Wednesday Project – Husband Father Son

Wednesday Project: Destruction

We’re on to another project. This time, we’re re-doing a bathroom connected to the room of one of our kids. The first post in the series gives a good overview of what we’re trying to accomplish.

The first part of this project involves some demolition work. As you can see in the picture below, there is a box structure built over the sink. Inside this box are two small fluorescent lights with a piece of translucent plastic that sits in in box to cover the lights. This setup was a custom feature when the home was built back in the early 1990s, but today it looks a bit dated and worn and, most importantly, it doesn’t produce the best kind of light for a bathroom.

With that in mind, we decided to remove the box its lights and replace this set up with a regular light fixture. That meant we had to remove the box.

I’m going to leave the lights in place until the wall paper is removed, then I’ll take them down, install a fixture box above the mirror, rewire the light and then repair the sheetrock.

As you can see, that one small box made quite a pile of debris!

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“Wednesday Project ” is a mostly weekly series of my adventures in home maintenance and repairs. You can read all of the posts in this series by clicking here.

Wednesday Project: Another One

It’s time for another home project. This time we go upstairs to refurbish a bathroom connected to one of the kid’s rooms.

As you can see in the pictures below, this bathroom has definite masculine feel to it. The previous owners used the bedroom as a home office for the man of the house and I suppose this bathroom was decorated originally with that in mind.

This room will receive the customary treatment. We’ll remove the wallpaper, re-finish and patch the walls as necessary, paint everything and change the hardware.

The biggest challenge in this room will the “box” over the sink. This custom made box houses two fluorescent lights and a piece of plastic is fitted inside the box to give the “light” a finished look. The problem with this setup is that this doesn’t provide good light for people using the sink. Therefore, the plan is to rip out the box, repair the sheetrock on the wall and ceiling and add a more conventional light.

The plan is also leave the cabinets, counter top and bathtub, but to add a shower door.

We hope to have this done by the end of the year so stay tuned…

Wednesday Project: Finished

Well, the long loop has been completed: our half-bath project is finished. Below, you can see a good portion of the finished project.
The final piece of this project was replacing the door knob and door hinges. This step is easy and exciting. In terms of ease, it’s probably the easiest part of the job and it’s exciting because it looks good and because it means the project is almost complete.

We are systematically updating our home, so as we go through each room, we try to replace all of the hardware. We chose “antique bronze” as our new motif, so that’s what each room gets. But even if you aren’t changing styles in your home, replacing the hardware is a fairly inexpensive way to spruce up your home.

So, that’s it and now we’re on to another room.

Wednesday Project: The Sink

The next step in our half-bath renovation was to finish up the sink. And to be specific, “finishing up the sink,” involved several things that weren’t necessarily fun and they weren’t necessarily easy. However, as you can see from the picture below, things did happen.This may be easier to follow in a step-by-step fashion:

First the old sink and pedestal were taken out so that we could remove the wallpaper and paint. After they were removed, though, we decided to replace the old off-white sink and pedestal with new white versions.
When the painting was finished, it was time to install the new stuff. However, I soon found out the copper tubing coming up through the floor would have to be moved to accommodate the new pedestal.
So I went below, cut the tubing, pulled it through the floor, and drilled new holes.
Re-connecting the copper tubing was a problem, but I’ll describe that problem below.
I waited a week or so as I thought about how to re-connect the copper tubing, and then finally went ahead and installed new antique brass faucet and drain into the new sink.
I then replaced all of the PVC pipe connecting the sink to the plumbing in the wall and then connected new half-inch flexible leads to the sink and then connected the leads to the copper tubing sticking up through the floor.
At this point, I made several more trips to Lowe’s and Home Depot to stare at the copper fittings and talk to the store employees to determine what to do.
After a while, I finally called a plumbing contractor friend to come fix the problem. He didn’t really want to come over for such a small job, so he described the parts I would need to buy to finish the job.
I bought those parts – two compression couplings for 3/8″ inch flexible copper tubing – and took them home and installed them. But they didn’t work. And by “didn’t work,” I mean that they leaked. Both of them. Hot and cold.
So I turned the water to the sink off again and took some more time to think.
After thinking on things a few more days, I returned to the store and bought two more fittings. And some plumber’s tape. Then I returned home, and after a few more days, I tried again. And again it didn’t work. And by didn’t work, I mean that the fittings leaked. Both of them. Hot and cold.
So I turned the water off again and took some more time to think.
Then I decided to call another plumber to come fix the leaks. The plumber came out and fixed everything in about 15 minutes. I gave him a check for $125 and left.
A day or so later, I realized he had left a good-sized roll of copper tubing. I called and left him a message telling him what he left and that he was welcome to come by and pick it up. He never called back. So I guess I have a new roll of copper tubing.

