Lego and Sawdust

We have an 8-month-old Poodle/Bichon/Shit Tzu puppy named Gracie, and she has shown that she isn’t old enough to be trusted alone in the house. Even with her 6-year-old surrogate mom Diva around, she gets into too much trouble.

Restraining her has meant getting a kennel or a crate, and in order to be large enough to be comfortable, they take up a lot of room. With a bit of research Jennifer found a person who made an end table that was also a kennel.

I used their idea, reworked the dimensions and proportions to fit our dog and our space, and spend a couple of weeks putting this together:

It’s made of project pine, assembled with pocket screws, and finished with semi-gloss clear polyurethane. We debated for quite a while about whether to paint it or stain it, but I made a few experiments and we never found anything that we liked. The pine and clean poly matches the dining room table which is just across the room.

Gracie likes it (or at least likes eating cookies in it):

and it seems to fit well:

While I’ve been doing tile, Jennifer has been sanding drywall, painting, fixing drywall bits that I damage, sanding again, painting again, fixing paint that I pulled off with tape or damaged with grout, sanding and painting again.

Drywall is done!

First the ceiling...

Looking awesome

Smooth as a baby's bottom.

We’re going with white, because it looks quite nice with the green tile:

Painting all finished.

We chose Zinsser Perma-White Mould and Mildew Proof Interior Paint as an added precaution. This bathroom had a mildew problem before we put the fan in. We haven’t had any issues since then, but for roughly the same price it’s worth it. It’s semi-gloss to make it easy to clean.

I bought trim for the door, caulk for the tub, sealer for the grout and masking tape to help with caulking at Home Depot today.

– $42.53 – Zinsser Perm-White Mould and Mildew Proof Interior Paint (4L)
– $10.39 – 2 large rolls of low-stick masking tape
– $21.76 – Door trim
– $16.77 – 3 tubes of Mono Ultra Silicone Caulk
– $34.71 – Grout Sealer (1 pint)
$126.16 – Total with taxes

Bathroom Renovation Main Page

Grout, Day 40 and 41 of the project.

I was pretty nervous (again) about the grout. I’ve read some disaster stories about poor grout jobs, and water leaks and ruined walls and all that sort of thing. But, once more into the breech.

I don’t have many action photos because I was concerned with getting the stuff up and not having it dry before I was done. There are always warnings about not letting the grout haze dry on the tiles, so I was determined not to let it happen.

The grout goes on much wetter and softer than the mortar did. If it’s properly wet enough, grouting isn’t so much about packing grout into each line as much as it is smearing the stuff around and wiping it off. I’m such a micromanager that things like this are hard for me to do. I want to finesse each single joint into place, when the best way to do it is just smear the stuff on in large swoops. I learned quickly, and I found that I really like grouting. It goes on easily, and then when you use the sponge, it forms itself into perfect little lines automatically.

After it has been applied and let to dry a few minutes is the time for finesse. I wiped the walls with the large wet sponge in big strokes, but I also traced out each line and removed lumps and filled in holes

Lesson: Keep a bit of leftover mortar stirred and soft while the stuff on the wall dries, and use your finger to blop some on to a spot that doesn’t look right and use the sponge to wipe it into shape again).

Remember last post, when I said that I was a little unimpressed with how my tile job turned out? Well:

GROUT IS “WOW! THIS TILE IS AWESOME!” IN POWDER FORM.

Every place that I thought the tile looked a little bad is gone. Grout evens out the bad spots, hides the tiny chipped corners, levels out the low spots and makes the whole world seem shiny and full of rainbows. Grout is my new favorite thing to do.

Before...

... and after!

I was so happy, I went and gathered the whole family to come look. I even put the tub fixtures in place so we could dream about what it will look like soon:

If you squint your eyes, you can see what it will look like finished...

On a practical note: one 10 pound bag of caulk (the smallest size they sell) was exactly enough for our tub. The tiles are 8 inches square and the grout lines are 1/8 of an inch wide. I had about a half cup of grout left over.

None.

Bathroom Renovation Main Page

Days 3 and 4 of Tiling, Days 32 and 33 of the project.

More tile cutting. I installed the bottom row of tiles, a few of which needed an 1/8 of an inch taken off the bottom, and the tiles around the faucet and shower head.

