turtle + mole

last weekend we were excited to have 3 full days to work on the house.

mathew started by finishing the laundry room frame and wall siding on the new bathroom window that he made and installed. then he covered the plywood with some of that star paneling that was used upstairs on the walls. this will eventually be sanded and painted white to match the rest of the wall. i’ve almost forgotten that this used to be the bathroom door.

on saturday all i did was clean up recycled tile. we even got to re-use some of the white tile that used to be in the old (stenchy) pink upstairs bathroom. because the previous owners had used mastic (glue adhesive) instead of thin-set to install the tile, mathew found it was easier to clean using the heat gun in the garage. the white tile looks brand new!

on sunday i woke up with food poisoning so mathew worked alone for the rest of the weekend. he finished cleaning all the blue tile, cut and installed it to fit around the window, and floor.

and he even bought a dremel tool to grind out some of the old grout that wasn’t applied correctly. when i wandered down to take photos i was surprised by how much it sounded and smelled like drilling teeth at the dentist’s office. ick.

and mathew wouldn’t be mathew if he didn’t go one step further with the details. (left) he purchased, cut and corner-rounded some white marble for the window sill. the recycled white tiles are around the inside edge next to the window. more white marble will go around the outside of the window next to the blue tile, to give the impression of a window frame. it took us a while to decide exactly what to do in that space between the blue tile and the window. it would have been impossible (and not very pretty) to cut and install small pieces of the blue to fill that thin space. (right) and he routed and installed wainscoting top ledges that will go around the room. now it’s time for me to sand the wainscotting and make it pretty again.

here’s how the exterior looks after the painting has been done and the scaffolding removed. nice, huh? now when i look at the rest of the house and see peeling paint it makes me want to get out there and scrape, sand and paint. …but one thing at a time.

mathew finished making this bathroom window from the large old bedroom window that was replaced. he cut the metal, pieced it together, cut the glass (with much difficulty) and installed it into the frame. we’ll add a translucent film for privacy since it looks out onto the laundry room, but it really helps to add natural daylight to the room. (right) here it is again with the window trim moulding added which will be painted eventually.

during the week mathew put up kerdi membrane, a special water barrier cloth that goes under the tile where he had removed the old window, tub and shower fixtures.

last weekend we got to work installing tile in those gaps over the kerdi.

even though we’ve already had lots of tile experience, installing this tile was painstaking work. since we’re recycling it, it’s no longer in big sheets with mesh backing but in pieces, so we had to apply each small piece and eyeball it to make sure it lined up with the old tile.

(left) here mathew is cleaning out excess thin-set that squeezed out between the tiles. (right) and i am cleaning the backs of more tile to be installed. we need enough to go around the new window to the right and to fill the rest of this wall where mathew is working. it is a very SLOW process.

while we worked last weekend mathew came to the realization that this remodel has taken as long as it has because of mathew’s perfectionism and my desire to recycle and not contribute to landfill…

We haven’t made a post in a while: It’s because we got some rather unmotivating news; Po-Po has decided that she wants to move into a nursing home. The amount of time this is taking us has probably played into it a bit, but mostly she’s concerned that she does not want to have to cook, wants to have a nurse on call, and does not want to clean. All of this we can come up with ways to do, but also, she’s planning to move into a place with her sister-in-law. We understand that it may be lonely still living downstairs here, even though we are here. But at the rate we are working, she can go check out a nursing home for a few months; if she doesn’t like it or changes her mind, she’ll still be welcome here when we’re done!

We are now floating ideas of what we will do with the downstairs: Maybe a vacation rental?

I finally got the window trim back on, painted: finished. then we moved the scaffolding over to do some more painting on the next section of house, while we still had the scaffolding.

There was peeling paint all over the wall, so we encased the scaffold in plastic to keep all the paint chips in. Below, you can see janeen scraping off the loose paint.

Once every loose chip of paint was scraped off, sanded (with a HEPA vacuum attached), cleaned up, and the wall was washed with TSP, we primed and painted it.

