Things that satisfy me
Getting things done.
Today I finally got to Home Depot and got all (I hope) supplies I will need for the bathroom tile job. Getting the cement backer board was the hardest part (and probably the priciest next to the tile, but it wasn't bad at all) and I mean that both from the choosing standpoint and the lifting. I had to decide between three different brands, and I wanted to make sure I got the best stuff. When I do jobs in my house, I like doing them right. There's nothing worse for me than a half-assed job. Like this tile I'm tearing down in the bathroom - it's on regular fricking drywall on top of the plaster walls which also had metal tiles on them. They just screwed the drywall to the existing stuff and went to town. It's even a nasty color - a white speckled with brown that's just nasty, with taupe border tiles. They stick out from the wall about a half inch, which means they crowd the tub edges so there's even less space on them. You're not supposed to use regular drywall in wet installations, and you aren't suposed to just slap the stuff on top of the existing wall.
The right way to do this is to pull it all off. All the way down to the studs, which means cutting out the plaster where I'm going to lay the tile. My house was built in the housing boom after WWII and has proper plaster on top of metal mesh, so the cutting isn't going to be easy - I know this from when I had to install the ceiling fan and had to change the size of the hole. But that's the only way to get to where you can fully install this the way that provides a water barrier. It will involve replacing any sections of studs that have gotten damaged from water/mold. I'm hoping that the damage is confined to the plaster I'm going to have to remove anyway, but we'll see - either way, I'm doing it. Then when everything is cleared out, I have to lay roofing felt with roofing cement to waterproof the seams, and then I will have to cut and install the 1/2" backerboard I bought today (and hauled all five of the 3x5' sheets up the stairs from my car one at a time, thank you). Any gaps (like the ones at the top of the 5' full length that will have to be added to make the 70" that they will extend from the tub edge) will have to be taped and mudded. Then, with a nice, flat surface, I can finally start the actual tile installation - that will NOT extend an extra half inch from the wall.
I have a window in one of the walls to be tiled, and the wood trim around it is (understandably) starting to rot in one corner). It's all coming out and then I'm going to build it out with the concrete backer board and it will have tile all around it. In the wall opposite the shower head (the back), I'll have an opening set into the wall that will be tiled so I can have a shelf for shampoo bottles and the like. I've seen it in a lot of pictures, and it's freakin' sweet. I thought about getting a towel bar, but I thought the white bar would take away from the effect with all the nice mosaic tile. I'm only using white tile for the edges since I could buy the rounded edge tiles in the glossy white. So there will actually be blue mosaic tile everywhere with a white border along all the finished edges (the top and sides and on the window sills).
I've been putting this job off for a while now, and I'm looking forward to finally getting it done. It's going to be like when I took the sliding glass door out of my house in Norman - once you start, there's no turning back or putting it off. With that job, I was standing there with a big, open hole in my house saying "yeah, and now I get to frame out that door and window and dog door" and being more than a tiny bit intimidated with the whole process. In this case, I'll have no shower or bath until I finish, and I may be showering at the Y for a week or more. It's a good incentive for finishing stuff you start, but hey, I enjoy pressure. *chuckle*
The tile itself is on track for delivery on Monday (using the UPS site, checking it every day). I'm glad I decided to go for the nice tile for the bulk of it instead of just using it for accents - the glass mosaic tile is just soooo pretty.
Doing a job well, even when it's a pain in the ass, satisfies me greatly. I enjoy when a job is difficult and I have to work hard to get it done right, because the feeling when it's done and I took the extra time to do it the best possible way, well, that's just awesome. Especially when it's my house - I get to see that every day and think "damn, I do good work." Poetry, even when I do it well, doesn't give me that same concrete feeling of knowing I did it right - I usually find myself wondering if it really worked well at all. There's never a sense of all the edges lining up and being flush, you know? It's painting, not carpentry. Sometimes you need to know that you got all the measurements right and it's well-finished in a way that poetry writing can't ever give. Life doesn't give me that very often, so I guess I embrace it in these places where I find that strong feeling of having gotten it just right.
So yeah, my bathroom's going to kick even more ass fairly soon.