I was in such a rush to get to the tiles around the faucet that I forgot the plan. I started measuring with a full tile in the corner of the tub, marked out the location of the large hole and spent an hour carefully nipping out four tiles. They fit perfectly. Then I realized that we had planned the front wall of the shower to start with a full tile on the outer edge and a cut tile in the corner. Unfortunately there is no way to move the hole in a tile a few inches left. I had to garbage them and start again. Lesson learned. Have a plan, and check it constantly.

I did get the tiles up though:

Holes cut

Time for more cutting.

Cutting and more cutting

Lesson: There was more chipping happening, so I read a bit more and learned that this can be a sign that the water level is low and the blade is heating up. I used a plant watering can to top up the reservoir every few cuts. No more chipping.

Did I mention that using a wet tile saw is messy? That’s not a shadow, that’s the part of me that’s wet through because of the spray coming off the saw. The tile is red adobe underneath, so the water is tinged red-pink. That stain is never coming out…

It's nice to be damp when it's below freezing...

That afternoon I did a count and realized that I was going to be a few tiles short (thanks to a few mistakes and the crummy blade in the saw). I also ran out of mortar with about 15% of the job left. Rona bound! While I was there I managed to find the dehumidistat that we’d been looking for.

Tip: Install a dehumidistat. It automatically turns that bathroom fan on when it’s above the set humidity and turns it off when the humidity drops. Lots of people use timers, but you never know how long it’s going to take to dry out, and people often forget to turn the timer on. The dehumidistat is totally automatic. No brainer.

While I was at Rona, I saw a large sign informing me that the tile that was on the shelf was all that there was. Rona is changing tile suppliers, so the stock they have is all they will ever have. I decided to pick up a box of 40, rather than just a few more. This way I’m sure to be able to finish the tub and have a stack left over to put away. If we ever have to do any plumbing work I want to be able to patch the repair with the same tile.

I saved some tile, though, because I needed some thin slivers and I was able to cut one off of each edge of a single tile.

Two cuts per tile

The tile is now finished. Looking at it, I think I’d describe the job like this: It turned out worse than I’d hoped, but better than I’d feared. There are some minor variations in the plane of the tiles (some are in a smidge further than others) and at the corners a couple of lines don’t meet up by about 1/16 of an inch. I’ll reserve judgement until after the grout and caulking are done.

Two trips to Rona

$19.98 — Broan Humidistat
$39.99 — Bag of Mortar
$11.34 — 6 tiles (saw the sign, went home and discussed with Jennifer)
$75.60 — 40 tiles (came back to buy more)
$164.54 — Subtotal with Taxes

Bathroom Renovation Main Page

Tiling Day Two, Day 28 of the project.

With all of the full-sized tiles up, it was time to do some tile cutting.

I was pretty unimpressed with the chipped edges that this cheap tile saw generated, so I looked online to see if others had the same problem or if that was just how tile cuts. General consensus that some minor chipping is expected, but the edges of my tile were pretty bad. The solution seemed to be twofold: get a new blade (the ones that come with the saw stink) or get an expensive saw. Most amateurs seemed to be impressed with the improvement that a new blade gave, so I tried it. I was a little hesitant to buy a $50 blade for a $70 saw, but it was worth it. Night and day. The saw makes beautiful cuts with only minor chipping now. Totally worth the money.

Lesson: Replace the blade in your tile saw with a good one. Trust me.

Cutting from both ends to minimize breakage

Lesson: Toss the fence that comes with the saw. Most of the cuts you make won’t be perfectly straight, but at a small angle because the walls aren’t straight. The fence sucks, and setting it up to cut at an angle is an exercise in frustration. Freehand cut the tiles. The blade is an abrasive, so it’s like using a sander. Very little danger. Freehanding a tile cut feels like using a bandsaw. Keep it straight and you can correct mistakes and make angles and everything you need to do very easily.

My first few cuts were nice and straight and smooth, but I broke the last quarter inch off the tile. The blade vibration just snapped the tile at a crazy angle, ruining the tile. I tried pushing the tile with another tile, and with a piece of wood, so that the blade never left the material, but it didn’t work.

Lesson: Cut about an inch from one side, back the saw blade out and start the cut again from the other side of the tile so the two cuts meet in the middle. There is still a little bit of breakage, (see the below picture, the top edge of the tile has that little nub on it) but you can sand/file/cut this off (I used the tile saw to shave it down) and it’s perfect. At least this way the breakage is on the bad side of the cut, not the side you want.

