 I had just solved the problem of a frozen faucet valve by soaking the valve parts in a 50/50 solution of vinegar and water. My bargain bidet was going to work out OK after all. There was just one more thing to fix and this project of installing a bidet would be complete.
When I did the rough plumbing for the fixture some time back, I didn't pay close attention to which side I ran the hot and cold supply lines. I do remember struggling a bit working in the tight space where the supply lines needed to run, so I probably had my eye more on running the 1/2" copper pipe as directly as possible. At any rate, the pipes came up through the floor with the cold water on the left and the hot water on the right. It wasn't until I hooked the bidet up that I discovered this mistake.
I could have left it with the hot and cold reversed, but that would mean joining the world of reverse plumbing whenever entering the bidet closet, and who knows what other implications that would have. I decided I should do the job right, so I picked up a pair of flexible supply connectors at the hardware store and then proceeded to change out the ones I had just recently installed with the longer flexible ones that allowed me to cross the lines between the 1/2" copper and the faucet valve.
Then another setback.
I'm not sure how it happened, but in the course of changing out the supply connectors, the hot water shut off valve developed a leak. It's possible that I had over-tightened the compression nut for the connector and this cracked the valve, but whatever the cause, the leak meant I would now have to replace the shut-off valve too.
The shut-off valve was soldered in place so I had to break out the propane torch again, heat up the solder joint and remove the valve. The hardware store only had compression style fittings for the replacement and that was fine with me. Once I cleaned up the 1/2" hot water supply line, installing the compression fitting was easy.
Now with the valve replaced and the connector lines crossed to bring hot water to the left faucet valve and the cold water to the right, we were ready to try out the bidet.
Sometimes it feels as if I'm doing one renovation project inside of another, kind of like a set of Russian Dolls. The house is being renovated and many of the parts that are going towards the renovation need renovation themselves.
I described the rehab of an old sewing cabinet into a sink vanity so that I could make use of a salvaged sink. Now I'm in the midst of resurrecting a salvaged bidet.
Bidets are just uncommon enough that they fetch a pretty high price here in the U.S. Anybody who wants this special toilet fixture must be willing to pay about double the price of a standard toilet. I was lucky enough to come across one at a salvage dealer a couple of years ago for $50 and snapped it up.
My bargain bidet sat collecting dust in the barn for a while, and then it sat unplumbed in the little closet that would be its home for even longer until last week when I was finally able to devote attention to this minor plumbing project.
The first step to connecting the bidet to the rough plumbing was to solder (or 'sweat') shut off valves to the supply lines. This required turning off the main water supply and prepping the 1/2" copper using plumber's cloth and solder paste. Then, after placing the valves, I could heat the pipe using a Bernzomatic torch and apply the solder so that it flowed around the joint, quickly wiping the excess off with a damp rag.
With the shut off valves in place, I was ready to put the bidet in place by fitting the waste tail piece into the drain trap. Once the fixture was in place and the waste connection made, I installed the supply lines. These attach to the faucet and the shut off valves by compression fitting.
Now that all my connections were made, I turned on the main water supply and searched for leaks. Sure that I didn't have a leak, I opened the valves to try out the faucet.
Two things became immediately apparent: (1) the supply lines were crossed so that hot water was coming from the cold tap, and (2) the hot water tap valve was stuck.
As far as the crossed supply lines, this was something that I hadn't paid close enough attention to when doing the rough plumbing two years prior. It was no big deal really because with flexible supply lines between the shut-off valve and the taps, I could re-cross them. Unfortunately, I had used short rigid supply connectors so I would have to buy some new ones.
The problem with the frozen hot water valve was another story. My first instinct was to use brute force to try and free up the valve. This didn't work. I then decided that buying a salvaged bidet was a mistake and I should just take a sledge hammer to it. Before doing that, however, I thought it might be more reasonable to try to find a replacement valve.
A visit to the manufacturer's web site (Kohler) gave me the hint of soaking the valve in a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water. This dissolved the calcium deposits that had encrusted the valve and freed it up. (And without spending a dime!) Now I was sorry I had resorted to brute force originally because the threads that hold the knob to the valve got stripped a little when I took a wrench to it. Luckily the threads weren't stripped beyond use.
Next: Reconnecting the supply lines introduces a leak...
