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.
Where did my weekend go? It went by way too fast. Seriously.
Not much going on lately. I’ve been trying to cut back our budget (or lack thereof), because we spend money without any regard. I had a real shock when I setup an account on mint.com (which is a fantastic site!), and saw what our spending on food was over the past month. I’m not going to put it here, because I don’t like to talk about personal finances, but needless to say, it was a lot more than it should be. So we went grocery shopping, and have instituted a once a week dining out rule for the time being. My goal isn’t to cut out eating out, or eating things we love, so much as it is to budget doing so.
Started playing rock band a bit more lately (haven’t really been playing much the past few months), since I can never seem to play my real drums when I want to. It’s obviously not the same, but it can get close when playing on expert, and I get the same workout. I grabbed the demo of Guitar Hero: Metallica
the other day, and it’s pretty cool. I’m not that into the interface Guitar Hero uses, but there’s no denying the killer song set they have in that game, so I’ll probably pick it up when a good deal comes around.
While on the subject of Music, some awesome new releases lately:
Lamb Of God – Wrath: Love it! It’s no secret that LoG is one of my favorite bands. Metal at it’s finest. Unlike a lot of their hardcore fans though, I thought that the last album (Sacrament) was a killer album. I loved the obvious Pantera influence, and I’m not that big of a fan of the cookie monster vocals. That said, the new album is a return to the more aggressive style, and with it brings more growling. It’s not a bad thing, but IMO it doesn’t do the music justice.
Mastodon – Crack The Skye: Another killer album. I love these guys! Very prog oriented, technical band. Their lyrics are total cheese-dick fantasy stuff, but there’s no denying that their music is fantastic.
Static-X – Cult Of Static: What can I say, it sounds like every other Static-X album to an extent, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
From the not new (although they do have a new album coming in May), but new found love category: Isis. I’ve heard these guys a ton in the past, even seen them a few times opening for various bands, but I never really gave them a chance despite rave reviews from both friends, and music rags. Finally getting into them, and I have to say that I feel like a total tool for not giving them more of a chance before. Awesome layered, ambient, metal oriented music.
I’ve been using Dropbox (this is a referral link, as I get extra space, and so do you!) for a few months, and it is just pure awesome! The basic idea of it is, it’s 2GB of free disk space on a web server. Why would I need free web space since I run a web hosting company? I don’t, but Dropbox is much more than just free web space.
So I called comcast to cancel my cable internet service today, and the conversation went something like this:
comcast: Hi, how can I assist you today?
me: Hi, I’d like to cancel my internet service.
comcast: May I ask the reason?
me: I’m switching to FIOS.
comcast: Why do you want to do that?
me: Faster speeds.
comcast: You know, we have pretty fast speeds available too.
me: I’m pretty sure I have the fastest already.
comcast: What city are you in?
me: Ashburn
comcast: One moment…. Yes, I see you have 16/2. You do know that you are getting a discounted rate on this service? You pay $56/mo, normally it’s $62/mo.
me: All the more reason to switch.
comcast: So there’s nothing we can do to keep you?
me: No. I’ve already switched.
comcast: Okay. You just need to return your router within 5 days.
me: Thanks. Have a nice day.
So Verizon was scheduled for the final install from 1-6 on Friday 3/6. I got a call from the installer just before 1:00 on Friday saying he was on his way. He showed up about 10 minutes later, and I showed him where things were, and how I wanted the install done.
Well, miss utility showed up on Friday to paint lines. Saturday afternoon, I found a bunch of guys in my backyard digging. I went out to see what they were doing, and how they planned to get the fibre to my house. We have a 4 foot wide stone path that goes from the side of the house all the way to the garage, so the fibre has to get across it somehow. They found a drain pipe that connects from my gutter drain, that goes under the path to drain the water away from the house. They wanted to run the fibre in that. I told them no way, you need to tunnel under the path. They weren’t happy about it, but they gave it a shot.
They dug a whole about a foot deep on one side of the path, then trenched it out and took a 6 foot spike and hammered it under the path. I sat out there watching them pound away at the spike, wondering how they planned to get it back out once they made it through. After about 10 mins of work, and digging on the other side to find the end, they just pounded the thing right back out. I was pretty impressed.
They shoved the fibre cable through, and pulled it out the other end, then routed it up the thin trench they made through the yard back out the fence to the box. We are lucky enough to have the junction box directly behind our fence. They ran it up to the side of the house, and bundled it up and zipped it to another pipe for the installer to connect to the box he’ll install.
The cable itself is pretty heavy duty. It’s about half an inch wide, and it’s flat rather than rounded. The ends are capped off with a nice thick cap to cover the polished ends.
All told, they were done in less than an hour, and left very little trace that they had been there.
I have decided to do a series of posts about my pending Verizon Fios install for both my own tracking, and for others to use for reference. If you are interested, read more after the break. I’m cutting this to spare space for those who don’t care.