Should remodeling photos bore you, this is a post you will want to skip. For those more interested, this post may very well whet your appetite for more. Without further ado, let's get into what the week has brought to the Peck household.
Perhaps I will begin with the medicine cabinet door that Bruce made and finished the day before they guys came. Having spent copious amounts of time perusing bathrooms online, as well as reading up on designing does and don'ts, one thing became clear to me and that was just how important scale is to a room. While we can't control some of it due to what is already here, one thing I wanted Bruce to do was put the new cabinet into scale. Not too big, and not too small. Because the counter has been raised 3.5 inches, or will be when it comes, and we are having a backsplash made, the cabinet had to shrink a bit on the bottom. Bruce began the door by attaching the trim.
That husband of mine loves his clamps! So, here is the door front,
and here is a shot of him applying the pink stuff which is spackle used to fill the nail holes.
Should you be wondering where some of this magic happened, it was behind our house using his mitre box which he stores at Bill's house when not in use. Our sunroom has become the storage area for now.
To accomplish the scale that I wanted, Bruce had to add a piece of wood on the bottom of the cabinet which will make using the lower shelf different, however, we plan on putting it to use in some fashion.
Before I go further, my sister Nancy, ever the curious one, deemed that I did not do a great job explaining the counter top conundrum. Here's what I've learned about counter top heights should you be curious as well. Apparently, following WWII, when the GIs came home and there was a huge building boom, most homes were built with just one bathroom that the entire family would share. In order for the children to be able to reach the bathroom sink, countertops were made at 30". Well, two bathrooms have been around for quite some time now, and who started the change of making countertops at 36", I can't tell you, but that is what is being used today. Ours won't be quite that high, but much better than it was! Door hung, Bruce could hardly wait to see it painted, doing so near our bedtime on Tuesday night.
Another thing he did was put some vinyl flooring inside the cabinet. Say what? Before we moved here, the entire complex was re-piped and they did not do a neat enough job for Bruce's liking so he cut off the pipe that stuck out, applying the vinyl over the old pipe holes. (taken before holes covered)
The last thing he did was to use a plumb bob to mark the ceiling as to where the new shower curtain hanger will go. What's a plumb bob you ask? Here is what it looks like.
I don't quite understand the concept, but according to Bruce, this will work and we should now be able to have the shower curtain closer to the tub edge, something we sorely needed to avoid having the curtain stick to us while showering! Now that I am showing the photograph, it turns out I have the sequence wrong. How do I know that? Well, duh, the tile is gone and according to my written timeline, Herbert hasn't even come yet!! Sharp eyes would surely have called me out on that one.
One last look at the pre demolition.
When Herbert and his helper, whose name I have forgotten (boo on me for that), arrived they wasted no time getting to work with Herbert using a crowbar to remove not just the tile, but the wall along with the tile!
One disappointing find is that I was hoping to carve a shower niche into the foreground wall and that is not going to happen because they discovered it was a solid block wall. Not the worst thing that a person can find in a demolition. I do wish I had more photos to show, but Bruce kept reminding me to leave them alone as they worked! They did, however, let me take their photograph.
A big part of this project, something most will never even notice, is the installation of a real bathroom exhaust fan. When these were built it was not really a part of the building code; instead a circulating fan was installed, mostly for show. Now it will exit to the outdoors, thanks to the above guys. Herbert is the boss, so he does most of the serious work, including drilling a hole in the exterior of the building, no small feat.
The idea is to drill small holes in a circle and punch it out with a hammer, or so Bruce tells me.
As you can see to the left of Herbert, our neighbors did this same thing some years ago. That is what ours looks like from the outside now, and below what it looks like inside.
So to recap, Wednesday was the demolition day with all of the tile removed and taken to the landfill. Thursday they worked on the fan and the electricity portion of things, including where the new light fixtures will be hung.
Friday was spent on drywall work, putting in new pieces all over the place, as well as fitting the new shower plumbing guts in about two inches closer to the window than it was before. One thing we discovered on Wednesday was that I did not have the guts for either the shower, or the tub, not the news I wanted to learn. I hopped online and quickly ordered the shower rough in valve from Build.com, where most everything came from. Okay, that was good. What was not good was discovering that the tub rough in valve was on backorder
for the foreseeable future. Great!
Just kidding.
Making a long story short, Bruce finally found one in a hardware store in Michigan that I promptly called and ordered at nearly twice the price of Build.com. One place I called said she had nine orders waiting and that it had been on backorder since September!! Had I known this ahead of time, I probably would have chosen different plumbing fixtures, but I didn't, so onward we go. If this is our biggest setback, and I think that it will be, then we are way ahead in the remodeling game.
I met Daniel, the tile guy on Wednesday afternoon and we discussed the layout, he being a bit skeptical of my plan for stacked vertical tile, in spite of my attempts to convince him it will be good. As I tried showing him some online images, I discovered that my wireless keyboard was not connected to the internet (another long story I won't bore you with) but he saw enough to begin to come around to my way of thinking. Unfortunately we could not test it out as the tile is in our storage unit down the street. but when he comes on TUESDAY, the tile will be here and we will work it out together. He plans on starting on the floor and as you can imagine I can hardly wait!
What was I doing to stay out of their way? FINALLY finishing the puzzle Matt and Tom gave me for my birthday. I will admit, I was near the giving-up phase, but somehow I convinced myself that I wasn't a quitter...
Actually, unlike lots of folks, I have no problem with quitting if something is too hard for me, and had it been from anyone else aside from our London family, I most certainly would have quit in a heartbeat! It's a beautiful image, and the puzzle is very well made, but it was so hard, especially that tree. Oh wait, those grass pieces were crazy hard. Anyone else want to give it a go?
Speaking of our sons, Jonathan and Alissa have just gone through a week that will not go unforgotten for a very long time. With temperatures way below freezing, they lived with no power for several days before a friend offered them shelter with heat included. Never were more beautiful words spoken than that invitation, that is if they had the nerve to drive six miles on snowy and icy roads. Having heat won out, and they consequently crawled through the city to their sanctuary. Friday they headed back to their apartment to find that they had heat but no water as city-wide pipe freezing problem had the city shutting off the water. To say that I was anxious is putting it mildly.
Keeping myself busy to avoid worrying, I decided to make a cajun rub for chicken thighs. I got out the recipe and all of the spices.
Seeing them all lined up it reminded me of how enriched we are from the kindness of friends, in this case Bonnie who, while reading in this space on the web, learned of how difficult it was for me to get the spices I use at a reasonable price in Vancouver. God bless her, she sent me a care package of about ten bottles of spices! I tried to find that blog post without success, but I'm going to keep trying so I can relive that moment in time when I felt somewhat hopeless. Thank you Bonnie! Here is the finished product.
This morning we had a beautiful sunrise, something that has not happened lately as we have been waking up to very grey skies.
As I've been having tennis elbow pain, instead of pickleball this morning, I took a field trip which I hope to document soon. At the same time, Mr. Peck played his heart out, and in other good news, Herbert came to do some drywall finishing.
Indeed we are very much underway with the end probably about two weeks away. Woo hoo!
your friend,
Gail
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