The upstairs was completely re-framed in renovating the house, but the
basic configuration changed only a little. The re-framing took place
so that the master bedroom ceiling could be lifted, the bathroom
enlarged, and a loft constructed for my son's bedroom.
Formerly the closet between the master bedroom and the second bedroom was a walk-through affair. I closed off access from the second bedroom and moved the door slightly so that it was more symmetrical with the door on the other side of the room. I also framed-in a closet for the smaller bedroom.
I made the bathroom larger so that tub could be positioned away from the sloped ceiling. Originally, the bathtub was tucked in against the knee wall which prevented it from being used as a shower.
One small luxury we decided to add in the renovation of our modest home is a bidet. This is a handy toilet fixture that Americans have never quite gotten used to. Simply put, it allows you to wash your private parts without having to take a complete shower or bath. I might argue that it's a way of conserving water, but I don't have any real statistics to back that up.
The bidet will go in a little closet off the Master Bedroom. I roughed-in the plumbing for this feature two years ago when I plumbed for the laundry downstairs. The first order of business towards installing the bidet was finishing the floor.
We originally wanted to lay down a kind of rubberized industrial floor as a fun solution to this little bidet room but as we started to look into the cost, we backed away. The area is only 9 square feet but the cost of materials alone was going to be around $100. For a space that was going to be taken up mostly by the bidet itself, and in a time when the budget is tight, that was more than we wanted to spend.
Looking into cheaper solutions of vinyl tiles, we couldn't find a color or pattern we liked without having to order an entire box. We decided that a painted wood floor will be fine I had some scraps of luan in the barn, and decided that it would be sufficient to cover the uneven floorboards and provide a smooth surface for painting.
After placing the luan I installed baseboard and door casings around the inside of the door. I primed everything and then put two coats of semi-gloss latex on the baseboards and casing. On the floor, I put two coats of latex and two additional coats of clear high gloss urethane to make it easy to clean.
With the carpentry and painting done, I'm ready to hook up the bidet....
handyman
I had to pull the sink vanity out of the bathroom in order to do the caulking job I spoke of in the last post. So I took the opportunity to address some of the issues with that.
I got the sink from a salvage company. I was told that it's a cast-off from a renovation of the Park Plaza hotel in Boston. I think what drew me most to the sink was the cute little soap dish on a pedestal. Originally the sink itself was on a pedestal but that was lost somewhere between the Park Plaza in Boston and the salvage company in White River Junction Vermont. So I have a pedestal soap dish on sink with no pedestal. Welcome to the world of recycled building supplies.
 When it came time to put the sink to use, I looked around some for an appropriate pedestal replacement but couldn't find one. Then I remembered that I had an old cabinet for a treadle sewing machine that we used to use to hide our little TV. I decided that it would make for a good sink vanity if I cut a larger hole in the top and a couple of holes in the back for the plumbing.
I did that some months ago and applied several coats of polyurethane to protect it from the moisture in the bathroom. The cabinet is a bit a shabby but it has charm. It worked OK as sink vanity.
 The were a couple problems with it beyond its shabbiness though. The door was made to open in a way that made it easy to work the sewing machine's treadle but this aspect didn't function well in our bathroom as you can see by the picture. The door hit the tub before it could be opened all the way. Also, I found that my size 11 feet would always bang up against the front of the cabinet whenever I tried to get close to the sink.
I decided I would try to fix the door issue by moving the hinge to where it is usually on a cabinet. This meant carefully taking apart the door, using part of it to reconstruct the left-hand side of the cabinet, and then installing hinges at the corner.
 That all went pretty well. I was able to screw the pieces together in a way that keeps the screws hidden, and I found hinges that fit well on the narrow side piece. I also added a little magnetic door catch to keep the door closed.
Then I decided to build a plinth for the base of the cabinet. This raised the cabinet a few inches and provided a place for my toes when I belly up to the sink.
The finished product is still far from perfect, but it's definitely one of kind.
I was sitting downstairs congratulating myself on finishing work on the upstairs bathroom when I suddenly heard a drip, drip, drip. Water was dripping from the unfinished living room ceiling onto the floor!
