What’s Up Jack?

The bathroom remodel week 2, in the middle of the road where exhaustion, sore muscles and progress all meet.

We’ve racked our brains for years to think of someone skinny enough and dumb enough (I mean someone who loved us enough) to crawl around under the house and deal with the plumbing. This very old house has lots of abandoned pipes that gets in the way, to say nothing of the fact that the cold damp ground has very little clearance in places under the house.

Plumbing issues were our first big concern, as My Loving Spouse was not sure he’d be able to get around under there. With the floor gone, My Loving Spouse cuts out as many abandoned pipes as possible giving him more room to install the new pipes he needs to connect.

He spends a lot of time down there rerouting pipes and I spend a lot of time fetching what he needs.

The house has sagged so I drag in a cement pier, lumber and a jack to hoist the house back to level, (at least in this one spot.)

My Loving Spouse takes one for the team working on the drain/sewer/stinky line “up close and personal.”

I tackle removing the wall paper. My ‘intel’ tells me that I need hot water or steam. I give my steam iron a go, which works fairly well.

We screw the new floor down and one of us learns that a hot screw can really burn. (I have the Phillips head scar to prove it.)

With the plumbing ‘done’, we tackle the shower pan. Building the shower pan was our second biggest challenge. My Loving Spouse thought we ‘could’ build the cement shower pan ourselves….dreamer. We watched the YouTube instructions together while I mutter…”we can’t do that…”

We order a Tile Redi shower pan.

We also learn that My Loving Spouse will be returning to work 2 weeks earlier than we expected. Our time line gets a hard squeeze. (Reminder, this is ‘our’ bathroom, as in without it there are two old people running around in the middle of the night who need a ‘lou’.)

The Tile Redi pan arrives. It is weird. It feels odd and is very light. The bottom of the pan is ribbed for the mortar to go into.

We watch 4 different YouTube installation videos and read the instructions multiple times. We then cut the hole for the drain line…and let me tell you, we measure about 5 times before cutting. We cannot get this part wrong.

One of us mixes the mortar and one of us spreads the mortar. The one with bendable knees spreads the mortar using a trowel for the first time. I’d say that I’ve learned a lot watching DIY shows and my trowel work seems pretty darn good.

We drop the pan into place and jiggle it as the instructions indicate. Although we are still a tad nervous, it seems as if we’ve done ‘it’.

We are exhausted, but rejoicing as we’ve overcome our two biggest hurdles to this remodel.

We might be sore, we might be tired, but we are a great team and we are blessed.