Summer Projects

Owning a home is basically a life-time guarantee for having projects to work on for the rest of your life. And, if you ever get done with the projects at your house, don't worry--one of your kids will surely have a number of things they need done at their house. My dad falls into the second category, minus the no more projects left at his own place part. He's a pretty handy man, and we appreciate his knowledge and collection of power tools.

Here's what we decided to do when Dad came to visit. I don't have a proper "before" picture, but this is as close as you're going to get. Imagine the whole shower covered in the pink tiles, along with a sliding door that has about 20 years worth of crust in corners that never came completely clean. Notice the 1-inch tile on the floor, and the sad shape the grout is in. The whole thing needed to come out. Ripping a shower out is a piece of cake when you have a roto-hammer at your disposal. (And a couple of people hauling buckets full of broken tile bits down two flights of stairs and out to the truck waiting in the garage.)


There goes the floor! Actually, it was a little more involved than it looks. There was some chicken wire mesh in places that made it kind of hard to yank everything out. When we filled up the truck with all of the remains and took it to the dump, the truck weighed in with an extra 1,020 pounds. (Side note: Did you know that if you go to the Weber County Transfer station on a Tuesday, you might want to pack a lunch to tide you over while you wait for the train? Good grief!! The train tracks run right in front of the transfer station. We sat there and waited a good 30 minutes for the train to slowly go forward, stop, back up, go forward, stop, back up, etc. We had the truck unloaded in less time than we sat there pondering the meaning of life watching the train go back and forth.)

Once the shower was all gone, there was the question of what to do with the drain. The pipe in the floor and the hole in the base we bought were in two different places. No problem! All you have to do is cut out the floor, make a few new holes in the floor joists to make room for the new pipes, and fit the thing up so it fits.

Here's the base, fitted into place. I was at Lowes when it was going in, so I missed all of the excitement there.

Up go the walls, the dura-crete and bam! Shower. (The "bam" part took the good portion of a day and then some.)

Here's Mom cutting tile on the nifty tile-cutter Dad has. This is an industrial-grade hunk of equipment, and made life much easier.

After all tile tile went up (but before the residue from the grout got wiped off), we had our shower. So nice!

And, as if one bathroom wasn't enough, Dad was gracious enough to help us tackle bathroom #2. I don't have as many pictures of this part, because quite frankly, I was too tired to pick up the camera. This bathroom had a tub but no shower. (Deep question of the day: Why would you go to the trouble of building a house and putting in a tub, without adding the extra 5 feet of copper pipe to make it a shower as well?) Problem solved now. After we put in the plumbing for the shower, we tiled it all the way to the ceiling, like the other bathroom.

I don't have any pictures yet of the finished, polished product because the bathrooms aren't finished, polished and sparkly clean yet. Give me another week on that one. I also have to make a disclaimer here. You don't see any pictures of me in these shots, because I was the one behind the camera. I did work though, and wasn't just sitting off on the porch eating bon-bons during the process. It's actually probably a good thing that I'm not in any of the pictures, because I was a sight to behold!

Many thanks to Dad and Mom for spending their week with us. I think it actually should count as two weeks, because there were an awful lot of late nights. Lowes would like to thank us for spending lots of money on multiple occasions that week.