 My son was taking a bath upstairs and my wife was in there washing his hair. My first thought was that the plumbing was leaking and that I would have to destroy the entire house and all my work of the last three years to fix it. (I tend to overreact in these situations.) It turns out that my wife had splashed more than a little water on the floor and didn't get it all mopped up quickly. Well this was a problem. It's likely that more than a little water will get spilled on the bathroom floor in the future, and I haven't designed the living room to include any water features, so something needed to be done.
The bathroom floor is far from level. It has a pretty good slant towards one corner. Remember, this is an old timber frame house. Things have shifted and settled over the past 150 years. When I tiled the bathroom I made a decision not to level the floor because it would have required building a new sub-floor (a cost in time and material) and it would have made for a change in elevation between the hallway and the bathroom just enough to trip you up in the night. And frankly the charm of an old house comes from its many little idiosyncrasies like its uneven floors.
So how to keep the water from leaking? Well, the problem lay in where the baseboard meets the tile. With an uneven floor there are gaps along that edge. I would have to put a bead of caulk there to keep errant splashes from rolling out of the room and beyond the edges of the tile job. Don't ask me why I didn't do this in the first place. I had all intention to but simply forgot after having started up on some other job.
Caulking can be a messy business. I decided that a clear bead of caulk would look neater at a joint between natural wood and tile than white caulk, and besides, I had some clear caulk on hand. I masked both sides of the joint, donned some latex gloves, and layed down a bead.
It turned out that the masking didn't work out as I intended. Either I put the tape too close to the joint or I pulled up the tape at the wrong time. When I did pull up the tape, it pulled the bead of caulk right along with it. For the second go-round, I didn't use any masking tape and worked carefully to keep the bead of caulk neat and contained. After laying down a bead for the second time, I ran my finger along the joint to smooth it out.
I haven't gone and dumped a bunch of water on the floor to test it out yet, and after the caulk cures I will do a little test. Certainly before I start the finish work on the living room ceiling, I've gotta be sure that small spills aren't going to become big problems.
Yesterday was a long-awaited beautiful warm sunny day. I got out in the side yard and, after pausing to clean up a winter's worth of dog crap, chased line drives launched from 7yr old Ramon's whiffle bat.
Seeing me wield a shovel for the crap cleanup inspired Ramon to say, "you know dad it's been a long time since I dug a hole." I knew he was speaking literally, so I handed him the shovel and told him not to dig one in the yard but pointed him to the edge of woods.
A few minutes later he returned and said he buried a treasure and wanted to show me, so I ventured to the edge of the property and surveyed his work. The spot of his treasure was neatly marked with a pair of crossed sticks, but right next to his treasure hole was something that, in my borderline pathetic handyman scavenger way, got me even more excited: an old pile of stones!
 It appears that one of the neighbors dumped an excess of small stones at the edge of the woods. This pile was disappearing under the leaves and new growth that cover all things eventually unless they're discovered by backyard archaeologists.
I was excited because the driveway was in need of some spring maintenance. I was planning on picking up a load of stones from the gravel pit so that I could fill the deep ruts that threatened to swallow beemer, but this small pile was more than I needed.
I grabbed the wheel barrow and stole the shovel back from Ramon and started in on the first bit of outdoor yard work of the season, and for no cost to my wallet or fatigue to my truck, I threw down a row of stones that will get 'this old driveway' through another mud season.
handyman
When designing a room, one of the aspects that modern living affords is all kinds of lighting options. The possibilities for lighting design are so numerous that some people have made a career of studying them and offering their expertise as lighting designers.
For a DIYer like myself, endless options can sometimes be a point of consternation. Which lighting option should I choose? How will I know if it's going to fit my needs? Is my design going to stand the test of time, or is it going to look cheesy in five years?
The answer to the last question can often provide the answer to the prior ones. There's something to be said for lighting designs that have stood the test of time. The conventional is often the most practical.
When you walk into a dark room, do you want to choose from a bank of switches and dials before taking the next step? When you turn on the lights in a room, do you want a lighting experience or do you want to be able to see what you're doing?
By now you should have guessed that I didn't get too creative with the lighting design of my renovation project. I wired the house myself with the help of an electrician friend. The only thing getting in the way of us creating a temple of light was time and money, the two things that often get in the way of temple building.
What I did do, however, was follow the local code and then I expanded on its requirements where I felt it was necessary and where cost allowed.
