What You Callin' 'Easy'?

Remover applied

I've always wanted ceramic tile in my 1st floor hall.  Had it all picked out.  I'd doodle my tile job detail during choir practice--underlayment, Ditra, thinset, tile, and all.  Then late last winter I got the depressing news:  A trustworthy tile pro informed me I shouldn't do it unless I tore the whole floor out and sunk a new one between the joists.  For even if I reinforced the springy place in the existing floor I'd still be out of Code with a too-shallow bottom  step.  Feasible, but pricey.

Frankly, I'm out of Code already, thanks to the ½" plywood my previous owners two back slapped down to underlay the ever-so-(un)attractive sheet vinyl they chose.  The bottom riser is that much shorter than the rest even now, and it doesn't bother me.  Would another half inch or so of tile, etc., matter that much?

Test for riser comfort/safety

Late in May I bought one of my chosen tiles at the Big Orange Store, set it on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with some thick cardboard under it to simulate the setting materials, and walked down the stairs a few times.  No.  Ow.  Yep, it would matter.  "Watch that bottom step, Ethel, it's a doozy."

Well, maybe I could pry up the plywood and make something out of the original tongue and groove floor beneath. 

It was no go.  I think the POs-1 didn't merely nail it, they glued it down as well.  And I wasn't up to getting down with the circular saw and cutting it up into little puzzle pieces and heaving them up one by one.  No telling what that'd do to the T&G.  And there'd still be the dried adhesive to deal with.  Hmm, no.

Withal, I've decided, the only thing for it is to fill and sand the plywood (which is a decent, regular, knotless, interior grade) and paint it.  In a faux tile pattern that'll simulate the Gothic Revival tiles I always wanted.  But first, I have to get the vinyl adhesive residue off.

The product in question

Could be worse.  It's only around the perimeter of the L-shaped space and along the verges of the floor heating register.   I rejected trying to sand it off.  Chemical methods should be easier and more economical, I thought.  So I bought a bottle of Henry EasyRelease Adhesive Remover a few weeks ago, and today, I tried it.

Ohhhhhhh, my.  Easy release?  Not so much.  The label says to dilute it 4 to 1 with water, apply it to your dried, hardened glue, then wait one to two hours for the loosening action to work.  I sprayed on the first application around 2:30 PM and according to the instructions renewed it every so often (every twenty to thirty minutes) to keep it wet and working.

After two hours, I went at the (theoretically) softened glue with my 5-in-1.  No joy.  It barely made a dent.  Tried adding more adhesive remover to the bottle to make the mix more like 3 to 1.  Squirted it on and waited another hour or so, reapplying at intervals.

The ordeal begins

By this time it was nearly 5:30 PM.  Upstairs in my bedroom my two younger cats were sequestered behind the closed door, to keep them and their tender paws out of the adhesive remover.  Neither of them was happy to be held captive, and might have been plotting all sorts of dire revenge in the form of poo in the shoes or smelly yellow puddles on the bed.  They had to be sprung as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, the dog, exiled to the back porch, was leaping at the screen door and barking in protest at having to be outdoors without me.  (My oldest cat would stay outside all day and all night if I let her.)  Okay, kids, I'm working as fast as I can!  I went at the old glue again with the 5-in-1, a putty knife (useless) and the paint remover hook.   And went at it, and went at it, and went at it.

Done, barring the gunk hung up on the nailheads

I'm tired, I give up

The old glue started coming up, but it was hard work.  I kept at it steadily but by a few minutes before 8:00 I had less than half the ring of residue removed from the plywood, my knees were hurting, red, and swollen despite the pads I wore, and I was thoroughly fed up.  If this product brings up adhesive residue easily, I'm Mike Holmes' new forewoman.  I had to stop.  Rinsed the application sites with cold water per the directions, including the places I'd sprayed with remover but didn't/couldn't scrape, put everything away, and liberated the captive pets, indoors and out.  Thank goodness the kittens (five-year-old kittens) had controlled themselves.

Still to do, and only part of that

I'll try to get the rest tomorrow.  Pretty tired and disgusted now.  The sander might be an option after all.

Bathroom Dreames and Imaginacions

If I haven't posted lately, it's not because I don't have anything to post about, it's just that I've been too busy doing them.

Funny, it's so much easier to write about what I'm thinking of doing, and such a post this is.

