Is is now technically Day 20, but there has been only one activity going on in the bathroom: drywall.
Jennifer has been going crazy in there. She is mudding up a storm. I didn’t give her the easiest job, what with seams from concrete board to normal drywall, horizontal butt joints for the 6 inch piece of drywall across the top of the tub enclosure, and the rest of my mediocre drywall installation. She has been doing a great job though and she is almost finished. We’ve been taking our time to let the drywall mud dry properly, and she’s been going back to do more coats to make sure it’s perfect.
It has reached a point that if you close your eyes and run your hand down the wall you can’t feel where the seams are at all. She makes me look so good.
Above the bathtub (see the shower spout)
I broke a piece of drywall right beside the door so there ended up being a patch about 18 inches square right at eye level around the electrical socket. She’s done a brilliant job of making it blend right in.
Nice patch
The finished corner over the toilet
She says she has one day of final work to do and then I will get in to do the tiling. I’m still nervous, but I spent some time working out a plan (you can see the lines pencilled on the concrete board in the top photo). One end of the tub is just under a quarter inch lower than the other, just enough to make the tile lines look wonky if I put the tile flush to the tub. So, I’m going to lay the second row of tile first, sitting on a ledger board nailed perfectly level 8 inches up from the tub. After the tile is dry, I can fit the bottom row into place, doing any trimming I have to to get the small side in place.
I bought a pair of tile nippers for cutting the hole for the faucet, and I bought a carbide wet tile saw. The nippers are nice, but the tile saw is pretty cheapo. I tested it out on a couple of tiles to see if I could trim them to fit level on the bottom row, and it’s pretty cheesy. The fence isn’t square to the blade at all, so each cut requires me to clamp the fence in place after measuring the front and the back. The only thing I will need it for is trimming a few tiles in half and skimming the bottom off of a couple of tiles for that bottom row, so I’m not too concerned. The next level up of saw was at least a hundred dollars more than this one.
This is about the point at which we usually start to slack off and leave a project “mostly done”, but I am quite ready for a good shower in my own bathroom. I’m also quite ready to not have the only toilet in the house be in our bedroom…
Cost for this Post:
1 trip to Home Depot
– $20.99 – Tile Nippers
– $79.99 – Tile Saw
$113.10 – Total with taxes
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