Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Master Bath Progress

The pace of work on the master bathroom hasn't exactly been brisk (there have been several large obstacles and distractions), but enough man-hours have been put in since the last blog post to make the progress highly visible and--dare I say?--encouraging.

The shower is completely gone; nary a trace remains. We finished taking out the wall and had an electrician come in to take care of the wire that used to reside in it. He ran the wire through the remaining walls, including newly-added wire that will one day deliver power to a pair of mirror-flanking wall sconces, and he installed a new combination switch/receptacle box near where the sink will be.

Then there was the plumbing to deal with. After getting two different estimates on the plumbing work, I suddenly found myself highly motivated to do a lot of it myself. I was able to get the drain and the old water lines dropped down and capped off below the floor, and just recently started working on getting the water lines for the sink moved into the wall where we'll want them instead of coming up through the floor.

Saturday, I finished putting up sheetrock to patch the "holes" where the shower and wall used to be. There was so much variation in the edges of the existing wall and the new sheetrock that would abut it that it proved as difficult as I'd expected to get the joints even and flush. I was able to do what currently appears to be an acceptable job, but there's still some magic to be worked with my big bucket of joint compound, so I'm still quite nervous about how it'll turn out. We may well end up with a very topographically interesting wall.



I still need to patch the hole where the mirror/medicine cabinet used to be, but I want to wait until after the sconces are installed since it may prove beneficial to have that area exposed during or just prior to installation.

Another major headache can be seen in the fourth quadrant of the first picture. The floor register that used to be right next to the shower wall is now right smack in the middle of the room and needs to be moved. I think I'll be able to cut a new hole when we decide where it should go, but I don't know if I'm up to getting the ducting rerouted to the new location; seems like it could be tricky. I guess we'll see what an estimate from an HVAC contractor looks like, and if it's intolerably high, maybe I'll get another boost of confidence and motivation.