Bathroom repairs begin.

Today (7/5/2005) was the first day of bathroom repairs. This includes removing/replacing some studs and sub flooring below and behind the bath tub... Thankfully, this means the tub, the icky plastic walls, and tiles need to go. I have chosen to replace all the cabinetry at the same time... the only original thing to remain after the repairs is the toilet.

Here are the BEFORE images:

The cause:

Here is an image of the culprit: dry rot. As you can see it is behind the tub and extends out into the floor:

Well done is only half begun...

Here are the 'IN PROGRESS' and 'POST REPAIR' images. Next is the delicate situation of getting the Whirlpool tub in place (sob story to follow below...) And to put my walls back up.

Tub is in (just not the right one)

So, here we are post dry-rot fix. What's that? "That's not a whirlpool tub!" you say? Well.... no, it isn't.

It's NOT the whirlpool tub that I had called to authorize it's install, not the one that I purchased and lugged back to the house and stored in the garage for 4 days, not the one that I paid for an electrical permit and lined up a licensed electrican for... no, it's the SECOND tub... a standard 5' tub. I argued for days about it with the contractors, the end result was: "YOU can put it in, but we're NOT going to have anything to do with it... oh, and you better have it done in the next 36 hours so it doesn't make us late on your drywall installation." Losers. Oh well, I'm past that now... and I have about $500 back from the original tub purchase.

Covering holes and new plumbing

In the below 'pre fix' image, you can see duct tape which covers a fist sized hole into the wall, and behind the supply line flanges there were holes large enough to stick your thumb through... I am no longer surprised at the large amount of spiders living in our home now.

In the next image, allthough still slightly bumpy, you can see that I have patched all the holes and swapped in new plumbing. As soon as the tilework is done, I have a new vanity and faucet sitting in the grage ready to mate with the new plumbing. :)

Ugly, but solid...

Did some mortar repairs to the bricks in front of the house. It's a bit ugly, but solid as... well, solid as a brick. No more loose bricks to bug me. :)

Ready set.. tile!

A pile of tiles ready to go onto the wall and floor of the bathroom... someday... hopefully. Almost equal to a dollar a pound. :P

Tile is In!!!!

Whew, finally. After at least 6 trips to Home Depot and Lowes, multiple trips to DAL tile, and other various showrooms, and after buying a ton of tiles out in Union City only to find, upon opening the boxes, that 40% of the tiles were scratched beyond use. Thats what I get for buying cheap tiles...

Today I replaced all the valves behind the toilet, repaired another large hole where the plumbing (and bugs) enter the wall, primed the wall, installed a new wax ring under the toilet and installed the toilet itself.

And wihtout further ado, some early images of the new tiles (the color and sheen are not correct in the photos, I still need to clean the floors to get rid of the grout film.) One of the tile installers said to use WD40 on a rag to get it to shine (!?!?!?!?)






Now to shave and shower!!!!!

Almost Final!

Ok, so almost evrything is in. We have yet to decide on a window treatment (we're thinking we'll tie in some color into the room with the curtains, a rug, and a few wall-type knick-knacks). I'm trying to get TAPS to come back and do a better job on the toilet install... man these guys suck. (on a side note, now they are trying to over charge me so I am in negotiations with them again before I send the bill to the previous owners...)

The color in the below pics are still not representative of the actual room (sorry dad!) but they should give you a sense of the improvement. Last weekend I put in a ton of Red Oak base moulding. The miter joints look terrible, but the overall effect that the wood gives to the room is outstanding, so I can deal with it for now... maybe I'll re-do a few pieces later on down the road (after the weather cools down considerably!!)

Finally passed!

Ok, so even though I don't have my 'color' added to bathroom yet, I DID gt TAPS to come back and fix my toilet 9free of charge) and also got them to lower the final bill to reflect the discrepancies.

Passed the Santa Clara City final inspections today (8/26/05)! Woohoo, on to other projects! :)

Time to fix the porch...

Ok, so here is an image of the front porch prior to demolition/repairs (8/24/05). As you can see in the center of the porch area, that it has collapsed and is about 3 inches lower on the rightr side than the left. (the pile of cement in the flower bed is from when I removed the top two inches of filler cement).