My second floor bathroom needs work. That's undeniable. The bathtub is marred, discolored, and drains like an Amtrak train waiting for a freight to go by; the pedestal sink, while cute, is inconvenient and its plumbing was installed crookedly and leaks; the vinyl flooring is worn and curls at the edges; the linen cabinet is beat up, with doors that keep coming off the hinges; the tile is outdated and the wallpaper is absurd. A bathroom remodelling would be a glad and welcome event.

The other undeniable thing is that I am broke. Great credit still, but broke. I won't go into the gory details, but I do not have the funds lying around at the moment to redo my bathroom the way I'd like, or any way at all.

But it's spring and the remodelling contractor johnnies have emerged in force, attempting to drum up some work. So just for grins, I've made appointments with two of these businesses, to see what it's liable to run me to redo my bathroom, someday, maybe next year, when it might not be so laughable even to think about it.

Yesterday afternoon, then, a bloke came around from a firm I'll call First and Only Baths*.

This guy was enthusiastic, I'll give him that. I have an idea about making a cat litter box cubby under the stairs that are on the other side of the bathroom's lavatory wall, and he was so taken with it that I had difficulty in getting his attention on to what else I'd like to do. And he had no problem with my intention to do the tiling, painting, and other finish work myself, leaving the heavy lifting items to them.

But hmm, I have to wonder if this is a company I want to work with. When you've got drawings to show and the estimator still gets off on tangents about what you want to accomplish, what would you likely end up with? If you tell him you want something lined with Formica® or MDO plywood, why would he insist you should make do with stick-on shelf liner instead? If you've told him your tub drains too slowly, from what realm of fantasy would he import the idea to turn the head of the new one around so the drain line would need a greater fall from the plug hole to the soil stack? Why when you tell him repeatedly you'd need them to demolish and remove the tub, would he keep saying, "Oh, you can break it up if you want! We won't leave you with tub pieces at the top of your stairs!"

I can't imagine.

And then there was his insouciance about the floor structure as is holding the ceramic tile and clawfoot tub I want to put in. I have pictures from February when the kitchen ceiling was opened up to repair the bathroom sink plumbing. I showed them to him. It's obvious that the span between joists is too great to allow ceramic tile without sistering the joists or adding support to them somehow. But oh, no, he dismisses that; oh, it'll be fine just the way it is! They redo hundreds of bathrooms! They put ceramic tile on floors like that all the time!

I asked whether he thought the floor as it is would take the additional weight a cast iron clawfoot tub would add. "Why are you so worried about the structure?" he laughed.

"Because I don't want my bathtub in the kitchen."


He was very cheerful about simply taking up the existing vinyl flooring with its ¼" luan plywood underlayment, slamming down some HardieBacker® onto the 3/4" x 3¼" tongue-and-groove subfloor, then installing the ceramic mosaic on top of both. "Um," I ventured, "wouldn't you be putting down some exterior grade plywood first?"

"Oh, no, we wouldn't need anything like that! We've been doing these bathrooms for years!"

Yes, and I can imagine the cracked floors they've left behind. It'd be charming to think that First and Only Baths* can reverse the laws of statics to make it cheaper for me to redo my john, but me, I dunna think so.

But as Mr. Estimator burbled away, I got to thinking: How much, really, of this job can I not do? Demolition only looks formidable when you think of it overall. But if you've got a good crowbar, the tile comes out in pieces. Ditto the bad plaster (if it is bad, that is). Same with the old linen closet. The bathtub, being such a mess, probably isn't worth putting on CraigsList. Wearing suitable protection and armed with a hefty sledge hammer, I could knock the bejeebers out of it quite handily.

If I took things slowly and considered them well beforehand, I could cut and install the new cement backer board; maybe I could even sister the joists. Maybe, maybe, if I studied it out and got the right tools, I could also relocate the HVAC outlet and replace the plumbing lines for my lav and tub!

Well, no, maybe that's too fantastic.

I can imagine all that. What I can't imagine is hiring First and Only Baths* to redo my second floor bathroom.

As the kids a few years ago used to say, "In your dreams."

Yes, I Know

. . . I should oughta post something.

My computer's been back and reconnected since last Friday, so that's no longer an excuse. But can I plead that I got so used to actually getting things done while it was away that I'm loath to go back back to spending much time on it?

Uh, guess not. Spent practically all night a couple times since then on-line dealing with stuff I Really Hadta Take Care Of.

