Well It’s been a busy week. I don’t get a ton of time to work on the bathroom on weekdays between work, dinner and Baz’s bedtime. I usually get about an hour in each evening. This is why the plan all along has been for the bulk of the work to be completed during the week of Thanksgiving, since I’ll be off all week. That said, I have been able to get quite a bit done this week, so I feel like I’m positioning myself well to get this done.
After meeting with my plumber to discuss the potential work I want him to do, and a couple of days trying to decide what the new plan would look like, I firmed up a few details late last week and put in my order for all of the tiling materials. Not a lot changed there, just the additional floor space where the vanity was, which actually only covered about 6 Sq Ft. So I added another 8 or 9 mosaic sheets and another dozen or so pieces of Cove base. For the mortar, I ended up just keeping it simple (albeit more expensive), and I’m going to use the same stuff for the floor and walls. I decided on Mapei Ultraflex 2, which is a high end polymer infused mortar. It can be used on just about any type of underlayment and tile under 15 inches.
Update: I was getting ready to post this last night, was just trying to decide on mortar for the floor. I went up to take a peak under the floor register to see what the subfloor looked like, and I was shocked to find that the donkeys who laid the tile, just troweled some sort of adhesive right on top of the plywood subfloors, rather than a proper underlayment. This changes everything. There’s no chance of me cleanly removing this and shoring it up properly with the vanity in place. I most likely want to pull the tub too, in order to really get this crap out. In a perfect world, I can scrape this shit down to clean plywood, then continue my plan of laying thinset->1/4″ cement fiber board->thinset->tile. Worst case, I have to rip out the subfloor completely and redo it properly.
Continue reading “Guest Bathroom Remodel Part 2: Product Selection” →It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted anything on this blog, but I decided that it would be a good idea to document the progress of our first major remodel attempt. Not sure how many posts this will be, but I plan to break them up into pages with a specific set of info, so they don’t just ramble. So let’s start with the current state, and why I’m doing this.
Okay, I missed this last week. I would buy this just for the bottle. \m/
So I’ve used pingdom for years to monitor servers/services related to my hosting business www.serve-you.net. They offer a great service at a reasonable price, so I don’t have to setup my own monitoring hosts. They have tons of monitoring servers around the globe, which is a good way to not only monitor the up/down status, but also latency/page load times, etc.
The problem I often have though, is that monitoring servers are added/removed fairly often. I usually have pretty strict firewall rules on my servers, so allowing these servers is a must, since the activities that they perform is often seen as an attack. Pingdom publishes a list of active servers in the control panel, but keeping up with this and manually updating my firewall rules (I use CSF on my cPanel servers) can be a pain. Luckily Pingdom also has an RSS feed with the server list, though it’s in XML format of course. So I finally got around to setting up a script to automate updating the firewall rules daily with this list.