Widening the front step and walkway.

I chose to widen the steps isnce i was doing all this concrete work anyways. The first thing that I needed to do was to shorten the brick flower bed to allow for the new steps and walkays. I really liked the curve of the current bricks, so it seemed the easiest thing to do would be to take out a 2 foot section of the wall in the straight section and slide the rest of the wall over. Well, as you can see from the following picture, it became a real mess real quick. By the time i got to the bottom of the straight section I found a piece of rebar was going throughout the whole wall. So, the next best choice was to demolish the half of the wall which needed to move over, and rebuild it.

Half of a wall...

Ok, I'm halfway through... it hotter than hell outside and I'm already sore from all the sledge hammer work. :( I ended up just bending the rebar to a tighter curve and cemented it in place.

Finished!

Ok, so the wall is finished, it's a bit ugly, but the weathered bricks hide that some (I went to two different Home Depots to find some used bricks that would match the existing ones). So now, I have about 14 inches more space for the new steps and walkway!

You can also see the white paint lines which I used to mark out the construction areas for USA company who came out and marked all my undergorund utilities before I started digging (glad I thought of that!)

New porch is underway!

Ok, so lets jump right into it! I found some guys from Craigslist.com who gave me a quote for about 2/3 the price of what the big boys said, and that they could do it in about 3 or 4 days (which was about half as long as the other guys had quoted). Coincidently, they are from the East Bay, but I would definately recommend them for general construction work/landscaping.

I decided to add a small curved walkway from the driveway to the front steps since thats the usual path we take when coming home from work at night.

Demolition complete

Here's an image of the missing porch:



And here's where I later found the porch... in the front yard:

Ready to pour!

And here's another shot of the setup for the front pathway:

Drying Time!

After a greuling 10 1/2 hour day, they finished pouring and shaping the cement. It looks great, better than I expected for the price. The bricks are a tad uneven, but thats my fault. They did some reshaping of the top bricks to level out the flower bed a little bit... and yes, there are a few more bricks to lay on the top.

Thorns be gone!

This is what i did today while the big boys laid cement. It took me almost 2 hours to hack out the rose bush roots with a pick and an axe. There were three 9 foot rose bushes, a 6 foot cactus, and one of those big green nasty prehistoric plants (sorry mom, forgot what they were called again...) There are two jasmine plants left, which I plan to relocate somewhere else.



In the next picture you can see the bottoms of the plants I removed (they were growing into the soffits on the roof!)

Plants are here..

Well, even though I'm not yet ready to plant, I went out and got the ones I had been wanting for a while. In fact, last week I was concerned about the two plant types that I wanted being sold before I bought... dad suggested buying them anyways and just storing them in the backyard. I thought, "thats a good idea... I'll come back on saturday and pick them up just to be safe." Well, saturday came around, I went to the store, and wouldn't you know it, they were all gone. Not a one. After three nursery visits I found a few of them to satisfy me.



-Click image to see a larger image-

Starting the sprinkler system...

Ok, I'm starting the front irrigation system. This is the 'second' valve manifold that I made. "

You ever been doing something that you thought was really smart only to find that you were actually being really dumb?..."

I built an earlier manifold using all threaded pieces, thinking that they would be stronger than glued pieces since this side of the system is under constant pressure from the main source. Without going into detail, it just became really hard to line everything up without producing leaks... so at the last minute, I ripped the whole thing out and rebuilt another one using the glue technique... in the end it was a good thing because the first version was built nice and compact, but with only about 2" clearance between each valve. At some point I read that you should have about 6" distance between valves so you can remove a valve later on if it fails (by screwing it off). So, now its alot longer, but I'm in better shape because if it:

Windows

As if I didn't have enough projects going at once... I decided to start the windows so i can get them in and 'tuned' before the rainy season gets here. I received the window delivery last week (12 windows and a sliding glass door!). 6 of them are new construction which means I need to remove the stucco from the exterior wall, and then remove the complete window from the house frame. This takes quite a bit of work, but its seems fairly straight forward since you can see what you're doing. The 'easier' retro windows on the other hand turned out to be a total pain.