So, the sink is installed and the plumbing is connected and everything works great.

Wednesday Project: Electrical Stuff

Well, we’re getting very close to the finish line of our project, renovating our half bath. We’ve scraped wall paper, re-surfaced walls to get them ready for painting, painted, installed a toilet and now we’re ready to talk about some electrical issues.

Whenever Sweet Wife and I renovate a room – and we’ve done a lot of rooms throughout several houses – one of the things we always do is replace the plugs and switches in the room and replace their covers.

We do this for a couple of reasons. First, there’s a good chance the existing plugs are old, dirty and perhaps even speckled with paint from a recent paint job. Plugs and switches are also fairly inexpensive and easy to find. Together, these are two good reasons to spend an hour or so (for the average room) and replace your plugs and switches.

When you’re finished, you’ll find that this makes the perfect finishing touch to all of the other hard work you’ve done. Usually, new hardware and covers will provide a sharp, clean contrast to the new paint on your ceiling, walls and trim.

In our half bath, there were only three devices to replace: one GFI plug and two switches (one for the overhead light and one for the fan). You can see these below.

GFI is short for “ground fault circuit interrupter.” In layman’s terms, this device is a type of circuit breaker placed closer to areas with greater shock risks. To get even more layman, you’ll see these types of plugs in areas of your home, such as bathrooms, where there is an electrical outlet close to water. The idea is that if you drop your hair dryer, which is plugged into a GFI outlet, into a sink full of water, the GFI plug will trip and you’ll be spared death by electrocution.

So, since this plug is very near our pedestal sink, there is a GFI plug nearby. (In fact, in our home, this GFI circuit also includes the plugs from our master bath, which is close by.) This type plug isn’t quite as cheap as a normal one and will set you back $10 or so, but that’s cheaper than burial expenses.

These plugs aren’t hard to install, but I’m not going to tell you how to do it because I don’t want your estate to sue me after you electrocute yourself. Instead, here’s a handy how-to link.

The last part of the electrical work involves replacing two switches. Again, I’m not going to tell you how to do this. Instead, I’ll let this guy from The Home Depot tell you.

I do want to point out one thing, though. Take a look at the picture below and note the pink box.

What you see inside the pink box is a section of wire with the insulation cut off. This happened when the drywall (sheetrock) in our home was being installed way back in the early 1990s.

Typically, when a home is being built, the electrical boxes for switches and plugs will be installed when the walls are bare (i.e. the drywall hasn’t been hung). Then the electrical wires will be pulled through the house to the electrical outlets, switches, lights, etc. After the wire has been pulled, it will be rolled up and stuffed into the electrical boxes and then the drywall will be hung through out the house.

In the old days – like before the early 1990s I suppose, the drywall workers would actually take the time to cut the drywall to fit around these electrical boxes. However, some genius figured out this took too long and so the drywall folks just started slapping the drywall on the walls directly over the boxes. Afterwards, they would go through the house with a saw and cut openings in the drywall for the boxes. Unfortunately, though, when done this way, the electrical wires often get cut through.

Is this a fire hazard? Technically, yes. You never want exposed wires with electrical current running through them. That’s pretty obvious. Practically, though, I suppose in our case this wasn’t a huge risk because these wires have been exposed since 1991 and the house didn’t burn down.

So another benefit of replacing the plugs and switches is that I can put a few rounds of electrical tape around these bare spots and hopefully reduce any remaining risk. At least I hope so.

Wednesday Project: The Toilet

The renovation of our roomy five by five half bath continues. So far, we’ve scraped wallpaper, re-surfaced the walls and repainted the room. That brings us all the way back to re-installing the toilet and the sink.

Originally, our plan was to keep the original pedestal sink and toilet. They were both in nice condition and we were especially concerned about replacing the older toilet with a new model. The newer models are engineered to be a little more efficient – i.e. they are supposed to use less water, and that can translate into less flushing power.

