those that have taken months to get and that changing ranked as too hard to do – but otherwise I’ve been able to be here throughout. As this effort drags on, though, I increasingly wonder about the sanity of anyone who stays in their home through a more involved renovation that isn’t just contained to one room.

I’m sure at some point this week, I’ll scour a few of the online shops I frequent, just to scratch the acquisition itch. Otherwise, it looks like a week of reprising those distant times of puppy training when all the creatures of the household piled into the kitchen. I suppose, spending a few days huddled up with books, tea, and furry critters isn’t really the worst bit of vacation time I’ve ever spent… but it wasn’t at all what I had planned.

The Bathroom Report: Day 40

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Seeing it fully tiled for the first time, I can honestly say that while the shower is still abnormally large, it no longer feels absurdly so. I think when, eventually, the glass gets installed, it will feel like a properly enclosed space. Given the lead time quoted by the glass company, though, it could be a while before I get to make a final determination on that. I was skeptical about both the design and the tile choices originally, but seeing them all hanging together versus laid out on just a sample palette, I’m well pleased with where it’s heading.

The crew here started in on the floor yesterday. Once they get to the point of laying that tile, it should be a straight forwarded running bond pattern covering a simple rectangle. With no oddball angles to contend with, I’m cautiously optimistic that it’ll go quickly. Of course, before they could start on the tile, the heating element needed to be fitted…. and that, of course, is where we encountered this week’s catch.

The heating cable that arrived weeks ago when the materials were delivered turned out to be about half the length they actually needed for the job. Most of what they did yesterday has to come out so that can be corrected. With that, instead of getting the floor most of the way done, they’ve shifted gears to work on grouting the shower tile while waiting for the right cable to show up. That’s fine. It’s still necessary progress. God knows there’s enough grout work that needs doing.

I’m not sure if you’d call it a design feature, but one small thing I insisted on is leaving a 24”x24” corner section of the floor unheated. Since moving in to this house, the master bathroom was almost exclusively a place to keep the litter box. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll move the box back into the bathroom or leave it where it’s been during construction, but in the event it does someday move back into its old space, having a bit of the floor that wouldn’t act like a hot plate under it felt like just good sense. No matter how good a room looks, heated cat pee feels like something best avoided.

I’m not yet willing to call the beginning of the end, but it seems to me that we’re well past the end of the beginning. Once the floor is in and the grout is done, I have to believe we’re in the home stretch. Then it’s moving in the vanity, painting, making the final plumbing connections, and fixtures and finishing touches. It’s still a lot… but a lot less than it was a while ago. 

The Bathroom Report: Day 33

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It’s the end of another week here at the endless bathroom project. OK, that’s maybe an exaggeration, but it sure feels that way. I assume it’s because we’re now counting days past the originally scheduled finish date and the end still isn’t in sight. 

The end may not be in sight, but there has been some solid progress made this week. The DITRA membrane is on the floor and the shower is (partially) tiled. The tile work has been slow going. I’m told that fitting the pebble floor and some of the angled bits of the first course of wall tile needed to accommodate the long slope of the shower pan took a bit of doing, but it’s in and the first coat of darkener is on it. The crew is plugging away at it, though, so it’s daily visible progress if nothing else. Plus, given the vague memory of my one long ago experience in installing a tile kitchen backsplash, that was considerably less involved than what they’re working on, I’m perfectly happy to let them contend with it.

I’ve mostly given up on projecting when I think this will be finished. I know getting the tile done is the longest pole of this particular tent. The rest – dropping in the vanity and the plumbing and lighting fixtures – should go (theoretically) quickly. That’s what I’ll keep telling myself. It should help to stave off the madness.

The Bathroom Report: Day 26

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After pissing away 14 days waiting for the county, we’re back in business. My crew of two has been here the last two days, patching holes, closing up the walls, and generally getting everything set to install the shower pan, lay in the heated floor, and start working through a small mountain of tile.

Heating the floor was one of my non-negotiable items – one of those things I’d have blown up the project without. With the master bathroom being as far from the furnace as it’s possible to be and still stay under roof, the room never quite gets warm. During heating season, the living room may be toasty, the master bedroom is comfy enough, but no matter how hard the furnace is working, the bathroom at the end of the house has never been anything but cold. That obviously won’t be an issue with Bathroom 2.0. Depending on how successful it is in the bathroom, it’s an option I’d like to look hard at when it’s time to replace the flooring in the currently carpeted sunroom.

I was forced, thanks to design oversight early in the process, to make one trade away this week. Since I was determined that the shower niche should centered on the wall instead of offset, I had to give up my heated towel rack. There was no way to mount it where it needed to be that wouldn’t have resulted in drilling directly into the back of the niche. I hated losing that little feature, but spending the next dozen or more years looking at an off-center niche would have made me far twitchier over time than continuing to be subjected to the indignity of room temperature towels. 

Seeing that the ceiling had been closed in, I asked “innocently,” if there was a plan to replace the vast sea of blown insulation that had come down when they opened it up. The sheepish look from the project leader told me that I probably wasn’t supposed to notice/ask about that. It’s not mentioned in the contract, so I’m sure I’ll get a change order and bill for it, but losing every bit of heat I put into the floor directly through uninsulated sheetrock in the ceiling feels like a dumb idea. Whatever it costs to rent an insulation blower for half a day will be worth it.

For all the good news this week, I’ve had to come to terms with the original project schedule being hopelessly blown. In fact, the original plan called for wrapping everything up next week. Well, everything except the glass panel for the shower that’s allegedly going to have an additional 3-6 week lead time from when they get the final measurements. The schedule might be blown and it may be well into July or August before I can actually use the shower, but I couldn’t help but notice that the pile of material and supplies stacked in my bedroom is dramatically less than it was at the beginning of the week. There’s visible progress and I couldn’t be happier to see it. 

