Unfinished Projects

Allow me to introduce you to Tim the Toolman Taylor. You may remember him from the TV show Home Improvement. He also apparently was the previous owner of our home. We gradually have been fixing Tim Taylor's improvement of our home. Rumor has it that he was an electrical engineer, but somehow installed all GFCI plugs in our kitchen (which is a BAD thing), and didn't ground the wires probably. He did a shoddy job on tiling upstairs as evidenced by the 4 inches of grout behind the master bathroom toilet where tile should be.

Speaking of toilets...we hate all the toilets in our house. They all have issues with flushing, and so far two have leaked because the bolts connecting the tank to the bowl were corroding. Nicholas fixed one of the toilets with no problems. We decided to wait to fix the downstairs toilet, a little too long because it started leaking a whole lot. When Nicholas went to replace the bolts, he found that Tim Taylor had poured some kind of compound on the bolts when prevents you from unscrewing them (and incidentally, probably made them corrode faster). We bought a new toilet, which was on the list anyway. When Nicholas removed the old toilet, he found the wood laminate floor was ruined.

Nicholas went in search of matching floors to no avail. Not only did he have a hard time matching the color, he found nothing that matched the grooves. So our first major home improvement project became the downstairs bathroom, something I had not envisioned redoing! Did I mentioned this project started on Memorial Day weekend? 18 sq. feet of floor space.

It took us awhile to find tile that we liked because the options are pretty slim for 6x6 floor tiles. I also had a problem paying an exorbitant amount of money for tile, no matter how little we needed. Obviously home improvement projects take longer when you do them yourself, and there really isn't much space in the bathroom for more than one person. It took Nicholas 5 days to tile the bathroom in small chunks.

2 days--planning, studying, making sure everything would go right.

1 day--mortaring down all the uncut tiles

1 day--cutting tiles and mortaring down cut tiles

1 day--grouting

It sounds silly that it took so long, but once you mortar you have to wait about 24 hours before you step on the tile. We had exactly the right amount of tile, so Nicholas worked very hard to plan the pattern out perfectly so the cutting wouldn't waste any tiles.

After the tiling, he installed the baseboards and caulk where necessary. Then we puttied the nail holes and painted all the trim and both sides of the door.

We replaced the door handle.

Nicholas installed the toilet, twice, after he had to get extra wax and level it with plastic shims, but I won't elaborate further. :)

There is only one thing left before we have a fully functioning bathroom!

The pedestal sink. This is what it looks like right now. When Nicholas removed it, we praised the name of Tim Taylor yet again. See the two holes at the bottom of the white area before the paint? That is the proper way to secure a pedestal sink to the wall, but they were non-functional holes void of securing implements. Nicholas had to cut the grout at the bottom of the tile back splash because those tiles were grouted to the top of the sink. After he finished that, he tugged on the wall a little bit to see if the sink was attached any other way, and the entire wall bowed. That is because the sink was attached to the wall with some type of adhesive which resulted in the brown area of the picture where the drywall was torn away. Now, Nicholas is going to have to repair the drywall before he can re-install the sink. But one day (soon) I will have a fully-functioning downstairs bathroom, which would have been helpful during my first trimester.