In the master bedroom, I thought it would be nice to have two overhead lighting options. I knew I was going to make use of a ceiling fan that I already owned which included lights. The fan and its lights would be at the center of the room. To provided another lighting option, I installed 6 recessed light fixtures around the perimeter of the room. The 6 recessed lights are controlled by a single dimmer switch.
If you just want light to see what you're doing, the center lights are fine. If you want a more controlled lighting effect, the dimmer on the perimeter lights provides that. Of course there are bedside lamps as well, though they are not hard-wired.
I'm on the lighting tip because this evening I got busy replacing the 6 incandescent bulbs in the recessed lights with dim-able compact florescent bulbs. This was not an easy task. First of all, the ceiling is high enough that I needed a ladder to do the work. Second, each of the recessed light fixtures had to be adjusted because the new bulbs are longer than the old ones and I didn't want them sticking out below the ceiling.
Adjusting the fixtures meant removing the fixture trim and loosening a wing nut that holds the socket to the canister. Once loosened, the socket can slide up and down. It sounds straight-forward enough, but the springs that hold the trim in place are tricky to get in and out, and the sliding light socket contraption is finicky. After dealing with six of them I had enough of handymanness for one night.
The dim-able compact florescent bulbs from Greenlite work pretty well, though one of the six malfunctioned and will have to be returned. They also emit a slight buzz when they're dimmed low. I'm reserving final judgement until after we've used them for a while.
Almost all our light fixtures now have compact florescent bulbs. This is just another way we're saving green by living green.
Last week I got started on painting the upstairs bathroom. This is (more or less) the last step to finishing this room. The idea of actually finishing work on one of the rooms in the house has got me re-invigorated in renovating. A glimmer of light appears at the end of the tunnel.
The walls in the upstairs bathroom are surfaced with veneer plaster. This gives the walls a nice texture and an old-fashion look. The original walls, which had to be demolished in order to update the house with insulation, modern wiring, and plumbing, were all covered with 19th century horsehair plaster and lathe. The veneer plaster helps to maintain the house's original appeal.
When I painted the two bedrooms that are also finished in veneer plaster, I applied two coats of acrylic latex paint over primer using a roller
--the standard paint job. The rooms came out fine, but the latex paint flattened-out the texture of the veneer plaster, and a little of the rough-hewn charm of the walls was lost.
With the bathroom, I decided to try applying a wash-- thinning the paint to a watery texture so that it would soak into the wall more than coat it with a layer.
The first step was protecting the other surfaces from splatters. Latex paint in its basic form is pretty easy to control so a few drop cloths can usually keep you out of trouble. Applying a wash, though, means thinned paint is going to be splattering and dripping all over. I had to take extra care with masking the trim and covering the bathroom fixtures and floor. And even with all my efforts, some of the very thin color wash seeped under the masking tape and got on the trim. Thankfully it came off easily with water and scrubbing with a dobie pad.
Once I had everything masked (which included removing the light fixtures and wall switch plates etc.) I was ready try out applying the wash.
I referred to the book, "Paint Magic" by Jocasta Innes for a brief primer on applying a color wash to a wall. She makes the point: "...expect the first coat to look a mess. The next coat makes a miraculous difference -- the color suddenly comes alive, and the walls knit together with the inimitable radiance that watercolor alone can give."
I'm not sure that our bathroom walls have an inimitable radiance, but they turned out looking pretty good. Without the encouragement that the second coat would improve the look, I would probably have freaked out some. The first coat looked bad.
I applied the wash with a large brush using a criss-cross motion, making sure to brush out any drips as they ran down the wall. The thinned paint dries very quickly and drips have a tendency to show through.
All the brushing was hard work. I found myself having to take a break after coating each wall. I also found it was helpful to wrap a small rag around the brush handle when working up high. That helped to keep the watery mixture from running down my arm.
One of the recurring thoughts I've had through this renovation project is that I'm at best an amateur at every task I undertake. It's pretty satisfying when the results look professional.
At various times over the course of this project I've maintained project plans, to-do lists, punch lists, spreadsheets, you name it. I'll be cooking up another one soon I'm sure, but over the past few days, all I had to do was turn around and another task was begging for attention, so I started knocking them off one by one.
The vent box got three coats of poly-urethane along with the wainscoating and trim in the upstairs bathroom. The woodwork there was left unfinished for a while. Clear-coating surfaces can be tricky because it's not always easy to see which areas you've covered while you're working, especially during the first coat which gets quickly soaked into the wood.