Cutting tile, notice the little bit on the top cut edge that is easily removed.

Cut tiles often need support when you install them, because there are only tiles on 3 sides and it can slide or sag towards the empty side. I used electrical tape, because it’s stretchy. Pull off a long piece, stick it to the new tile, stretch it and attach it to the tile that’s already in place. Nice and solid.

Installing the cut tiles along the corner

Ran out of mortar one tile short...

And, of course, it’s that time of year in Winnipeg. This is the saw the next morning when I got up to continue work:

First snow. Nice.

I brought it inside to thaw, then brought it back outside to use, because it’s far too messy to use indoors.

$55.99 Bosch Diamond Saw Blade, with taxes

Bathroom Renovation Main Page

It’s actually Day 24 since the project began, but Halloween costumes and other life-type things interjected. For instance I was ready to start the tiling yesterday, but we had a dinner to go to in the afternoon and Jennifer and the kids were out shopping for last-minute Halloween costume parts so I was looking after the puppy. I also had a few last minute costume parts to work on myself. Such is the way of being a handyman and a dad.

The drywall is now (beautifully, thanks Jenn) done, and I nervously set out to begin the tile. The tub is just under a quarter inch off-level, so I decided to start the tile one row up and fill in the bottom row later (because some of them will need to be trimmed slightly). I made a ledger board out of a very straight piece of laminated pine that I had in the shop, and I cut half-circles out where the tile joints would be, so I could fit the plus-shaped tile spacers in. I screwed the ledger board to the wall using normal drywall screws, making sure it was perfectly level.

Ledger board attached

You can also see that I put a large dropcloth in the bottom of the tub, and then taped a shower curtain dropcloth to the wall. I don’t want to get mortar all over the tub, or to chip the tub if I drop a tile or a tool.

Mixing the mortar was a challenging start, because I had to figure out how to reduce the mix of “50 pounds of mortar powder to 1.5 gallons of water” to a more manageable size. I wanted to work in smaller pieces. I also didn’t want to have to weigh out the powder each time, I’d prefer a volume.

It turned into a nice coincidence that two empty soup cans full of mortar powder weigh exactly two and a half pounds. A bit of math helped me figure out that one and a quarter cups of water plus two cans of powder were the perfect mix. That amount is about enough for six or seven tiles. It fits nicely in an old honey bucket and is easily mixed by hand with a paint stirring stick.

Lesson: Spend the time to find an easy repeatable recipe for your mortar so you don’t have to weigh or calculate every time you want to use it.

I took a deep breath and started tiling. Things went just great. Exactly as planned. I have watched dozens of videos on Youtube, as well as read a number of articles and how-to’s on this, so it all seemed to come together nicely. It seemed to be a bit messier than the professionals in the video (I have little bits of mortar everywhere) but for the most part things are going great.

The size of the batch of mortar means I mix the mortar, wait ten minutes for it to slake (a chemical reaction that helps it harden), put up a half dozen or so tiles and then go wash off my tools and start again. My tools never build up dried mortar, I get a ten minute break to have a drink or consult with a child about a costume, and then I get back to work again. Perfect.

I worked for about 4 hours, with time in between to go to Walmart for some yellow tape for stripes on Wolverine’s jacket, spray paint some rubber boots white for Dr. Horrible, and a few other odds and ends. All in all I was pretty pleased. I have a half dozen tiles left to go and I’m finished the back wall.

Animated progress gif!

The day in seconds

Near the top there were a few tiles that wouldn’t sit properly. There was a very minor correction (a gap was a 64th of an inch too wide so the spacer was loose) and the tile would slide back out of place when I corrected it, so I used electrical tape to hold the tile in position until the mortar set. It’s fine now. I used electrical tape because I had some on hand. Masking tape would have done fine.

Almost halfway done

The almost finished wall at the end of the day:

The end of the day

(Those tiles at the top are all the same colour, it’s weird lighting and me holding the camera at a weird angle to get the whole wall in that causes some shadows, making a few tiles look darker.)

Next comes cutting the half tiles for either side, and then the end walls. Yay! I’m so happy. So far (knock wood, cross fingers) things are much easier than I expected.

None!

