DIY bathroom remodel: the toilet paper holder!

Now that the vanity is in, we got to install our toilet paper holder! Yes, a toilet paper holder seems like such a small detail, but I’m so excited to have one in! After we installed the toilet (and what a relief it was to have that in!), we set the toilet paper roll on the back of the toilet, so then every time we had to…you know, do our thing, we had to reach awkwardly behind and contort our bodies to grab the toilet paper.

So now things are (more) normal again! And we made sure to move it forward a bit from its old position, and up. The holder we purchased is just exactly the right color to match the vanity and not cause a visual disruption. I’m super happy with it! My hubby did a great job installing it, which seems like a very simple thing to do but he said it was actually quite difficult, because he had to make sure it had the right tension.

DIY bathroom remodel: the countertop

The only thing you can expect on a project like this is the unexpected! Way back when we were still in the planning phases for this project, we made sure to purchase a countertop four weeks in advance, since we knew it was going to take that long for it to arrive, and we wanted to get it in time for our nine-day break.

We ordered it from Lowe’s, because that was where we had ordered our vanity cabinet. Little did we know…! (Lowe’s is apparently not the place to go for these things.)

We worked with an extremely helpful guy named Ricardo, who should be promoted because he was awesome and extremely helpful and attentive through the whole process! We figured out all the measurements, and exactly what color we’d like. (Not too dark, it needs to lighten things up since everything else is dark; the colors in the quartz need to highlight the other colors we’re using in the room.)

10 days after making the order, Ricardo calls us and tells us that the manufacturer doesn’t have the color we asked for. (Why it took the manufacturer 10 days to realize this I don’t know.) We come back in, and choose a different—not completely ideal, but still beautiful—color. Ricardo tells us it’ll be finished four weeks from that day (hence, arriving in the middle of our nine-day break instead of before); no big worries, just a slight inconvenience.

Then Ricardo calls us and tells us the countertop has arrived a little early! Sweet! We borrow my sister’s truck and pick it up, noticing it has stickers on it saying “Southwest Airlines.” Interesting, it was shipped on an airplane from Georgia! (Random things you learn doing a bathroom project: quartz comes from Georgia!)
We bring it home, open up the box, and…there’s a giant crack down the middle.

We take it back to Lowe’s. Ricardo helps us re-order, and calls the manufacturer to tell them we’re not paying for the cracked one. When the new one has been re-ordered, he tells us it will be four weeks before the countertop arrives. We are now going to have it after our nine-day break ends. Ah well, such is life!

Then we get a call from Ricardo, during our nine-day break, saying the second countertop has arrived, but bad news, it is cracked again.

Bummer.

At this point, we decide to cancel our Lowe’s order and get our money back. And we start looking for a local place that already has stone in their possession, that won’t be shipped across the country.

We get a recommendation from the place we got our tile, and drive to a warehouse in Kirkland. The warehouse is hidden away behind other warehouses, and looks like every place I went to in Shanghai: unmarked, no signs telling you if you’re in the right place, looking a little bit like something out of a movie, where shoot-outs happen or large quantities of drugs are exchanged (or perhaps two hostages stuffed in trunks). My husband is backing the car into a parking space that’s very difficult to back into; I ask him why he’s backing in (he never does that). He says, “For a quick get-away.” He then insists that we sit there for a couple minutes and “stake the joint,” meaning we watch for signs of any suspicious activity. Then he tells me to “stay in the car” and goes to knock on the unmarked door. A very friendly woman pops her head out. We’ve come to the right place.

The woman, Ann, walks us around the warehouse and asks us to pick the piece of stone we’d like. The pieces are actually there! It’ll be a very quick process; as soon as our vanity is installed, a guy comes out and “templates” our vanity, then they cut it right there in the vanity, bring it to our home, and install it for us, including our sink. 

The total, including installation work, comes to $200 less than the Lowe’s countertop, which did not include installation. They’re faster, the piece is already local, and they’ll put it in for less?! Surprisingly, Ann is apologetic about the price, but I’m secretly thanking my lucky stars, and marvelling at how stupid we’ve been: we were planning to install the Lowe’s countertop ourselves! Suddenly it dawns on me, we have NO IDEA how to do that! I realize, all the fuss with the Lowe’s countertop ended up working to our advantage. We’re saved from installing it ourselves, we have professionals doing a template instead of relying on our measurements and guesses, and we get to see the piece of stone in person beforehand. 