On the inside of the house, I finished off the last piece of wainscot (it will be behind the door). Then, for the second time, I installed the shower receptor. Last time, it lifted up as the moisture in the mortar was absorbed into the wood floor and the floor swelled. After the wood dried, it left the mortar up, holding the shower receptor off the floor, so I had to tear the whole thing out. This time I did it right. I put down moisture barrier paper, then the mortar, and set the receptor into it.

To be sure that it was going to stay flat on the floor, I piled boxes of tile into it. The photo below right shows the drain plumbing for the shower. The white pipe is not PVC – it’s a piece of black ABS pipe that I’m reusing that had been painted white. (You are not supposed to connect ABS pipe to PVC – probably something to do with how they glue). It’s all black cast iron pipe as it exits the building, and the P-trap for the shower is also cast iron.

here are some photos of me painting the walls with the airless paint sprayer..

the last two weekends have looked pretty much the same.

i’m slowly working my way around the bathroom installing wainscoting. (right) i’m especially proud of the places where i have to pre-drill or pre-cut for plumbing and electrical outlets.

since we’re recycling wood, i’m also piecing two smaller boards to create one large board most of the time. this was tricky because each board isn’t exactly the same width, there could be a difference up to 3/16″, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you’ve got that large a gap between boards and then it’s not so pretty. so it became a big matching game.

(left) this is my 4th pipe in the wall and it falls between two pieces of wainscotting. (right) i clamp two pieces together, measure exactly where the pipe will fit and drill the hole. mathew and i are surprised by how accurate my measuring has been.

installing wainscoting is noisy, dusty work so i just wear my respirator mask and ear protection pretty much the entire time. this is a dramatic reinactment where i’ve forgotten my protective eye goggles… if i had them on, you probably wouldn’t recognize me.

(left) this was my view of mathew for the last two weekends. (right) this was mathew’s view for the last two weekends.

now that the windows have been installed, mathew has put all the siding and window trim back in place. it sounds simple but involved lots of wood repair, sanding and priming. the brown stuff is bondo for filling holes and cracks, most of it he applied on saturday after the sun had gone down and the mosquitoes were out.

mathew spent this last weekend scraping, sanding and prepping the entire wall and window trim for paint (oh the noise! can you tell i’m not big on noise?) he did spend some time cutting left-over crown moulding, this involves carefully measuring tricky angles to fit it together under the small bathroom window sill. he wanted to have something pretty under the window in case someone looked out at it. (i’m sorry i don’t have any photos of the finished moulding. i’m not about to climb the scaffolding on this cold monday morning to take the one missing photo.) (right) here is an ugly “before” pipe photo instead.

you’ll have to tune in next week when we post photos of the finished, painted wall!

after figuring out how to transport 4×8 sheets of plywood with a honda civic (cardboard as padding on the roof, rope, and slow driving), I closed up the wall on the laundry room side.

This is actually the exterior wall of the house, and the laundry room has been added at some point — probably as a deck initially, then walls were built around it. The part of the wall I’m filling with plywood is basically the only shear wall on this end of the house. We need a seismic retrofit.

on the left you see some of the old wood siding. janeen loved the look of it, and all the history of paint colors: the first color looks like a dark forest green, with an olive green over it, then a turquoise, then dark green again, and a layer of off-white cream. should we go back to green?

on the right, janeen is covering the gaps in the gyp board with fiberglass mesh tape. she spent most of the day on saturday sanding all the walls to take the gloss off the paint. after the mesh tape, she painted the walls with pink “plasterweld”…

on sunday morning, i cut up and reassembled one of the old windows to make a new window for between the bathroom and the laundry room area. we found a great web site that has all sorts of decorative films to apply to glass. We’ll obscure the glass with one of these films.

janeen continued taping the walls. she used plaster to fill all the holes and gaps in the wall before i started plastering over it all. sorry, there are few photos of janeen from this weekend. janeen loves the drama and speed that things change when plaster goes on:

by the end of the evening, i’d plastered the three walls above the height of the wainscote. on the right, you can see the closed up wall in the laundry area, and the window waiting to go into its opening where the door used to be.