Bathroom Renovation Main Page

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…

1 trip to Home Depot

– $20.99 – Tile Nippers
– $79.99 – Tile Saw
$113.10 – Total with taxes

Bathroom Renovation Main Page

The last day before I went back to work. I finished the drywall installation, after making a few notes…

Messages to the future

I make a habit of leaving love notes to my wife and family inside and major construction that I do. I like to think someone in later years might see them and smile if they ever renovate again.

Finished the walls

Concrete board initial mortar coat

The world's most beautiful drywall contractor

Initial fill-the-screw-holes coats of mud are up, and now starts the process of taping the seams. I think I’m almost lucky to be going back to work…

None.

Bathroom Renovation Main Page

Well, that was better.

I added some shims to the wood blocking behind the faucet. It ended up being an extra piece of 1×4 behind the main faucet and an extra piece of 1×4 and a piece of quarter inch plywood behind the pipes. Sorry, no photo of the blocking (I was so happy I forgot) but here’s the newly-moved faucet. Note the difference between this picture and yesterday’s.

Where it should be.

I didn’t want any more surprises, so I tried putting the faceplate on and attaching the handle, with a piece of tile to judge the right thickness. It worked like a charm.

Test fit. Success!

Then I managed to get the rest of the Durock concrete board up around the tub. Note the six inches of space at the top. A tile will overlap the seam between the Durock and the drywall by about 4 inches so there will be a two inch (or so) bit of drywall showing at the top, that will be painted. This allows us to use just full tiles, no cutting partial tiles. Much simpler to lay out.

Concrete board, faucet and tub spout pipe

Space for drywall

Lesson: The tub box is designed to be used to cover the tub during construction. I didn’t find this out until a couple of days into the reno. I added two fence boards (they come conveniently five feet long) as a sort of scaffold from corner to corner. I can now stand comfortably on the tub to do the work without fear of damaging the tub finish if I drop anything.

Protect-o-tub

We stopped at Rona to pick up some more drywall to replace the stuff I ripped out yesterday, and to pick up a few other things. One of the important ones was Alkali Resistant fiberglass drywall tape. Apparently normal fiberglass drywall tape will get eaten by the alkali in mortar and cement board, so you need special tape to do the seams in cement board. The clerks at McDiarmid Lumber had never heard of it, and tried to sell me some special acrylic glue to spread on the board before I tape it to protect the tape, then some special chemicals to add to the mortar and then I just left. Rona had special Durock tape sitting right out with the normal drywall tape. Sometimes I wonder how McDiarmid stays in business. If it wasn’t a couple of minutes from my house (as opposed to 15 minutes to Home Depot and Rona) I’d never go there.

Lesson: This is a big one. GET A DRYWALL DIMPLER. A proper one. I think my “issues” with drywall are directly the result of having never heard of this. I used a normal screwdriver bit for a while, and had all sorts of trouble. I bought one of these:

The wrong kind.

It was no better. It wrecks the screw heads and wears out in a very short time. It still rips the paper much of the time. (Okay, *I* rip the paper, but I wow, hate these things). Today I was in Rona buying some more drywall and I saw a proper dimpler.

The right kind. BUY THIS.

It was $20, but it was the best $20 I have spent in a long time. I actually laughed with joy the first time I used it. You can drive a screw at full speed on the drill, and it goes “WHIRR CLICK” and pops off the screw and you have a perfectly set drywall screw with a nice circular divot around it. No worn screw head, no torn paper, no babying the screw for the last sixteenth of an inch. ZIP, WHIRR, CLICK and it’s done. I got the drywall around the bathtub up in minutes. I actually called Jennifer in to show her, I was so excited. It sounds kind of silly, and it might seem obvious to some who read this, but the difference is mind-blowing. I can’t imagine the amount of time I have wasted doing mediocre drywall work in the last few years because I simply hadn’t seen a $20 tool. Arg!

If you have any drywall to do, YOU MUST GET ONE OF THESE.

1 trip to Rona

– $20.99 – Dimpler
– $1.99 – Knife blades (cement board and drywall are hard on blades, buy extras)
– $3.96 – spare drywall bits for the dimpler
$30.18 with taxes
—————
$20 — Durock fiber seaming tape
$70 — 5 sheets of moisture resistant drywall

Total for today: 120.18

Bathroom Renovation Main Page

Some major setbacks today. I was pretty depressed by dinner time. There were a few successes, but I’ve got some extra work to do.