The whole countertop sitch did put a delay in things—we won’t get the countertop in for a whole week after the vanity is in. But what’s a week at this point? We have lots of little things we can work on while we’re waiting.

DIY bathroom remodel: the boy helps install the vanity

The Boy decided to chew the paper on some exposed drywall, so we had to rip it off and now I have to mud it and sand it again.

Then while I was screwing in the drawer glides, he started rolling around in sawdust and got some on his head. Then he started playing soccer with a piece of drywall and was about to eat it when I chased him out of the room.

Then the little jerkball knocked over a drawer I was working on! When I set the drawer down again he decided to sit in it and wouldn’t get out when I told him to.

And then when the vanity was finally done and I went to take a picture, he ended up in the photo with his little tail sticking out of the shower curtain. That little rascal!

I gave him the customary punishment: I pick him up and shake him a little, then I do “Swing the Cat,” wherein I hold him under the armpits and swing him around a little and laugh at the stupid way his legs just dangle, and sing a little song that goes “Swing the cat, swing the cat, it’s time to swing the cat.” Then I give him a little noogie and strangle him and then I give him a little potch on the tuchus and send him on his way. 

It’s hard to stay mad at him after he lets me do all that stuff. 

DIY bathroom remodel: actually installing the vanity!

Someone at work asked me today, “No, but seriously, why isthis bathroom project taking you so long?”

How can I answer that question without boring them to tears with the details? Oh, the details! Whoever invented the phrase “The Devil is in the details” should get a cookie; I’ve never really identified with that phrase, but now it makes complete sense. Oy vey, the million and one tiny little problems and follow-ups that make a “simple one-day project” turn into a four-day mess! After the saga of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, on Monday we were finally ready to attach the vanity to the walls!

First we had to cut out a hole for where the sink pipes will go. We used a little battery-operated mini-SawzAll that my neighbor had loaned us. The battery runs out after about five minutes, so it was a race against time to get all four sides of our hole cut out—or else we’d have to use a hand-saw (ugh! hate the hand-saw!).

Then we knocked on our neighbors’ door to ask them if they could help us lift it. We were worried it was too heavy for us, and that we would either snap off the legs if we tried to do it ourselves, or that the pieces would come apart again like they had on Saturday.

Our neighbor was extremely kind to come help us lift it up, all of which took about five seconds. Then began the hard work: drilling all the pilot holes into the cleats, and driving screws in. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong, because the drill doesn’t really fit into the smaller drawer modules. What hubs had to do was put the drill bit really far into the drill (because it stuck out too far to get the drill inside the drawer), do a little bit of drilling, then when he had more room, pull the drill bit a little further out and finish the job. Repeat for the screws.

Oh, and did I mention the cleats are 2x4’s, so they’re extremely sturdy (good!) and difficult to drill/screw into? (Bad!) We were nigh on bed-time and we had only drilled the pilot holes. We were afraid to leave the whole thing sitting, un-secured to the wall, overnight, lest the modules should break apart again (we were very paranoid). So we sunk a couple screws in the back, then noticed the side was totally not even touching the side cleat anymore. The wall wasn’t plumb because our mudding was so thick in the corners. So even though the corner of the vanity was up against the cleat nicely, the face-frame end of things was jutting about a centimeter away from the cleat.

We decided to go ahead and just screw in the face-frame end of things and see what happens. Fortunately, the cabinet “sat down” and touched the cleat. However, in the back of my mind there’s a nagging little voice that says, “There’s a lot of pressure being applied in opposing directions here, and someday your vanity is going to snap into two pieces.”

I spend a lot of time these days gagging that little voice and shoving it into a  closet. 

DIY bathroom remodel: installing the vanity

The vanity! First things first, we realized we had installed too many pieces of wainscoting, so we delicately removed three pieces—as delicately as you can remove something that has 5 nails going into the wall.

Then we installed the cleats into which the vanity will be screwed. One along the top, one near the bottom, on both the back and side walls. 

