Having the Right Tools Makes All the Difference!

You hear it all the time, and that's because it is so true. Having the right tool makes every thing about a task so much easier. Here are a few of the tools I have collected for this work.

I mentioned my new drill. My husband bought it for me so I would be able to mix the thinset mortar for the subfloor and setting the floor tiles. I have a long attachment for mixing the mortar, and the drill has an extra handle that fits around it so you can use two hands. That really helped me out when I was screwing the backerboard down to the subfloor. Cordless drills are great, but they don't have enough umph to do some jobs. The plug-in electric drill has alot more power.

This job, and the tile to come, required a lot of time on my knees. I wouldn’t be able to do that and still be able to walk the next day without this nifty little kneepad with handles. The knee pad cushions the knees, and the handles help you get up and down, especially about the 47th time you need to stand or kneel back down. I got this one from a website/catalog for Gardener’s Supply, but I have seen them other places since I got mine. You can flip it over and it is a bench. The handles fold flat for storage, but mine is almost always in use somewhere around the house. I don't think I could do this kind of work anymore if I didn't have this thing.

Don't Fear the Subfloor

After realizing I would have to do something about the subfloor in my gutted bathroom, I was afraid it meant calling in a carpenter to put down plywood. (I have a persisting fear of power saws ever since I had a near accident about 10 years ago.) But that would really slow down the process so I wanted to see if there was some other option. You never know what kinds of materials are out there if you don't ask, so when I picked up my new tiles at the tile store I did just that. The guys who work there are great, and they showed me a couple different options. I am starting with about 3/4 inch of subfloor, so they recommended that I use 1/2 inch backer board. This is a grey board that comes in 3'x5' sheets, and is sort of crumbly cement compressed between two mesh layers. So I bought 2 of the sheets and a big bag of thinset mortar to use on the joints. The only issue I have to consider is that this will raise the bathroom floor higher than the entryway that leads to it. But I have some ideas for dealing with that.
Some people would probably use the measurements of the room and cut the pieces according to those, and that ought to work fine. But I decided I would rather make a paper pattern to lay out on the backer boards to get my cutting lines. I used 4 big sheets of paper, taping them together where they overlapped on the floor to make the pattern. This made it easy to mark exactly where I needed to make the cuts for the toilet, the heating duct, and to fit in the door frame. I also decided to pull the molding off the inside of the door frame so that I wouldn’t have to make cuts around that in the subfloor and the tile, so that made this part of the project a bit simpler. I cut out the pattern on the lines, placed the 2 boards on the garage floor, and laid the paper pattern on the boards so that it lined up with two of the edges to minimize the cuts. I used a black Sharpie to outline it and scored them with abox-cutter razor knife. Then you should be able to raise the board, bend it at the scored lines, and snap it. I could see it was close to snapping but couldn’t quite get it to go. So I called for backup – my husband came out and re-scored them for me, and he was able to cut them a little deeper than I was. Then they magically broke right along the lines – wow!

For the two holes (toilet and heat duct opening), he helped me a drill holes along the scored lines and then just used a long skinny hand saw to connect the dots. After that, I could do the rest myself. The stuff is pretty crumbly, so it was easy to notch the area for the door frame. In fact, it would be easy to overdo it, so I just did little cuts, and broke out small bits. When I took them into the bathroom to put them down, there was just one little spot that that needed to be trimmed. It was pretty amazing to see it go down on the floor so quickly and neatly.

So the next step was to screw the new layer to the subfloor below. I found a plastic box of green screws especially designed for cement board – about 2” long with a large head to hold the board down tight. The whole idea of this process is to have a surface that is not going to flex or else the grout – or worse, the tile – will crack. I pulled out cordless drill and a phillips head bit. But when I tried to put in the first few, it seemed like they weren’t going all the way in. So back to the hardware store for my new drill with a cord to boost the power quotient. I got one that has an extra handle that helps stabilize the drill and lets me use two hands to apply some extra girl-power pressure. And Whoa, baby, that one drove the screws in so fast I needed to back off a bit. The cement board is kind of granular and it was really easy to go too deep with the screws. But after a couple, I got the hang of the technique and it went really fast. And lickety-split, Bob’s-your-uncle, I was done! It looks so good, I had to keep going back and turning on the light to admire it.