Today I finally got to Home Depot and got all (I hope) supplies I will need for the bathroom tile job. Getting the cement backer board was the hardest part (and probably the priciest next to the tile, but it wasn't bad at all) and I mean that both from the choosing standpoint and the lifting. I had to decide between three different brands, and I wanted to make sure I got the best stuff. When I do jobs in my house, I like doing them right. There's nothing worse for me than a half-assed job. Like this tile I'm tearing down in the bathroom - it's on regular fricking drywall on top of the plaster walls which also had metal tiles on them. They just screwed the drywall to the existing stuff and went to town. It's even a nasty color - a white speckled with brown that's just nasty, with taupe border tiles. They stick out from the wall about a half inch, which means they crowd the tub edges so there's even less space on them. You're not supposed to use regular drywall in wet installations, and you aren't suposed to just slap the stuff on top of the existing wall.
The right way to do this is to pull it all off. All the way down to the studs, which means cutting out the plaster where I'm going to lay the tile. My house was built in the housing boom after WWII and has proper plaster on top of metal mesh, so the cutting isn't going to be easy - I know this from when I had to install the ceiling fan and had to change the size of the hole. But that's the only way to get to where you can fully install this the way that provides a water barrier. It will involve replacing any sections of studs that have gotten damaged from water/mold. I'm hoping that the damage is confined to the plaster I'm going to have to remove anyway, but we'll see - either way, I'm doing it. Then when everything is cleared out, I have to lay roofing felt with roofing cement to waterproof the seams, and then I will have to cut and install the 1/2" backerboard I bought today (and hauled all five of the 3x5' sheets up the stairs from my car one at a time, thank you). Any gaps (like the ones at the top of the 5' full length that will have to be added to make the 70" that they will extend from the tub edge) will have to be taped and mudded. Then, with a nice, flat surface, I can finally start the actual tile installation - that will NOT extend an extra half inch from the wall.
I have a window in one of the walls to be tiled, and the wood trim around it is (understandably) starting to rot in one corner). It's all coming out and then I'm going to build it out with the concrete backer board and it will have tile all around it. In the wall opposite the shower head (the back), I'll have an opening set into the wall that will be tiled so I can have a shelf for shampoo bottles and the like. I've seen it in a lot of pictures, and it's freakin' sweet. I thought about getting a towel bar, but I thought the white bar would take away from the effect with all the nice mosaic tile. I'm only using white tile for the edges since I could buy the rounded edge tiles in the glossy white. So there will actually be blue mosaic tile everywhere with a white border along all the finished edges (the top and sides and on the window sills).
I've been putting this job off for a while now, and I'm looking forward to finally getting it done. It's going to be like when I took the sliding glass door out of my house in Norman - once you start, there's no turning back or putting it off. With that job, I was standing there with a big, open hole in my house saying "yeah, and now I get to frame out that door and window and dog door" and being more than a tiny bit intimidated with the whole process. In this case, I'll have no shower or bath until I finish, and I may be showering at the Y for a week or more. It's a good incentive for finishing stuff you start, but hey, I enjoy pressure. *chuckle*
The tile itself is on track for delivery on Monday (using the UPS site, checking it every day). I'm glad I decided to go for the nice tile for the bulk of it instead of just using it for accents - the glass mosaic tile is just soooo pretty.
Doing a job well, even when it's a pain in the ass, satisfies me greatly. I enjoy when a job is difficult and I have to work hard to get it done right, because the feeling when it's done and I took the extra time to do it the best possible way, well, that's just awesome. Especially when it's my house - I get to see that every day and think "damn, I do good work." Poetry, even when I do it well, doesn't give me that same concrete feeling of knowing I did it right - I usually find myself wondering if it really worked well at all. There's never a sense of all the edges lining up and being flush, you know? It's painting, not carpentry. Sometimes you need to know that you got all the measurements right and it's well-finished in a way that poetry writing can't ever give. Life doesn't give me that very often, so I guess I embrace it in these places where I find that strong feeling of having gotten it just right.
So yeah, my bathroom's going to kick even more ass fairly soon.