But two things changed our mind. First, we needed to remove both the toilet and the pedestal sink as we scraped wallpaper and re-surfaced the walls. Second, both of these were beige and we figured out that color would clash with the new wall and trim color. So, we bit the bullet and purchased a new toilet, pedestal sink and faucet. (We were able to re-use the toilet in an upstairs bathroom to replace a unit that was worn out and we may save the pedestal sink to possibly use in the future.)

So, when the painting was all finished, we decided to put the toilet in first. Although fooling with toilets is nasty business in general, it’s a fairly easy job to install one. Here’ are the general steps (assuming the original toilet is gone and the new toilet is assembled):

Place the two toilet bolts into the toilet flange.
Place the toilet seal ring on the bottom of the toilet.
Pick up the toilet and place it down over the flange and make sure the bolts go through the holes on each side of the toilet.
Press down on the toilet to make sure the ring flattened and sealed properly.
Put the washers and nuts on the toilet bolts and tighten (but not too much).
Connect the water to the toilet (again, don’t over tighten).
Turn on the water.

Voila! Your toilet should be in business.

Generally, if you are going to have problems, you’ll know it right away. Usually, those problems will have to do with your water connection. If you’ve sealed the toilet properly and have not overtightened the bolts, you usually won’t have problems with water moving out of the toilet. Always keep a bucket and some towels handy to clean things up quickly if you do happen to spring a leak.

Our new model looks like this:

As you can see, this model is more long than it is wide and this seems to help the toilet to have a good solid feel to it. Also, the tank doesn’t shake or have much play in it.

Wednesday Project: Painting

Last week, we spent some time talking about “preparing our walls.” The idea behind this was to get our walls ready – in this half bath – to be painted.

No matter what you are painting that job will look no better than the quality of your wall surface under the paint. If your walls are bumpy and pock marked under the paint, then the finished product will look bumpy and pock marked. In our case, we made a valiant effort to prepare the walls, so we’re as ready as we’ll ever be to apply some paint.

Let’s take this step by step…

Oops – More Primer

I left off one final step in wall preparation last week, but it’s mostly all right because that step fits in nicely here. What is that step? After you’ve finished skim-coating your walls, you’ll need to apply one more coat of primer to the walls. This will help “seal” the freshly applied and sanded sheetrock compound and will help your regular paint to be applied more efficiently (as in the paint won’t soak into the wall quite as much).

Tape the Edges

Some do and some don’t, but I do. Tape the trim edges, that is. I’ve done it both ways – and there are plusses and minuses to both, but I just do a better job with tape. So I taped everything.

Paint

Once the edges are taped, I apply the paint. I use a nine inch roller and pan to apply the paint and then use a brush to paint the edges.

Some folks are able to finish their wall with one coat, but in all my two plus decades of painting, I’ve never been able to make walls look good with just one coat. So I use two and that works almost every time.

Once I’ve applied two coats to the walls, I remove the tape and then tape the edges of the painted wall so that I can paint the trim. The same logic for taping applies here. I usually apply two coats of paint to the trim as well.

After the trim is painted, the tape can be removed and…voila! Below you can see the beautiful grayish color that contrasts nicely with the sharp trim.

Wednesday Project: Preparing the Walls

Well, we made it. This our weekly post updating our progress on a project to renovate a small, half-bathroom in our house. The room is about five feet long by five feet wide and simply houses (or used to house) a toilet and a pedestal sink. In a nutshell, the project involves removing some wallpaper, painting everything and updating a few fixtures. Sounds easy, right? We’ll see about that, I guess.

Last week, we discussed the process of removing wallpaper. There are various ways to do this, but we chose what I think is the easiest method: using an electric steamer. Some folks will spray a solution on the walls and then scrape (and spray and scrape and spray an scrape), but I think the steamer method makes the labor of steaming a lot easier, and I’m for easy wherever I can get it.

But no matter which method you use, what you are really trying to do is prepare your walls for painting. In the end, you want your walls to be glass smooth, but that won’t happen unless the surface you are painting is glass smooth. To do that, you have to prepare your walls. Ultimately, that’s what you are trying to do when you scrape off wallpaper. You’re just getting back to the starting line for a painting project.