I started putting up more drywall this morning, and when I stood back and looked, I realized that it just wasn’t very good. I talked to Jennifer (who is going to be doing all the mudding) and she was of the same opinion. There were too many gaps near the corners, a couple of ugly butt joints and it simply wasn’t up to scratch.

We then sat back and planned drywall together. We’d never really worked out exactly what the plan was for tiles and where the cement board should end and normal drywall begin. I got out the tiles and a handful of spacers and laid out a few rows on the dining room table. This gave us specific measurements to use. We also learned that we should overlap a half a tile from the concrete board onto the regular drywall, which means that the transition between the two needs to be placed properly. Apparently the concrete board is difficult to get smooth enough to paint. We’re also going to have a small gap at the top of the wall between the tile and the ceiling, so I’ll have to have a strip of regular drywall at the top of the wall above the concrete board.

Lesson: Lay out a row of tile with your spacers and get real measurements for your tile install, and plan around that rather than trusting that your 8 inch tile is 8 inches exactly and your 1/4 inch spacers are exactly 1/4 inch. Small differences add up to measurable amounts over a number of tiles.

Lesson: Read up on drywall installation to make mudding easier. This book is brilliant and I read most of it just before dinner and it will help immensely.

So I pulled out all of the drywall I’ve installed so far, with the exception of the ceiling. I’ll have to head out and buy some more, but hopefully I’ll feel better about the end result. Drywall makes me feel useless. I regularly miss studs and have multiple empty holes all around some screws, no matter how well I try to measure. Sigh. Ah well, at least the plumbing is going fine.

I wanted to put the concrete board up first, so I can fit the drywall around it. The first board went up just fine. It’s nice that Durock comes in sheets that are exactly the length of a standard bathtub so there’s no cutting for the back wall. The second sheet was a bit more difficult, because there ended up being a lump of concrete on the back of the board that I didn’t notice until I was on the very last screw and it wouldn’t lay flat. I had to back the whole board off again and scrape the back smooth.

Small, but enough to ruin a smooth seam

Lesson: Check the concrete board for smoothness on the back before putting each sheet up.

I got the long wall of the tub done, the back wall, and then prepared to put up the front wall (where the controls are).

I measured and drilled a hole for the tub spout, and then placed it up in order to measure the location of the faucet. It was then that I noticed that the tub spout pipe was only sticking out a very small amount. Of course! I’d looked up the needed length and measured a pipe and soldered it on, but I’d forgotten that the measurement was from the FRONT of the FINISHED SURFACE. I just made the pipe that long, but it starts a good two inches behind the wall, so it was far too short. Luckily it only took a few minutes to sweat the short one off, cut a new longer pipe and put it on instead.

A smidge too short

Okay, problem solved. Back to the concrete board. I marked the location of the handle, took it outside and cut out the circle with a jigsaw. It fit perfectly. I decided to see what it looked like with the chrome face plate on. There is a plastic piece of trim that goes on under the chrome, and it says on it in big letters “IMPORTANT! THIS PIECE MUST BE FLUSH WITH FINISHED SURFACE”. And as I watched in slow motion, it pushed deep into the hole, past the concrete board. So, add the tile thickness and it means that the faucet fixture is plumbed in about 13/16 of an inch too far back. It will have to be moved. I mentioned earlier being a bit lost in the directions on exactly how far the fitting had to be from the surface. The diagram looked nothing like my faucet. I should have stopped right there and checked. Sigh.

Rats.

I was ready to give up at this point. After pulling out two days worth of drywall and fixing the tub spout, to find out I had to move the faucet that I was so proud of installing was heartbreaking.

I spent some time cleaning up and organizing tools and then had dinner and a glass of wine. Then I went back to the tub and removed all of the pipe straps that kept the faucet in place. With just the pipes supporting it, there is a lot of flex. I am confident that I will be able to simply add some shims behind the existing wood blocking and it will be fine. Disaster averted, but still more work to (re)do.

Tomorrow is Friday and I go back to work on Monday. So it looks like I might get to a “drywall done” point by then, but no further. Tile will have to be done evenings. Jennifer expressed that it was worrying her too, because she was sure that the mudding will take her a week to do and dry completely. The plan now is to get the drywall up and get the seams on the concrete board mudded so perhaps I can start tile while she is still mudding the regular drywall. Then it’s just a matter of painting, flooring and fixtures, all of which we’ve done multiple times before.

So close. SO CLOSE.

– My pride.
– A few days work.

Bathroom Renovation Main Page