Go sell a house, wouldja?

Well, boys and girls, let's see what the emailman brought today. Hmm, here's one with a great question. Some hot-shot realtor from Denver asks, "Hey, slack-ass! How do you pull out a toilet without a huge water mess?

Well, good question, Miss SmartyPants, I am so glad you asked. It is actually quite simple, so don't leave your toddler in the bathroom unattended. Here is the entire process in 10 Easy Steps:

How to Remove a Toilet

Step 1. Turn the handle on the little tube going to the toilet tank. That's the water supply line.
Step 2. Flush the toilet once or twice to empty the tank as much as possible. There will probably still be lots of water in the actual toilet bowl.
Step 3. Argue with your spouse about the effect of pouring more water into the bowl. He obviously has never lived in a really crappy place during his sheltered life and has not needed to know you can flush a toilet just by dumping a bucket of water into it.
Step 4. Go get a big bucket and fill it with water in the kitchen despite the laughter coming from the bathroom.
Step 5. Pour the water into the toilet. It will flush out most of the water remaining in the toilet bowl, leaving a very minimal amount.
Step 6. Remove the bolt covers -they cover the bolts holding the toilet to the floor.
Step 7. Remove one or more bolts with a wrench.
Step 8. Go back to the hardware store and buy a little saw with a blade that will cut metal. Kobalt makes a nice one with 3 types of blades for metal, wood, or something else. The handle and the blade together are about the size of a wedding cake knife, and the blade is flexible so you can get into that narrow space between the toilet and the wall, slide the blade under the toilet and cut the bolt that is frozen.
Step 9. Have a few old towels handy now because there will be some water, but not too much.
Step 10. Lift the toilet up, breaking the wax seal, and take it out to the garage. It will look lovely out there.

You will have a little clean-up to do, but it is not bad. Get a stiff piece of cardboard and scrape away the wax seal. You will be able to see that the bolts actually are in little slots that would have let you lift, twist, and remove the toilet without actually needing to undo them all the way. And, as a bonus, you can see now how it all went together and that it might not be impossible to reinstall the new one yourself. But I will probably get a plumber to do it anyway.

And it is so lovely to come home at the end of a workday and see a toilet in the garage amid the rest of the clutter.

Let the Renovating Begin

It has been so long since my last post that I wasn't even sure how to log in and make this post. The bookmark saved it for me, and now I can get this back on track. Between moving in, travel (whee!) and the holidays, there was not much time to do anything of any significance. But now I am on the job with a vengeance. First project at hand is the half-bath in the entryway - the one commonly known by the universal euphemism of "powder room". This dreadful little penalty box was ill-conceived, boring, cramped - for crying out loud, you can't even open the door all the way: it bangs into the sink when it swings into the bathroom. The linoleum is pretty disgusting, and the medicine cabinet is absolutely disgusting. And the looong, loooooong flushing time on the toilet is getting on my nerves. It is clear that nothing in the room can be salvaged. It all. must. go.
And so on a stormy afternoon a few days ago, it all went into the garage. Then I pulled up the linoleum. The good news was that it was very easy to pull up. And, hmmm. Look at that subfloor. OSB board. That is not going to be a good substrate for tile. I imagine that is why the linoleum was not really stuck to the subfloor.

Looks like it will be time to call in some assistance from a carpenter, because i think it needs to be plywood or something a little more solid. Well, in the meantime, I patched the walls and prepped them for painting and tiling. That was enough to fill the rest of the day. I went to the hardware store and bought myself a 1/4 sheet palm sander to take the gloss off the paint on the wall to be tiled. And then I began to realize why professional painters get such better results than I ever have - this is an outstanding way to smooth out the areas you patch with joint compound on big areas or the other kinds of patch stuff on the small spots. So I went a bit crazy sanding all over the other walls, too. Now I can't wait to see how the paint will look. My tile is on order, due in any day now, so I will try to get that subfloor in ASAP.