Christmas Under Construction, Part 1

I was going to make this a “What I did on Christmas Vacation” story but it sort of evolved into something else as I went along. I’ll have more about Christmas later.

Last spring I redid our bathroom. It was a long and difficult job. I had to redo it because the guy I bought the house from was an idiot. Here’s a good rule of thumb. Never give an electrical engineer tools. Or glue.

The house is a prewar bungalow. The bathroom was built like all other bathrooms at the time; ceramic tile set in 2 inches of concrete over metal lathe that was tacked to the studs. It’s a great way to insure that if water gets on the floor it’s going to stay there and not leak into the basement or wreck your floor joists. It is also very hard to remove.

So the guy who sold me the house decided not to remove it. He engineered a solution. First, he cut a 47” hole in the wall of the bedroom behind the bathroom sink. The he went though the back and cut out a 31” hole in the tile, moved some plumbing (more on this later) and set in a vanity and sink. Then he built a frame in the bedroom (poorly) and put up some paneling.

Since he had destroyed the tile he got some 1/16th paneling with what looked like linoleum on the face and glued that to the rest of the walls. He also glued acoustic tiles to the ceiling.

When I took the paneling off it was obvious there was no way to save the tile. And the plumbing he did looked like it was designed by the little rascals. The only thing missing was the blue and white polka dot handkerchief wrapped around a leaking pipe joint.

I had a neighbor who is a plumber fix that mess and a cousin helped me redo the electrical.

Then I hired a guy who was dry walling my cousins’ basement to do my new drywall. Turns out I was his second drywall job ever. His real job was power washing decks and occasionally working as a bouncer. He was a hell of a bouncer for a drywaller.

The result of his work was, shall we say, sub par? The holes he cut for the can lights and the switches were larger than the covers, so we had big gaps into the walls and ceiling. He didn’t use any tape on the seams, so the mud started cracking quickly. None of the corners were square, and because the original walls were 2” thick the single sheets of green board around the doors were so shallow that we couldn’t put trim on them. There’s a great deal more, but you get the picture.

In addition, during my demolition I think the door frame was pushed out of shape and we could no longer close the door. I refused to replace the door with a new one because this one, like all the other doors in the house, is an unpainted original, custom made and still with it’s original hardware.

After living with this nightmare for 5 months we finally gave in. We decided to tear out bathroom again and hire some professionals to redo the walls.

Friday was when the work started. I spent a good deal of time tearing out our bathroom. I went down to the studs. The only thing I left was the shower surround, tub and floor. I had already done this in the spring and now I had to do it again. On the plus side, it was a heck of a lot easier this time with just drywall instead of tile to remove.

The weekend was all about Christmas with my wife’s family and we did some chores on Christmas Eve.

The construction started on Thursday after I called the contractor on Wednesday to ask him where his guys were. They showed up around 10 and got to work. They replaced our bathroom window, fixed the door and reworked some of the framing that was messed up. On Friday they had the drywall up and mudded and on Saturday they sanded and did a second coat of mud. Then they told us they were done. We were under the impression that they were going to prime the walls. Not so much, they said. My wife is still pissed.

They were also going to leave the window unframed. We won that one.

But as a result we spent New Years eve and New Years day priming and painting. We’re still not done. I have to paint the walls still, replace some floor tiles and reinstall the medicine cabinet and toilet and reconnect all the plumbing. Looks like we’ll wrap up hopefully on Saturday.

Next time I’ll tell you what we were doing while all this was going on.