We bought a perfectly lovely home and then tore it up.
Flooring. Cabinetry. Bathrooms. It all had to go. Remodeling is not for the faint of heart.
Truly.
Perhaps nothing was harder to face than the master bathroom. Learned much, I did.
The 22-year old bathroom had a small shower, an old Jacuzzi tub and a 2-sink counter with a make-up mirror & bench in the middle. It all had to go. We decided we wanted a soaker tub, a larger walk-in shower with a bench, and no make-up station.
This remodel would get intense.
First, we had a plan. To scale. It answered a lot of questions … but not all of them, we found.
This almost-to-scale graph paper sketch drove our design, start to finish. It may not be state of the art … but it’s MY state of the art. And, it was good enough. Almost.
A couple of issues came up almost immediately … this plan moved the shower head to a different wall and the shower drain next to the wall. This plan also moved the bathtub drain and and plumbing fixtures. I had no idea what this would mean.
No idea.
We bought a house with a post tension slab. A notice to that effect was stamped in the concrete in the corner of the garage. Unusual, I thought. Well, not really. Just outside of my experience. Thankfully, the plumber & the contractor/groomsman knew what they were doing. We would need to hire a radar guy.
Huh?
A post tension slab is often used on hillsides (we are) to create a more stable slab of concrete to build on (just about all Southern California homes are slab construction). Posts are set on the edges of the concrete, and then a cable is stretched between posts to form a grid pattern. Yes, rebar is often put in concrete, and that’s not what this is. This is … cables. Under tension. In a grid pattern throughout the slab.
OK, but here’s the important part. One must not cut a cable. Ever. Cut a cable UNDER TENSION and bad things will happen. The cable can whip out of the concrete and cut whatever is in its path. People die. Walls crack.
You know, bad things.
So, you want to move drains? You want to move plumbing? You have to scan the post tension slab to locate where the cables are as one MUST NOT cut a cable. And have no fear, the contractor knew a guy.
This guy showed up with a tablet and what looked like a really big mouse, about the size of 2 fists … and preceded to move the mouse over the floor to magically find the cables and how deep they were. You could tell the size & depth of the things in the slab easily. This information was then painted onto the concrete so we would know what we were dealing with.
Then the concrete got cut and the plumbers dug *around & under* the cables to see what’s what. That resulted in our bathroom beginning to look like a … construction zone with piles of dirt in the room and a fog of concrete dust wafting throughout the house. For days. Oh, the dust. My spiffy new table saw, still not assembled, was stored in the empty master bedroom (where would you keep it?), and the cardboard boxes got coated in an unbelievable layer of dust.
And that’s where it got weird. Post tension cables are laid out in a grid, but we had one forming what looked like a triangle at the corner of the house. Odd, that. The plumbers kept digging … and they came to a frayed end of the cable. In the middle of my bathroom.
Bad things happen when you cut a cable. But they didn’t cut it. They swear. They found the END of a cable that was loose in the concrete. That frayed end was rusted, actually, so visually it was clear this was not a freshly severed end.
OK, decision time. What do you do?
After consulting with the groomsman and the plumber … we just kept swimming. We didn’t cut the cable. Nothing bad happened. Keep moving forward. The plumbers kept digging. But it felt like we broke our house.
Then we find that my plumbing purchase … my extensive plumbing purchase … did not include the necessary rough out kit for the tub filler. What is that, exactly? No clue. But it is what gets buried in the concrete to mount the tub filler assembly to. OK, great. We need one. Where is it? Oh, and we need it NOW.
I talked to our main plumbing fixture source, and he located a rough out kit that was only 30 miles away. I hopped in the truck, got it, delivered it, and got on with my day. That’s important, because that day, of all days, was my set up day for the KHTS Home & Garden Show in Santa Clarita, one of my key annual events which is sponsored by “your hometown radio station” that happens to be in our hometown. I was setting up a rare triple booth, all in, and I had to drop everything to go get this missing rough out kit. I did it, then returned to the event to set up my booth. It was a long day.
It was Friday, April 25.
So, here we are at the end of June and we have not progressed much, it seems. We still don’t have a shower. We haven’t used the tub, though it is functional at this point. Stone is not done. Walls are not painted. Plumbing, cabinetry, stone … those 3 trades may get finished next week. Here’s where we are, 4 months after we bought our forever home.
I’ll let you know if we have a good week. Maybe a lot will get done … like stone work, cabinetry & plumbing. Maybe.
We do have a functional toilet in the master … that is actually a bidet. That’s a French word for an appliance designed in Japan and manufactured in Viet Nam. Pretty fancy for a small town boy that remembers running water being put in the house. We only had an outhouse at home until I was 13.
Back to our computer-driven automatic toilet thingy. It knows when you approach and opens the lid. Do your business, and it will clean you up, flush when you arise and close the lid as you run away. Or maybe that’s just me.
Mrs M wanted to go fancy and who am I to say no? She has actually used the bidet. Me? Nope. I’m still too scared.
If you are interested in bidets, here is a review of the one we bought. As far as I’m concerned, watching it to see all of the, uh, creative language used to describe the process is worth your time. I think it’s laugh out loud funny.
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