Basically, the old windows have been 'converted' long ago using part of the original wood window and then adding in an aluminum slider. This made it difficult, because there were many new parts (and some old parts that you couldn't even see since the windows were painted shut) just alot of stuff to cut through. They seem to need a bit more work when doing the final trim than the new construction type does. Below is a shot of the (long awaited) removal of the office window (pictured is my friend Stephen... who volunteered his weekend to spend with me breaking glass and cutting metal)

I took us almost 1.5 hours just to remove the window (but we learned a hell of alot about the window in the process). We also replaced the kitchen window with a special 'tempered' glass one since we'll eventually be putting in the sliding door on the left side next to it.

Initially, I had scheduled to do the new construction type windows, but the day before, I double checked the measurements and the 6 windows were 10 inches too small!

PreLawn Stage2

I'm finally making some progress on the front yard now.

Here's an image of the lawn AFTER the previous dead lawn was removed, but before I started any real work on it:


I spent about 2 hours rototilling the front lawn area. I then spent a whole day removing 12 wheel barrel loads of dirt, only to bring back in 6 bags(2cu ft. ea) of planting mix, two bags(1.5cu ft. ea) 'organic' compost (that's for you randal!) and a handful of starter fertilizer (ummm, sorry randal.)

Here's what it looked like after installing my edging and using the lawn roller on it:


and after putting in the irrigation system... it looked like this:

also, here is a cool thing I found online which holds 2x4's to a stake that you can bend to any angle:

Sprinklers are working!

OK, so I ran a sprinkler test, and after a few tense minutes of gurgling and hissing they finally triggered. Here they are in all their sprinkly glory:



(note: the water all over the neighbor's driveway is from them washing their car!)

The Octagon...

Ok, so far, the most amount of work (and the worst) of anything that I've done on the yard, is the root system around the Magnolia tree. My plan is to put new grass back in under the tree along with a large flower bed 'octagon' around the base of the tree. The problem is, there are TONS of small and large roots protruding above the ground (in some cases 4" above the current pavement level). This makes getting the ground 'level' and 'amended' for sod a serious amount of work, not to mention getting the planter box secured and level and all the irrigation lines that need to cross root highways in place. Here's an image of the base just as I started to remove a few of the worst roots and attempt to level everything out:


Removing the roots took more than a weekend alone, I had to hire someone to help me half way through. (update: little did I know I'd be trimming/hacking roots for weeks to come) With the ground fairly level and a rough outline of the planter done:


The next step was removing some driveway to get a 2x6 edging board into place, dig my trenches and install driplines and sprinkler system piping. I thought ahead and ran some electrical wire up into the planter so I could install 'beauty' lights for the tree later. Damn, more roots, they seem to add almost an hour of extra work at each stage of the process.


There she is! The 'octagon'... not geometrically 'true' but it should hold some shade loving plants and a few tree lights!

Here comes the grass!

Got the sod delivery today... 550 sq. ft. of it, of which I'll probably use about 425 sq. ft. The rest I will kindly donate to my neighbors dirt spotted yard. I never thought about how heavy these rolls would be, and after constantly watering them they only got heavier.


Well, here it is, after about 5 hours of work, the grass is laid and it looks great. The next day I added some flowers and small shrubs to the front border.

Patio door installation

I have been wanting a sliding glass door in my kitchen for a long time now. I had been dreading this seeing as how hard the windows were to install into and EXISTING hole. As you can see from the 'pre' shots, I am starting with a 35" window opening.






Learning 'the hard way' from some of my more recent indoor projects, this time I thought ahead and created a dust barrier from the rest of the house. My 'clean room':

And here we go:

WIth my trusty friend Stephen at hand, we started with the exterior wall removal. We figured since we had no idea of the condition of the inside wall, we would start from the outside and see how the wall was made. Apparently, the window we were removing was put in after the house was built (since it was missing a few important parts!). I can't believe how much work it was smashing through that stucco. It's incredibly thick and and completely merged with an underlying 'chicken wire' mesh. We were hitting the walls so hard, a few wine glasses found their way out of the cupboard and onto the floor.






Here's the rough opening. (I have a HOLE in my house!!!)



This is actually the following day, so much work left to do...



...and as you can see, the demolition pile is growing larger.