Another bathroom remodel

I know what you are thinking. I thought they were done with remodeling their bathrooms. Well this one was for my mother-in-law. The vanity and top were all ready so all I had to do was demo the old stuff and install the cabinet, countertop, and faucet.


Here's the after picture.

To Do list

Since I'm staying at home till the New Year, I created a To Do list for things around the house. The first one was replacing all of the ugly brass in our house. The last remaining brass pieces were the door thresholds and sweeps. Here you can see the before. This one doesn't actually look too bad since it matches with the door but for consistency I replaced it.



Here's the after picture.



Here's an after picture of another door I did. I replaced a total of 4 doors. Each door took about 2 hrs to do. I usually could finish a door a day since Cole would nap twice for about an hour each time. By the last door I could finish in about an hour.



Another item on my to do list was to replace the Saab's worn out trim. The material they used in the trim didn't stand up to the desert sun.



Here you can see the installation of the new trim piece.



Here's the after shot. It looks so much better now.

Dishwasher repair man

Our dishwasher died just this past week. When I plugged the power cord in another outlet, it trip the breaker indicating a short. So I opened up the junction box where the power cord is attached and you can see that one of the wire nuts melted and then shorted to the metal panel causing a nice little scorch mark. When I googled the problem I actually ran across the same problem here. So I cut off the melted wire, reconnected the wires but this time soldered them together. Hopefully it won't generate as much heat now.

Plumbing leaks

Our water softener started leaking recently. Luckily we caught it before any damage was done to our house. You can see the new (blue) softener that I bought from Sears. This is just a rebranded GE softener.


Here you can see the point of failure on the old unit. It lasted 10 years which isn't too bad.


The softeners are essentially the same so I installed it using the existing plumbing. The new softener was a 1/4" too low but you can still get the connectors to fit. Or so I thought. It developed a very slow leak through one of the connections.


Here's the new connection that a plumber did. He removed the old fittings which I found out are threaded specifically for those water softeners. You can't use them on a standard thread. This would explain why I wasn't successful in hooking up the flex lines to the existing connectors. Luckily I was able to put the old bypass valve on so that we had running water until the plumber was able to fix it.

Mr Maytag

May was a very strange month where it seemed things were failing left and right.

Things that failed were

1. Water heater (I just replaced this 2 yrs ago)
2. Dishwasher (3 yrs old)
3. Car battery (2 months old)

Our water heater started having problems where the thermal protection would trip and shutoff the water heater. After a few days of continuously resetting this (not recommended) I figured out why it kept tripping. Basically the water heater wouldn't shut off at the preset temp and would keep heating up the water until it got too hot and tripped the thermal protection. After searching on the Internet how to troubleshoot a water heater, I determined that the lower thermostat was bad. Basically no matter what temperature I set it to, it was sending voltage to the heating element.


Here you can see the old thermostat and the heating element (in green) just below it.


Here's the new thermostat from Home Depot for $9. The water heater is under warranty but Sears only covers the parts. You have to pay for labor to fix it. They charge $70 just to come out to see what the problem is. Now granted $70 would have been a lot easier than me troubleshooting the problem and then buying the part and installing it but at least I know how to fix this if it were to go bad again.


Our dishwasher let out this awful loud noise one night and then I noticed the door wouldn't stay open. First thought in my mind was that the spring snapped.

Here you can see the dishwasher pulled out and the spring that is used to counterbalance the door.


Here's a closeup of what actually failed (the end of the rope that attaches to the door) and the replacement parts on the floor.


Here you can see the old design (left) and the new design (right) of the pulley. The old design had one pulley fixed which I guess caused additional wear and noise when you opened the door. The new design has both pulleys spinning now.


I just couldn't help but add some foam insulation to try and lower the noise from the dishwasher.

How many hrs does it take to change a nightlight?

Answer: 2 hrs to be exact.

What took so long was that there was no outlet on that wall so I had to wire a new outlet. That in itself shouldn't take more than an hour but there was some blocking in between the light switches (source for the power) and the outlet. I had to cut another hole in the closet so I could drill through the blocking and then fish the wire through that hole.

When we moved Lauren into her new room, there were no good spots for the nightlight and hence why I needed to add an outlet.

Here's the opening that I cut out for the outlet. One of my tricks for easy clean up is to tape a bag on the wall so all the drywall dust falls into the bag. That saves the vacuum from choking on drywall dust.



Here's the before picture with no outlet.

Car wash now open

The shower glass was finally installed just before July 4th. We ended up with 3/8" thick glass versus 1/2" thick since it's a little cheaper and not as heavy. This way there wouldn't be as much wear and tear on the door hinges. We also used pivot door hinges on the top and bottom by CRL instead of side mounted hinges so that all of the weight would be supported by the bottom hinge.




Here you can see the shower in action. We have 3 separate heads; 1 fixed (the heavenly shower head), 1 rain, and 1 handheld. All three have their own volume control and I removed all of the water restrictors since I can control the volume using the valve.

