Do we really NEED a shower?

We decided that we did. I may not have mentioned it, but one thing this house lacked was a shower. Well, a shower that wasn't in the laundry room in the basement, anyway. The house has… 1.75 bathrooms? The full bathroom is located on the second floor by the bedrooms. It had a toilet, sink, and bathtub. The half bath is in the basement, with a toilet and sink. Also in the basement, located in the laundry room, is the “quarter” bath. It’s just a shower stall, nothing else.

While this laundry room shower was functional, it was pretty dirty. The prospect of journeying from the second floor bedroom to the basement shower, every day, wasn't very appealing either. Also, we were slightly worried about the terrible water pressure in the upstairs bathroom, so we decided to get the old galvanized steel pipes replaced at the same time that we had a shower put in.

I will admit that I spent a week or so planning and contemplating tackling this project myself, as I had really been enjoying these smaller projects. In the end, good sense prevailed, and I figured this was significantly out of my fairly feeble skill set. I started to ask around at work, and ended up finding that a co-worker’s husband happened to be a plumber! This was quite fortuitous, as he also had a friend who could do the framing. We got a quote, compared it to a few others, and set a date.

One of our dilemmas was dealing with the closet above the tub. As you can see in the pictures, it’s fairly large; we tried to think of scenarios in which we could keep it, but it just didn't make sense. Once the shower was in, the closet door wouldn't open all the way, you couldn't access the back of it, etc. We finally decided to just rip the door out, and frame the closet in. We compromised by building some shelving just outside where the closet used to be.

Anyway, on to the first step: replacing the galvanized steel pipes. I wanted to help as much as I could, so I did some of the demolition. I pried off a lot of tile, ripped the door and the door frame out of the wall, and removed the toilet. Once the plumber arrived, he ripped open the wall behind the toilet and sink. This proved to be extra difficult: at some point in the past, probably when the very galvanized steel pipes we were removing were put in, a previous owner had patched the wall with steel mesh and plastered over it. The plumber used a grinder to get through this, and ended up having to remove a bit more of the wall than we had planned on.

 We ran long PVC lines from the bathroom, down through the wall, and into the basement. I ended up learning a good lesson; it’s not always best to remove the old pipes. When they’re two stories tall, it’s ok to leave them in and use them to guide and fasten the new lines to. We got all the pipes replaced, and called in the contractor friend to frame up a shower.

The contractor brought his son, and the two of them framed in the closet, the shower, and patched up the wall we had ripped open to access the plumbing. Once the plumber came back and plumbed in the shower, the contractor and his son finished off the drywall, built in some shelves, and tiled everything. Leaving me with the grouting, which I was excited to do.


I recruited my friend Jeff to help me, and we picked up the needed supplies and started mixing up some grout. At first, it appeared to be pretty easy (and fun), but as it dried and we looked back on our work, we realized it was a bit more difficult than we thought. I hadn't yet learned to sponge away ALL excess grout; I was leaving on what I thought looked good, rather than keeping the 45 degree angle with the sponge and wiping up everything that it touched.

It turned out all right, however, and we put two coats of grout sealer on it. I then caulked the tub and the toilet (which had been put back into place), waited 24 hours, and we gave the shower its first test. Worked beautifully! The water pressure was great, the shelves looked good, and we finally had a shower in our upstairs bathroom. Now, if only we had a bathroom fan…

The Intricacies of Mud

I neglected to post this as my first project, although in truth, it was. I think I rejected it at first because it turned out so poorly, but I’ve since decided that it was part of the adventure of homeownership, for better or worse, and should be included.

Also, it does actually take place in the master bedroom, which I covered yesterday. The closet in that room was in pretty bad shape when we bought the house. The plaster on the ceiling and some of the walls was coming off in chunks, and hadn’t been repaired. This is important because it was truly the absolute first thing that I faced. Having no experience, the first thing that popped into my mind was Spackle.


I headed to Google, talked to some friends/co-workers, and chatted with a couple employees at the local Menards. Turns out that I really SHOULD be replacing the wall, or at least part of it; when the damage is this bad, it’s not recommended to patch plaster walls with drywall mud. But… I had no clue how to do that, so drywall mud it was.

I kind of assumed that the prep process would be similar to painting: I scraped away the larger pieces, sanded the rest, and wiped it all down. I then began to cake on the mud. It took quite a while; I found that the mud would frequently bubble as I ran the joint knife over it, or end up not really sitting how I wanted it. Eventually, I got it to look decent, and let it dry.

Unfortunately, I neglected to mud the smaller, less damaged areas. I figured I could sand and paint those, but was quickly proven wrong. After the mud dried, I sanded it down, and tried to sand the smaller areas down, as well. As you can see in the pictures, this clearly didn’t work. It’s still pretty visible through the sand texture paint.

One of the reoccurring lessons here is that the preparation stage is VERY important… oh well.



Never Buy a House with Wallpaper

Although we closed on October 12^th, 2012, since it was a private sale, we were lucky enough to have access to the house beforehand. This allowed us to get a jump on some of the smaller renovations we had planned.