The Bathroom Report: Day 19

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Good news… The county has signed off on the rough electric, which is nice, I suppose. The plumbers were back today to correct two incredibly nitnoid items their inspector found. Otherwise, as we arrive at the end of third full week of this project, it feels like the process involves a lot more down time than actual work. As I read the schedule, we’re now about a week behind the original plan.

Maybe I just notice it more because as we trundle on towards the one month mark, I’m ready to get out of the guest room and back into my own bed. Sure, the new arrangement has developed its own rhythm, but I’d very much like the old one back sooner rather than later. 

The county is supposed to be back to re-inspect the now new and improved rough plumbing on Monday. I assume once that’s happened, the pace will pick back up again. Yes, I know that patience is an alleged virtue, but after eight months of waiting to begin and now closing in on the end of a month of work in progress, I really just want to take a damned shower and have whole sections of the house that aren’t closed off, tarped, and being used for storage. Plus, not having a parade of perfect strangers wandering in and through the house every day will be a nice perk too.

The Bathroom Report: Day 5

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When I looked in on the work yesterday, most of the walls had been stripped back to the studs, there we gaping holes in the floor, and materials were stacked across every open foot of my bedroom floor. The whole thing looked a lot more like destruction than construction. 

Today, though, something magical happened. The crew arrived this morning and started framing. I’m ok at reading the big sweeps of a floorplan, but I’m also notoriously bad at spatial awareness. This is the first time I could start really getting a feel for how things might look when all this is over.

It was also the first time I got a sense of how absurdly large the shower I asked for is actually going to be. I’ve always smacked shoulders and elbows into the sides of every shower I’ve ever been in, so I told the designed that was the number one thing I didn’t want in this new layout. She delivered on that request in spades. In my defense it also had to be pretty damned big so that I could get away with not having to deal with water getting all over the place since I also didn’t want a shower door or curtain. Giving up a linen closet and a foot off the walk-in closet finally feels like it might have been a good idea.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I used to have to walk through the bathroom to get anything out of my closet. It was a design I hated with an irrational level of ferocity. That issue is gone now with the new door cut in and framed. It’s seven square feet smaller than it was when this project started, but still would be room for me to double the amount of clothes I have and still have plenty of empty space left over. Making that trade off was a no-brainer.

We’re all taking a breather for the long weekend, but next up will be the plumbing and electrical rough in. Then we’re off to the races with wallboard and what feels like absolute acres of tilework. 

As week one closes, I know we’re nowhere near the beginning of the end, but I feel confident we’ve at the very least reached the end of the beginning.

The Bathroom Report: Day 1

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Seven years after moving in despite my hatred for it and just shy of nine months after signing the contract, the master bathroom remodel is underway. There’s been a steady stream of dismantled parts and pieces getting schlepped down the hall, out the front door, and to the comically oversized pink dumpster that’s now posted up in the driveway.

All things considered, the crew that’s here doing the demolition work has been surprisingly good at keeping the mess contained. That said, I’m glad I had the foresight to abandon my bedroom for the duration of this project. There’s a shocking amount of equipment, supplies, and random stuff being staged in there. Trying to sleep in the midst of that wouldn’t have given me a moment’s rest.

Walls have come down. New doors have been punched through. The cabinetry was folded, spindled, and mutilated. And it looks like a right disaster area. I’m trying to remind myself that this is, by definition, a process and that it has to look worse before it can look better. 

The tub… the tub that almost stopped me from buying this place… remains unscathed for the moment. It’s sitting under the windows in an otherwise empty room as if mocking me by its continued presence. It’s the one thing left when everything else is gone. I’m confident, mostly, that it won’t survive the hammer blows tomorrow, though.

There’s inevitably going to be about 30 days of intense grumbling here, but don’t think for a minute I’m not happy to finally have this project underway. 

A mark on the wall…

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I signed the contract for my bathroom renovation back in September. A few days before Christmas I got an email from the contractor stating that all supplies are backlogged, half the employees are out with the Great Plague, and every project they have is running way, way behind. Here we are in May, five months hence, and I’ve finally talked to the company’s operations manager and have a tentative start date plugged into the calendar towards the end of the month. At long last, there’s a mark on the wall.

Look, I’ve loathed the master bathroom in this house since the first time I saw the place. I almost took a pass on the house because of it. The giant tub and no shower made it mostly dead space to me. For the last seven years it has been serving as a glorified hallway where I kept the cat’s food and litter box and that I have to walk through to get to the master closet. Aside from the very big windows facing the woods and excellent natural lighting, it has no redeeming qualities at all. The room is cold as blue hell in the winter and for reasons I’ve never managed to figure out, has no particular aesthetic at all. It’s as if the original owners realized three days before they finished construction that they needed a master bathroom and scrounged up whatever parts and pieces they could on short notice.

I’m not saying this new bathroom is going to be particularly beautiful, but it’s damned well going to be functional. I’m cautiously optimistic that the designer (probably) didn’t let me get the overall look and feel too far out of whack. I mean it all looks good enough on the renderings, but there’s no way of telling what it’s really going to look like until it’s all there live and in person… which now looks like it’ll be sooner rather than later.

My fingers are firmly crossed in hopes that I haven’t spent tens of thousands of dollars on something I’ll hate once it’s all thrown together… Though the simple fact that I won’t have to schlep down the hall to shit, shower, and shave every morning will go a long way in making it a favorable outcome. Being able to do it all with toasty warm floor tiles will probably seal the deal regardless of appearance… and then I can rack and stack the list again and see what project is next.