Last Friday evening, we hurriedly ate dinner, went to get my sister’s truck, went home to get the vanity, and drove over to my dad’s house—and showed up an hour late. Sorry, dad! Then we inserted metal glides into our four stained vanity legs, using his fancy-schmancy drill press. Then we attached the vanity legs onto the vanity. This all took quite a bit of time, amazingly. I can’t really explain why or how these projects suck up so many hours, but they do. That’s the reality, and I’m slowly learning to accept it.

Then we all got tired and dumb because it was late at night. So we made plans to come back the next morning.

The next morning, my dad called to delay, because his water heater had gone out that morning! (Amazingly, he still set aside five hours that day to work with us, despite needing to do his own home project, installing the water heater. You’re the best, Pops.) We spent a few hours attaching the three vanity modules to each other. We put shims between the modules, and then screwed three screws in through each shim. We decided not to shim the back sides, figuring the whole thing would be secure enough without doing that step.

At 3:00, when hubby and I needed to leave to make a dentist appointment, and when my dad needed to get ready for house-guests to come over, we ended right on time. We went to lift the vanity into the truck, and—poof! The modules fell apart!

In my younger days (four weeks ago at the beginning of this project), I would have blown a gasket right about then. However, the older, wiser me simply went like this, in unison with my dad:

“Oh.”

Then, while my husband put his hands on his head and said, “That just happened,” my dad instantly went into problem-solving mode. This is how my dad problem-solves: “Okay! What you’re gonna do is, you’re gonna back those three screws out. Then, you’re gonna drive in three more screws going the opposite direction…then all you gotta do is sink the original three back in. So, you’ll have six screws, facing each other. No problem.”

My husband was still standing there with his hands on his head, asking, “Do we come back tomorrow to finish this?” My dad wasn’t available tomorrow. I could see my husband starting to despair, so I took charge. “Okay! What we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna back those screws out. Then we’re gonna put the three separate modules in the truck, and take them home. Then we’re gonna put the vanity back together in our own bathroom. No problem.” We didn’t need my dad’s fancy tools anymore, all we needed for the rest of the job were a drill and screwdriver.

Despite the setback, it solved one problem we hadn’t yet figured out: how would we have gotten the whole vanity back into our bathroom anyway? It was pretty heavy as three separate pieces; attached it was going to be too much for us to get down our stairs—at least by ourselves, and no one was around to help us.

On Sunday, we brought the three modules in, and slowly but surely re-attached them to each other. We also decided to add the shims we had originally planned to put in the back, to stabilize everything. We couldn’t over-do the stabilization after what had happened! We also decided to follow the directions that had come with the vanity (which we had previously thought we could ignore), that said to sink a screw in between each module through the face-frame. Dangerous if we aimed incorrectly (screws coming out the front!), but we were careful and we avoided mishaps.

Now how does all that take an entire day? Well, when the drawer modules are too small to fit your electric drill/screwdriver, that’s how. Hubs had to do a lot of hand-screwing, often at weird angles with drawer glides scraping his knuckles. We figured out, on average, we spent a half-hour per screw! Ridiculous.

But we got it all put together! After three days, we didn’t have much to show for our work, but we’re learning that’s the way it can go. Serenity now, Jerry! Serenity now! 

DIY bathroom remodel: mudding the drywall—again

Here’s the work I did while hubs was in class one evening: taping the mudding the drywall where we had to rip it out to move the electrical boxes up.

I’ve learned something about how to motivate myself on these projects—because when you get home from a long day at work, you don’t really feel excited to do yet another home project. What I do is the same thing I do when I’m psyching myself up for a sewing project: I imagine the finished product. When I imagined the wall, beautiful, smooth, painted, ready for light-switch trims, I found the strength to spend my evening working instead of watching TV (or blogging). 

DIY bathroom remodel: painting the niches

The niches are painted! We went back and forth on whether to paint them the same color as the walls, resulting in a camouflaged, more subtle look—or whether to paint them brown, resulting in a contrasting, bolder look. Hubby generally gives in when it comes to color choices, so we went with my brown look. It’s hard to say whether I totally like it, without the white trim that will complete the niches. I think they’re good. Not great, yet.