One thing that's important to remember when clear-coating is not to shake the can when mixing. This stuff should be treated the opposite of a James Bond Martini: stirred not shaken. And when stirring, be careful not to introduce air bubbles into the mix. You'll be sorry if those tiny bubbles appear on the newly finished surface.
After completing the wood finishing, it was time to install some shelves in the boy's closet. These Closetmaid wire shelves came by way of a neighbor who was re-modeling them out of their house and into ours. This task was pretty straight-forward: (a) use a tape measure and a level to mark the walls where the shelf anchors will go, (b) drill holes for the hollow wall anchors, (c) insert the anchors and then mount the shelves.
Hollow wall anchors always make me nervous. I guess I've had the experience of hollow wall anchor disasters enough that I'm always expecting the worst. More than once I've drilled a hole that's too small for the anchor only to correct it by making a hole too big and having to either patch the hole or drive 10 miles to the hardware store for a larger size anchor. This recent wall anchor assignment went ok.
With the shelves mounted it was time to work on the leaky shower head in the downstairs bath. I re-installed the original shower head because the plastic, chrome painted head/bracket for our hand-held wand had developed a small crack. Until I can find a suitable replacement for the cheap plastic thingy we'll have to live with conventional showers sans massage.
 Then, in the master bedroom I installed a shade for the skylight. The shade is made especially for the Velux window. It sat in the box for over a year since I installed the window. Don't ask me why. I'm not sure how often we'll use it because we've come to like having the window unshaded all the time. I suppose there may be an afternoon when we'll want a darkened room.
And if all that wasn't enough, I started in on painting the upstairs bathroom. If all goes well this week, that could become the first completed room in the renovation project. All the other rooms still need window and door trim at the least.
One of the problems with lists is having to face the reality of the work ahead. That may be why I haven't kept my lists up to date. All I have to do, though, is take a look around and there's a project waiting completion.
handyman
The renovation project that I started 3 years ago was more than just a house renovation project. It was also a lifestyle renovation project to some extant.
Living in the country in the Northeast requires a large carbon footprint if you don't work to shrink it. First of all we have to drive a lot. My wife works 25 miles away, and my other job (besides renovator/homemaker) is 10 miles away. The nearest commercial center for provisions is also 10 miles away. We try to limit our driving by carpooling and bicycling whenever possible but there's no getting around burning a lot of gasoline.
Heating our home also requires a lot of energy. When we started renovating the house I made the decision to install a wood stove, hoping to supplement the heat provided by the fossil fuel furnace. I'm happy to have made the move to wood, but only by doing it did I learn the amount of work it takes to rely on wood heat.
Once we got used to using the wood stove, we decide to use it as our primary heating source. This past winter I kept the thermostat for the furnace at 62 degrees fahrenheit and kept a fire going in the wood stove whenever we were home and not sleeping. The rooms near the wood stove were always cozy and with the installation of my air recirculating fan and ductwork, the other rooms stayed warmish.
Burning wood has saved us a lot in oil fuel costs and helps to decrease our carbon footprint considerably. As winter turns to spring, though, I'm eager to take a break from loading wood into the barn and splitting it up. Sometimes the wood gets wet too, and there's nothing as frustrating as trying to get a fire started on a cold morning with wood that's a little wet or hasn't been quite seasoned enough.
And as the neatly stacked piles of wood dwindle, the empty rows remind me of the splitting and stacking that comes with the warm weather. Wood work chores leaves less time for leisure but there's not many jobs more honest than working for your winter warmth.
handyman
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I had just solved the problem of a frozen faucet valve by soaking the valve parts in a 50/50 solution of vinegar and water. My bargain bidet was going to work out OK after all. There was just one more thing to fix and this project of installing a bidet would be complete.
I could have left it with the hot and cold reversed, but that would mean joining the world of reverse plumbing whenever entering the bidet closet, and who knows what other implications that would have. I decided I should do the job right, so I picked up a pair of flexible supply connectors at the hardware store and then proceeded to change out the ones I had just recently installed with the longer flexible ones that allowed me to cross the lines between the 1/2" copper and the faucet valve.
Now with the valve replaced and the connector lines crossed to bring hot water to the left faucet valve and the cold water to the right, we were ready to try out the bidet.