So, at this point, we’ve scraped off all of the wallpaper. What’s next? Well, here’s what we did.

1) Clean your walls

You’ve scraped off the paper (and the backing and the glue), but no matter how well you scrape, there will still be a glue residue on the walls. If you leave that residue, there’s a good chance it will seep through your paint job and eventually may look like resin is dripping down your walls. Some people like that, but most don’t.

I mixed up a solution of trisodium phosphate (TSP) and washed the walls with it. This probably doesn’t do anything, but at least you’ll feel like you at least did something.

2) Prime your walls

Since I was serious about preventing any glue residue from seeping through, I painted the walls with an oil-based primer beefed up with stain blocker. As you can see from the picture below, this primer advertised itself to be odorless, but it really isn’t. You won’t really smell the fumes when you open the can, but spend 30 minutes in a small, enclosed room and you’ll feel the burn.

Priming your walls doesn’t just cover glue residue, though. It also primes your walls. But in this case, it’s priming your walls to receive the sheetrock joint compound as described below. You want the mud to adhere to your wall and the primer helps create this condition.

Once you’ve primed your walls, you’ll need to wait at least an hour before proceeding to the next step.

3) Skim coat your walls

Once the primer is on, you’re ready to get real; you’re ready to spread on some sheetrock mud. In this process, you are actually applying the product that will serve to re-surface your walls. Depending on the condition of your walls, this process will either go fairly smoothly (no pun intended) or be a complete nightmare. In my case, the process was closer to smooth, but it wasn’t at all easy.

I bought the bucket of mud pictured below at a local home improvement store. It cost about $13. You can buy mud that will dry quicker, and if you’re in a crazy hurry you’ll probably have to do that, but if not, it’s not worth the trouble. The price isn’t all that different and you’ll have to mix up the compound – and then you’ll be on the clock to apply the product before it dries. Based on past experience, I decided to go with the pre-mixed compound and just wait for the normal drying period.

I also tape off the room as if I was painting. This keeps a lot of sheetrock mud from caking on your trim.

You apply the product to the walls using your typical drywall equipment. You’ll need to assess the scope of your project and make sure you have the right sized application tools. If you have a large job, or a job with walls in really bad shape, you may want to mix water with the compound until it resembles cake batter and apply with a paint roller. My job wasn’t that big and the walls weren’t in horrible shape, so I apply with a six-inch or so sized drywall trowel.

4) Sand

Once the drywall compound dried, the walls will look similar to the picture below. As you can, see you’ll need to sand. Sanding is sort of an understatement, though, because at this point of the project, you’ll wish you had the left the wallpaper well enough alone.

Sanding your walls will create a monster of a mess and will, ultimately, test your will to live. Well, maybe that’s an overstatement, but not by much.

You’ll want to definitely make sure your project is properly enclosed, but at the same time you’ll want to make sure you have enough oxygen to breathe. My project is very small, but it’s also very close to our den and a bedroom and I wanted to make sure those rooms weren’t coated in sheetrock dust. However, the dusty inferno I created inside the room while sanding made me feel like I was dying. Again, that’s sort of an overstatement, but not by much.

Before you sand, make sure you protect anything nearby that you don’t want covered with dust, wear eye protection and consider wearing a bandana or something similar to keep dust out of your hair. If you use a power sander, you’ll also want to wear ear protection. Regardless of the size of your project, you’ll also want to make sure you take plenty of breaks so that you don’t kill yourself.

On your first pass of sanding, your not trying for the perfect finish. Knock off the rough spots and do as good as you can, but your not finished sanding – not by a long shot.

5) Repeat

You’ll repeat steps #3 and #4 as many times as necessary until you either die or give up and accept that your walls won’t be perfect. And that’s not much of an understatement.

How good or bad your walls looked after removing the wallpaper will generally determine how many times you repeat the process. In my case, the walls didn’t look too bad, so I only had one major skim coating and sanding cycle. After sanding the first time, I only re-coated and sanded selected patches. I repeated this until the walls were in good enough shape to paint.

Final thoughts

I really, really, really didn’t like this part of the project. I wasn’t necessarily hard work, but the cage of death I created while sanding inside the small room was not fun at all. And it’s not something I hope to do again soon (although there’s one more room left in the house with wallpaper). However, this is the most important step of this project. The finished walls won’t look any better than how you prepare the surface. My advice is to slow down and take the time you need to get the walls right. You’ll be glad you did.