First thing on our list? Remove the pink and white wallpaper in the master bedroom. My initial thought was that this would not be too difficult; the wallpaper didn't even cover the entire wall! Just from the chair-rail to the ceiling, no big deal.

I hopped on Google, did some research, and found that a large number of people seemed to have success with a wallpaper scoring tool, a spray bottle, some fabric softener, and a scraper. Unfortunately, we possessed only one item on that list, and that was the spray bottle. We made our first trip to Menards, and purchased everything but the scoring tool, as a friend happened to own one and let us borrow it.

I cannot accurately describe how poorly this worked. We mixed the correct parts of water and fabric softener, enthusiastically scored the target area, and let the concoction sit for the allotted amount of time. With the first pass of the scraper, I was unable to remove even one inch of material without gouging a small hole in the plaster wall. We rescored the area, applied another liberal coating with the spray bottle, and tried again.



After repeated attempts failed, it became apparent that the wallpaper, applied sometime in the 1970s, had started to part ways with the adhesive used to adhere it to the wall. We found that the actual pink and white wallpaper would come off fairly easily, however, the yellowed adhesive would remain firmly attached to the wall. After an hour or so, we had a 1’ x 1’ area of wallpaper removed, but about 90% of the adhesive remained. The thought of removing the wallpaper face and then sanding the adhesive into oblivion crossed my mind, but a short test run proved this to be an unbelievably poor choice.

You must remember that I had never even seen the inside of a wall before, so the concept of just tearing the plaster down and hanging drywall (which in hindsight, despite the mess, would have been much easier) never even entered my mind; but clearly our method was not working. We needed to try something else.

“Something else” turned out to be an Earlex SteamMaster wallpaper steamer. We rented this thing from Home Depot, lugged it upstairs, filled it up, and turned it on. The machine has a large tank in which the water is heated up, and then the steam travels down a hose to a large 10” x 10” plate with a handle. You press the plate against the wall, hold it there for 20 seconds, and release. The steam is trapped between the plate and the wall and, in theory, permeates into the wallpaper and the adhesive.

We were certainly excited at the prospects of this machine, and put it through a one-hour test; a time-trial similar to our first method. After an hour, we had managed to remove about double the wallpaper from our first attempt. This was only slightly better, until you consider the fact this is also allowed us to remove about 75% of the adhesive as well!

Covered in sweat, and out of ideas, we pressed on for ten hours, working late into the night. We started with me pressing the plate against the wall, and Rachel scraping once I removed it, moving about 10 inches at a time, switching roles occasionally. We found that some areas were much easier than others; some much more difficult. When we finally called it, we had managed to finish 90% of the bedroom. This was somewhat disheartening, as we had recently decided to keep the steamer an extra day to remove the bathroom wallpaper as well. Fortunately, the bathroom is obviously much smaller, and the wallpaper was relatively newer; probably applied in the late 80s or early 90s.

We finished the job the next night, after another long evening of work. The next day was spent spraying more water and fabric softener onto the remaining adhesive, and scraping it off, piece by piece.

After that… patching and sanding. Our bedroom seems to have collected about 20-30 nail, screw, and anchor holes over its 90+ year existence. We pulled them all out, patched them, and sanded them. I also sanded almost the entire wall to remove all the small scrapes and gouges from the wallpaper-removal process. Next, Rachel primed and painted the walls. All in all, it took about two weeks, mostly due to the fact that we were both working full-time jobs, and could only dedicate time on weekends and occasional evenings. We were very happy with the end result, but we both vowed to never even consider purchasing a house with wallpaper again.

Since this was our first project, and that declaration was made over 10 months ago, we've since decided to ease our no-wallpaper policy a bit. If our next home does end up containing some wallpaper, I will definitely rip those walls out. Never again.

A few more shots:

"It starts..." -Timon

On October 12th, 2012, my fiancé and I took one last look at our finances, spent about five minutes reassuring ourselves by talking up all the positive aspects of home ownership, cheerfully ignored an intimidating list of negatives, and closed on our first home.

*     *     *

Compared to most first-time homebuyers, our house-hunting experience was relatively short-lived; we looked at one house, had it inspected, made an offer, and closed. To be fair, the previous owner happened to be my fiancé's grandfather. He had passed away earlier in the year, and we purchased it from her family. Thus, we avoided a good deal of torture (or so people tell me) in bypassing the whole "find a house, make an offer, get rejected, repeat" cycle. On the other hand, as we chose to give ourselves only one option, we'd better love this place, and it better hold up.

Turns out that we do, and it has. Built in 1923, its two main levels comprise about 1600 square feet. It also includes a full basement with relatively high ceilings (7.5 feet from floor to joist, I believe), a great walk-up attic, and a detached garage. If you're an optimist, you could also say that it's been updated. Unfortunately, the last "update" was completed sometime around 1970.

Coming from a strong IT/computer background, I knew absolutely nothing about fixing, maintaining, or repairing houses. In this blog, I will record my (mis)adventures in home ownership; mostly to keep family and friends updated, but also for my fiancé and myself to look back on and remember, hopefully fondly. We're about 10 months in, and it's been quite an experience.

Enjoy!