BUILDING A NEW BATHROOM

Sorry for the delay in posts but I have spent the last few days doing grunt work to get the bathroom ready for tile and finishing.

I spent Wednesday replacing rotted 1x8 floor planks, leveling the bathroom with a new ¾” ply subfloor and putting down ¼” Hardi backerboard for tile.  Here are some pictures;

 

Since half of the bathroom floor was rotted and the previous owner had rigged some “improvements” over the years, I needed to replace the toilet flange and drain- I am still amazed that the toilet didn’t fall through the floor over the last 3 weeks.  I actually enjoyed this task because it corrected decades of neglect in about 2 hours and resulted in a perfectly clean finish- here are some pictures;

I spent Thursday in the basement running new plumbing to the whole house.  All of the original plumbing was galvanized steel and there had been numerous patch jobs over the years that were causing leaks and miles of unnecessary supply lines.  I shut off the water at the street and switched over everything to CPVC which included relocating the laundry room with the addition of a stationary tub, installing shut off valves at every fixture (there were no shut offs when we bought the house) and the addition of a couple spigots to the outside for garden hoses.  While I have done some plumbing work in the past, I have never done an entire house changeover so this definitely tested my abilities.  I was also very happy that there were no leaks after turning on the water for the first time (knock on wood)!  As a sidenote, I realize that some real plumbers and old school contractors may look down on using CPVC however I love the stuff.  CPVC is 80% cheaper than copper, flexible enough to work in tight spaces, forgiving enough to allow for less than perfect measurements/angles, installs exponentially easier than sweating copper for the amateur plumber and, from the novice level of research I’ve done, performs better than copper especially in terms of freezing.   I don’t have many pictures of this work because it is pretty dark down there but I will post some whenever I get around to installing some lighting in the basement.

Here are the new rough supply lines coming up from the basement next to the old plumbing;

Here is the new connection with the old stuff removed;

Here are the rough supply lines coming up from the basement to the backside of the laundry room;

Here are the new plumbing connections on the backside of the new laundry room;

Here is a shot of the same plumbing inside the laundry room- notice the spigots for the washing washine at chest level and the lines for the eventual sink near the floor in the middle;

Friday was a slow day and I didn’t get much accomplished.  I spent the morning reorganizing and cleaning up in preparation for my dad’s visit on Saturday.  Since the temperature has been around 105 for the last week and will continue for another, I put in a couple window units to help keep at least the bedroom and living room cool.  The house has central air and it is in good shape however it was having trouble keeping the temperature below 80 especially with the back half of the house only covered in a layer of Tyvek.  I managed to prep the shower area for backboard and tub installation but spent the majority of the day doing laundry, picking up supplies, etc...

As I mentioned, my dad came into town on Saturday and will be helping me out for the next week.  His visit comes at a perfect time because we have moved into the house and the camper is still sitting unused in the driveway.  He made it into town around noon and we spent the rest of the afternoon installing the tub and the shower faucets.  Although it took longer than expected, we had everything up and running by 9:00pm.  Now that the tub was in and everything was connected, I wanted to take a shower in an actual shower however the tub surround was still just studs.  In a moment of brilliance/stupidity, I remembered the leftover Tyvek House Wrap that we had from the laundry demo 3 weeks ago.  In theory it seemed to make sense so I wrapped the shower walls in Tyvek and finished the night with a shower in a real bathroom!  Here are some pictures;

Our goal at the start of Sunday was to install the backerboard in the morning and have tile on the walls by the end of the day.  Again our work took longer than expected and we won’t be getting to the tile until Monday.  While we didn’t get our daily goals accomplished, we progressed on several other areas that needed attention including installing new drywall on the bathroom walls, running electric to the laundry room for the eventual washing machine/utility outlets and framing a drop ceiling above the shower to give the illusion of separation from the main part of the bathroom.  We also spent some valuable time picking out the main tile & accent tile and decided on the eventual layout/design of the floor & walls.  Here are some pictures at the end of the day- I realize that this doesn’t look like a lot of progress but tomorrows update should include pictures of tiled walls & floor;