Wednesday Project: Wallpaper Off

In last week’s installment, we discussed the particulars of removing wallpaper. Well, the wallpaper is finally gone and below you can see the before and after shots.

All in all, the wallpaper part of the project wasn’t bad. It was hot, messy and fairly labor-intensive work, but the overall small space and the use of the power steamer made this project easy to get done.

As you can see above, I removed the toilet and sink. Though I loathe plumbing, I did this for a couple of reasons. First, there was wallpaper behind each and removing them was the easiest way to remove all of the paper. Second, I’m planning to replace the faucet and taking the sink down actually makes working on the pedestal part of the sink easier.

Though the wallpaper down, it’s not yet time to stop and celebrate. Really, the work is just beginning. In fact, how we do with the next step – prepping the walls for painting – will go a long way in determining just how successful our project is. Lord willing, we’ll discuss that next time.

Wednesday Project: Scrapin’ Wallpaper

The half bath renovation project mentioned last week is now officially underway. This project isn’t very complicated and the room involved isn’t very big. We’re simply removing wallpaper, repainting and updating some hardware in a room that’s about five feet wide by five feet long.

The first major step in this project is to remove the faux marble maroon wallpaper that has hung around since 1991. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: any project involving wallpaper is a horrible one. Wallpaper might sound like a good idea if someone else has to hang it or if you never change your mind and want to re-decorate. But unless you only plan to live in your wallpapered house a very short time, that’s highly unlikely to happen.

But though it’s a horrible project, it’s also one that most folks can do on their own. And if you do choose to do it, I highly recommend the Wagner Power Steamer pictured below. This marvelous piece of machinery was purchased at Lowe’s for less than $100. Sure, you could use something to score the walls and then soak them with a liquid solution and then scrape and repeat – we’ve done that too, but that makes the job a lot messier and a lot more labor intensive. With the steamer, one hand can hold the steamer over an area for a few seconds while the other hand pulls off paper. It’s not completely without labor or without a mess – again, this is a horrible home project, but it beats any other method by a mile.

The picture below gives you an idea of my setup. However, this picture was taken before I actually started working and I did make several adjustments. One, the cord on the steamer is long enough so that the base can actually sit on the floor (it’s much more stable that way). We have nine feet ceilings and the hose was plenty long. I’d also recommend rolling up some old towels long ways and laying them at the base of the wall. There will be a lot of moisture that works its way down the wall and it’ll pool up in your floor unless something absorbent is close by. I then recommend putting a sheet of plastic down over the entire floor area. This also helps keep water off of your floor. Finally, I also laid down some heavy duty paper over the plastic. After you are finished, you can wad up the plastic and paper and throw the bundle away, or you can throw the paper away and re-use your plastic.

Below you can see how my project looked after about 30 minutes of work. If you look closely, you can see a couple of different key things. First, you can see that the maroon layer is being stripped away. This is fairly obvious, but keep in mind this isn’t the only layer you are removing. If you look a little closer your can see a darker shade of white. This is the backing of the wall paper. It comes off a lot easier than the outer layer, but it still needs to come off. You’ll also see the whiter shade in the center. To get to this layer, you remove the outer layer and the backing, but you also will need to remove as much glue as you can. If you haven’t removed the glue, when the wall dries you’ll be able to see the patches of it you missed.

If you start your own wallpaper removal project, keep a few things in mind:

It usually takes about 15 minutes for the steamer to warm up and be ready.
The steamer produces steam that comes out of the end of the hose and it comes out extremely hot. Obviously, you’ll want to keep your face and other key body parts away from the steam.
The steamer produces steam that comes out of the end of the hose and it comes out extremely hot. If you are in a very small room – like me – you’ll basically make your own sauna…and staying in a sauna for hours at a time isn’t always healthy, so make sure you don’t over do it.
If you’re working in a normal type room, you’ll be working off of a ladder so don’t do anything stupid on the ladder.
For at least half of the room you’ll probably be working with your arms above your head and it won’t take long to wear yourself out.
Finally, if you leave the steamer on the wall for too long, the steam will not only remove your wallpaper, it will also damage your wall. Only leave the steamer on the wall for a few seconds and then move it to another location on the wall.