Bombing the Bathroom

It's been a long week and as you can tell I've been pretty busy. The bathroom has been the focus this week since it's really all that is left in the major construction picture.

So, after cleaning up the mess from the weekend Monday and Tuesday, I dug into the bathroom on Wednesday night. I quickly found that Travis's work over the holidays eased the process since most of what was left was plaster on lath and some tile on tileboard.

The shower wall proved to be the most difficult as the tile was on a greenboard and cementboard in some places.

Friday night I finished up the demo and Saturday was spent bagging what was left up and working on electrical and insulation. Sunday was more electrical which resulted in two trips to Home Depot which took forever compliments of slow work on the A train.

I woke up early today to tidy things up and get ready for Roy to help me hand the ceiling drywall. It took us 2 hours to cut the drywall and hang it with the main challenge being working in such a small space with one person on a ladder in the bath tub, another on a sawhorse and attempting to vault it up around corners and over the steam pipe.

After a bit of struggling, we got it all into place and it feels good to have gone from demo to insulated, re-wired with a ceiling in less then a week.

Still, there is a lot of work to do so I can get a sink back and not have to take baths (I've never taken so many baths in my life as I have this week!). It looks like the plumbing for the bath tub will need to be replaced and the subfloor has holes and oddities around the edges.



I have a few contractors coming this week to look at these elements and give their opinion.

In the meantime, I'll haul the bombed out debris to the curb each night this week and shop for tiles.

"Trucking" Ahead

I can't believe how fast the past few weeks have gone by. A lot of work has been done with help from many hands, and trucks. I've been in the local ZipCar Toyota Tacoma all too much in the past 4 weeks. I think that I may be the only person renting it as the mirrors and seat position always seem adjusted perfect for me.

Yet, while the price of gas has gone down the cost to rent the ZipCar hasn't, nor has drywall and other construction materials. Yet, just about everything I need to finish the major construction is in the apartment now.

The plumbing was even finished on the 16th. The sink was successfully moved over 2.5' I know, it was probably dumb for me to pay that much to move the sink over but I really feel it is going to make a world of difference.


Although the plumbing is in, my permits haven't cleared yet compliments of someone else in my building who has a violation for construction without a permit...grrrr.

The lesson of the week has been to relate the finishes to the placement of the infrastructure. In my hurry to get the electrical done on the last visit from the Michigan crew I forgot about the mounting height of the outlet boxes in relation to the picture frame molding. Long story short, I ended up moving every electrical box down a few inches...which proved to be difficult for some.

Despite my earlier lack of attention to detail, everything else has been moving forward. The last of the drywall was hauled up on Wednesday night last week and I began to hang it last weekend. More was tackled this weekend and I'm really happy with how the room has been shaping up. I spent a fair amount of time last week running all the power and light switches to the island position.

Today was a bit frustrating as I tackled re-doing the 2x4 framing for the kitchen wall. The pipe re-routing threw a bit of a kink into the original location for 2x4's, but I think I worked out a decent solution. My internal interior designer started thinking about whether or not to extend the wall to the door or stop it at the drain pipe. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to extend it to the door but I'll sleep on it tonight.

Finally, I wired up everything for the kitchen - 2 counter outlets, 1 dishwasher whip (loose wires), 1 stove outlet and one whip for a range hood.

All this took much more time then expected so my ambitions to finish the ceiling were kill joyed.

Yet, I have started a bit of mudding and plan to do more this week in preparation for Dad and Co. arrival on Friday. The ideal plan would be to have everything mudded before they get here so we can sand, prime, install wood floor and demo the bathroom walls/floor.

More to come this week.

*ZAP!*

After the dumpster day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday were dedicated to electrical work. Dad flew in with Uncle Steve and a with a surprise guest, Dr. Bob Armstrong who also had electrical knowledge. I attempted to clean what I hadn't the night before and get things ready to go. I jetted out in a Zip Car at 11:30 to pick up the gang...and yes, the dumpster was already gone.

After doing some damage @ Home Depot we grabbed some food and dug in. We re-wired a lot of old stuff and decided to make another Home Depot trip to get lumber, a new fuse box and other small supplies. The night dragged on and before long it was 12:30 AM and we were in bed.

Sunday we tackled more of the same. I got Zapped by the new fuse box and hit my lip with the leatherman that flew out of my hand. Luckily that was the only stupid move of the weekend. The best part is that the doorbell works for the first time ever!

Dad and I felt a bit lost with all the electrical, but we got some other things accomplished, particularly framing for the kitchen wall cut to size and the old sink back up and connected.


I'm off to Miami on Wednesday but should be able to get the cable TV and loudspeaker wire run this week so I can think about insulation and drywall the week after.

I'm all 'Wired' up

After another week of traveling, I came home from Denver yesterday with goals to start and finish wiring what I could of the apartment. I've bought a 500 ft. roll of RG6 wire for cable television wiring and a 500 ft. roll of loudspeaker wire. Wiring is quite simple, but since I had a bit of a master plan, it made it a bit more time consuming.

I've decided that everything should be concealed so I had to do some drilling through a few beams to run some cables. As well, my philosophy is the more cable outlets, the better. With that said, I'm running two stereo pairs of loudspeaker wiring and three RG6 cables in the bedroom (thus, 3 cable and two loudspeaker jacks). The loudspeakers will be 'home run' to the living room, where they can get a feed off of a receiver with multiple room outputs. The RG6 will be home run to the foyer ceiling where there will be a splitter box distributing the signal.



The smart thing I'm thinking about here is future wiring. I need to assume that my cable TV won't always come in from the facade as it is now (especially with the upcoming roof project our building is going to be going through). Thus, I've bought a combiner so I can run one wire from the dumbwaiter shaft to the foyer and the existing to the foyer as well. Thus if the wiring ever changes, I'm prepared and won't have to open up the ceiling much or completely rewire. These splitters/combiners are great devices and I recommend them to anyone who is wiring their place up (http://www.smarthome.com/7810.html). Once the signal is combined, out it goes via a 6-channel splitter (http://www.smarthome.com/7810C6.html).

The hardest work in all this was to tie together the loudspeaker wiring so I could have a stereo pair. I found the best method was to actually hang the wire out the window 6 stories in length and then twist the wire pairs (its not shielded) and tie it with zip ties. A bit of a process, but it seems to work. I'll have to mark up all my drawings with this wiring now for future reference.