Call my failure to update Overload Procrastination. Too darn much to write about. Such as:

Progress on the wood trim stripping to the point where I've finished everything in Stage One but the stair rail parts, the hall bench, and the casing around the doorway between the stairhall and the kitchen. This included having to remove and majorly patch the casing of my bedroom doorway, ineptly reinstalled during a 1980s remodelling job . . .

Getting over my queasiness over possible irreparable damage and starting to knock out the fillet stops holding in the stair balusters, so I can begin to strip them . . .

Realizing I need to strip the wallpaper over the stairrail before I start on its woodwork, so beginning the wallpaper removal in earnest . . .

Juggling and mistiming price increases and samples on the William Morris wallpapers I want, to the point that I've come out $160 on the wrong side of the equation and have to consider whether I'm going to get these papers or not . . .

Being offered and procuring a 1985 copy of my house lot survey from my PO-1's land surveyor, who's closing his practice, and what I learned from him when I picked it up . . .

Deciding I have to strip both sets of stairs and the 2nd floor hall floor before I can refinish and reinstall the stripped door and window trim, and making a start at that as I do the stair stringers . . .

Making a start-- sort of-- at finishing the drywall patches left over from the mid-February plumbing work . . .

Realizing I have to secure the cracked and sagging ceiling plaster in my 2nd floor hall and over the 3rd floor stairs before I can strip the steps and the hall floor, and so finally getting around (yesterday) to putting in an order for Big Wally's Plaster Magic . . .

Meeting with about a million masonry contractors to see if I can get an affordable price for replacing my scat-to-scumbaw front sidewalk steps, and researching on whether I can do it myself . . .

Going to the Pittsburgh Home and Garden Show this past weekend (courtesy of Elaine V. at Bless This DIY Mess-- Thank you ever so much!!) and buying a cool tile scorer/cutter so I can break the tile I want in my first floor hall . . .

Consequently looking up information on the substrate I need in order to support said proposed first floor hall tile, and finding out that my joist spacing (not to mention the cold air return plenum) may forbid my installing tile at all, without I put in a lot of supplementary joists . . .

Keeping an eye on the bulbs and shrubs breaking dormancy in my garden, and feeling uneasy because I need to grind up last Fall's leaves that are presently parked on the beds and prep the beds for planting . . .

Oh, yeah, and being nosy about what my new neighbors across the alley are up to, as they've had heavy equipment in totally uprooting and digging out the back yard.

So I have a truckload load of post subjects to catch up on.

But now I have to go downstairs and strip wallpaper. A couple weeks ago someone I heard on the radio pointed out that until one has paid off the mortgage, one's house actually belongs to the mortgage holder. This being two banks, in my case. So as I hope I may term myself an honest and honorable person, I need to get busy restoring the value of my dear friends' the banks' property and make the intended silk purse out of this Sow's Ear.

I Did That. It's Real Keen!

Funny how a whole summer is hardly long enough to clean out your files, but a few days will suffice to complete a whole slew of tasks you should have done ages ago-- like the few days before the impending visit of The Appraiser.

There is something to be said for an unhurried approach. So much more conducive to preserving one's health and sanity. But even as your deadline drives you on to exhaustion, it's also nice to stop from time to time like God on the Seventh Day and say, as did a high school classmate of mine after a communal renovation project, "See that part? I did that. It's real keen!"

Real keen, like the bolt I installed early Tuesday morning on the hatch to the attic storage. On Monday the kittens, taking after their adopted big sister the calico cat, figured out how to jiggle the cabinet latch open and get in. The little female picked up a dead bird in there (Let's not think about how it got there and how it got dead, okay?). I do not want a repeat of this. Thus, the brass bolt.

And from Tuesday, see how keen the basement shower floor is with a second coat of moss-green floor paint? Applied it with a brush instead of a roller this time: maybe it'll hold up better.

And a touch-up coat of paint on the rest of the bathroom floor:

That's real keen, too.

And early (very early) Wednesday morning, it was keen to get the basement laundry room walls de-cobwebbed, vacuumed, and scrubbed with mildewcide and Simple Green and the floor mopped with TSP:

Wednesday, I got the silly bushes in the front and side trimmed:
(I say "silly" because if you don't trim them, they look unkempt and disruptive and disreputable, but when you do trim them, it seems it's always the most charming, liveliest branch tips you have to shear off. It keeps striking me as some sort of parable about modern society, but whenever I try to work it out, I can't decide on which side the moral lies!)