Almost done

Do it yourself closet systems

We looked at 3 different closet system companies. California Closets and two online companies, easyclosets.com and closetstogo.com. California closets was nice but pretty pricey. One thing California closets had going for them were these pull out hamper bags. We liked these a lot better than the tilt out hamper or even wire baskets. Easyclosets and closetstogo were both significantly cheaper than California closets but you have to install the system yourself. We ended up going with closetstogo.com primarily because they had a better mounting brackets for the side panels (more like California closets hardware) and the fact that you could also get the exact same hamper bags as Cal closets minus the Cal closet label.



Here we have three drawers plus a pull out hamper. Installation wasn't too difficult but it did take a while. Removing all of the pieces from the boxes took 3 hours by itself.


Here's the exact same drawer and hamper section plus our only long hanging section.


I think someone needs to go shoe shopping now....maybe I shouldn't have gotten so many shelves. By putting in a pocket door, we were able to utilize the wall space for shelves. Much better use of the space than before.

No bathroom is complete without a....

I finally installed the toilet. Overall it was pretty easy although the bolt that holds it to the floor kept coming out of the flange slot. Whenever I have to tighten something I usually tighten it too much. In plumbing I noticed you usually only tighten things just beyond hand tight. They'll say something like hand tighten and then 1/4 turn beyond. However for the toilet, they said, "tighten but not too tight so that you don't break the porcelain". Can you get any more vague? You want to make sure the toilet is secure but go too far and you break the toilet.


Here's the drain with the flange on it. On a side note, our A/C is finally working again in the house. We've spent the last two nights without any A/C. The temp in the house would get up to 87.

Tile, tile, and more tile

The tile is all up. With the exception of the glass mosaics in the shower (ran out of grout), all of the tile in the bathroom is done. Just need to let the grout dry for 4 days and then I can start sealing all the tile. The bathroom is probably a little more modern than what we had thought but oh well.

Let the tiling begin

After repairing some spots in the kerdi and cutting all of the 18" x 18" limestone tiles in half, the tile is all ready to go.

Orange wallpaper

The drawers are too close to the wall, so I had to cut the end off so that it will clear the door trim. Here's the wood after a table saw.


Here's my nicely sanded and rounded edges. Just need to stain them and put them back on.


Here's the drain and shower pan kit. The rails are presloped so you know exactly how to slope the concrete. Unfortunately the hole around the drain wasn't large enough so this kit is sitting on top of the concrete base. This means the shower pan is going to be an inch thicker than it should be. I didn't realize this until the tile guy had already poured most of the concrete.


Here's the orange wallpaper. This is actually a waterproofing membrane called Kerdi. It goes on with thinset and then the tile goes on top of it. The whole shower is covered in this including the ceiling. I just hope the kerdi on the ceiling has enough strength to hold the tile.

More storage please

Just as in hard drives, you can never have too much storage. Since our pantry is fairly small and our cabinets are filling up with baby food, we decided to add a pantry door storage system. The system we bought was from elfa which is pretty pricey compared to what you can find at BBB or LNTs. But it is pretty sturdy and fits on the door without any drilling. It also uses a single hanging rail down the middle which doesn't get in the way of the door knob. The first system we bought from BBB had two rails on each side which interfered with the knob. It wasn't as sturdy as the elfa either.

Nice top

Our quartz counters were finally installed. We just need to tile, paint, and then get the shower glass ordered.


Here's the top on the corner unit we have in the toilet room.


Before the tops went on, I finished wiring 3 outlets in each of the boxes and installing the 1/4 turn ball valves for the hot and cold pipes. In this box, I actually ran the dedicated circuit for the air tub into this cabinet so that the hairdryer won't trip anymore. As long as the tub isn't on, the hairdryer will be the only thing on the circuit. Previously the hairdryer would always trip the bathroom breaker especially in the summer.


Here I added in the two breakers on the right that are for the tub and the heater in the exhaust fan. There's normally a cover panel that hides all the wires. :)

2 steps forward, 1 step back

We have made some more progress but only to discover that some things need to be fixed. The framer installed this access panel so that we can change the air pump or electronics for the tub. The plumbers also finished the shower plumbing and setting the tub in concrete.


Here you can see all the rough plumbing and the insulation that I put around the pipes.


Here I relocated the pump closer to the access panel for easy services. I also mounted the electronics near the door as well as wired up an outlet for the pump and lights.


Here you can see the duct work and exhaust fan that I installed. The long duct is going to the shower where we have another exhaust fan. I'm so glad I don't have to breath in that insulation anymore.


After I finished installing the duct work, adding 2 more recessed lights, and moving the pump, the drywallers were ready to hang. Here you can see the cementboard (gray) and the drywall.



Here's the inside of the shower with the rough plumbing. If you look closely, you'll notice that the plumbing is not centered on the wall. It's off by like 1 inch to 1.5 inches depending on the item. The light in the ceiling is centered. We might have the plumbers come back and fix this. Unfortunately I didn't catch this before the drywallers hung the cementboard.


Here we installed one of our medicine cabinets so that we could check the height. It turns out that the opening is a tad too high for a certain someone so we are going to get the framer to lower the opening 3 inches and then I'm going to lower the light outlets 5 inches. Hopefully all this rework won't take too long.