But getting them done was keen, especially the lemon-lime parfait effect on the golden cypresses or whatever those are.

And it was keen to get out the loppers and tame the weeping cherry, which had threatened to reach out with its rampant branches and devour the house:

And ya gotta admit, it's real keen that at long last, I got the new tiles around the upstairs bathroom mirror grouted and a new medicine cabinet put in:

(Yes, you do see a gap in the tile at the top of the mirror. That is not keen. That was cut out by some previous owner to accommodate the former medicine cabinet with the fugly fluorescent fixtures attached to it (I think the ballast sat at the top). This cabinet here is an el-cheapo stand-in until I can custom-build the cabinet I need. The space between the studs is too narrow for a decent stock model.

(Of course, all this will be torn out when I do my Dream Bath with the blue iridescent tile and the clawfoot tub.)

There's even more keen stuff I got done these past few busy busy busy days, all so I can impress that august personage, The Appraiser. I was up till six-ay-em doing it. (Thus the chronologically-impossible but artistically-accurate time stamp on this post.) But at this hour enough is enough. I do believe (novel thought!) that it would be really, really keen to get some sleep.

Will the appraiser think all this work is keen? Will the bank extend enough of a line for me to get something done on? We'll see in a few hours what comes of it all.

Hazardous Waste

Last night, Thursday, I decided that's it, the smelly second floor hallway rug has got to go. Aesthetic considerations suggested it was a good idea to rip it out. Common decency, sanitation concerns, and olfactory peace combined to make its removal absolutely necessary. Before company arrived. Now.

(After all, who wants to think she's lost her visiting parents a nights' sleep by the prodigious pong of pet pee wafting in through the bedroom door? )

It was nasty work. The carpet was filthy and stained, its edges booby-trapped with staple-tacks like shark's teeth. (Is my tetanus shot still up to date? I hope so!) The material had to be cut in pieces to satisfy the trash hauler, but it refused to go down without a fight.

As for the pad, you'd think the installers thought it would get up in the middle of the night and sneak away. Staples everywhere! Staples through the pad material and staples in the wood floor just for the fun of it! Staples smashed into the woodwork! And as a change from staples, broad-headed mails driven down to less than flush!

Well, I got the underlayment removed and bundled for pick-up, too.

Then the tack strips around the edges had to be pried up. Nails, more staples, splinters: at any moment I expected my dog to yelp in pain because he'd picked up something in his paw.

But the job got done.

Now I want to know, what are my options with the pine board flooring underneath?

Yes, fill the nail holes, sand it, maybe restain it a different tone, finish it. But what have people done about wide cracks like I have here? What do you do when you feel you could lose a small continent down the gaps?

And don't ya just love that slope in the floor! At some points it's more than an inch below the bottom of the baseboard.

I contemplate a really big shoe moulding. But maybe there're other options I haven't thought of. That is, short of tearing the surface off and shimming it up to level?

And in other news . . . here's the new bathroom mirror trim without the grout. That happened early this morning. I'm "borrowing" what little grout I need from some friends, as soon as they remember where they put the box.

Help! I Mean, Hooray! My Mother's Coming!

Today I spoke with my mom in Texas to wish her greetings and felicitations on Mothers' Day. And she confirmed that she and my stepfather are coming here in June!

Yes, I knew that was in the works. They've been talking about it since last Winter or before. But ack! That's less than a month away! I was going to have all this glorious work on my dining room woodwork and wallpaper done for them to see it!

Well, forget that. The wallpaper I've got my eye on is a William Morris pattern that has to come from England. No time to get it and hang it by mid-June, even if it were in the budget at the moment.

All right. What shall I resolve before God and all the neighbors (virtual and literal) to accomplish before they arrive?

I can install the new kitchen sink faucet I bought nearly two months ago, to replace the one that's leaking all over the countertop.

I can do something about the gaps next to the bathroom medicine cabinet that were left when I took out the old one with the ugly built-in fluorescent lights. I have the plaster spackle. And the fill-in tiles. And a new medicine cabinet, so the one I'm borrowing from the basement loo can go back where it belongs. All I need is mastic and grout and getting around to it.

What else? My POs had dogs that left their mark, shall we say, on the beige carpet of the second floor hallway. My own dog has followed suit. It does not look nice. It smells worse. Do I get the carpet cleaner in? Or do I use this as an excuse to rip it up?

I should be able to get these things done, if not more. Right? So now I've put it in writing in public and I have to do it.