Sorry I uh...was in the bathroom...

...yes...all week, in the bathroom.

o/

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past week, its been quite busy for me. My folks all got together & decided to remodel my bathroom for my Christmas present this year (with various fixtures & whatnot taken care of by my sister & her fiance) and that's taken up a good portion of the past week (interrupted only by Christmas itself).

Initially the plan was to totally gut & remodel the entire bathroom but when we got to looking it, things were scaled back a bit. We had wanted to move the toilet and replace the sink & vanity, that is until we got some contractors looking at the plumbing in the basement. Moving the toilet would require repositioning the cast iron piping (my house is close to 90 years old, though the bathroom was added on some time later) and would be a MAJOR construction project (not including needing to remove half the deck to get at the pipes from the outside). Now I'm no plumber, but the piping under the sink always struck me as odd, and it generally elicited a 'What in the hell...' kinda response. Given that December is a really bad time of year for major plumbing projects (outside temps the past few days ran from low 30s to single digits) we shelved all of that & instead focused on the shower.

After the nightmare of trying to find a reliable contractor & negotiating a reasonable price (no small feat, especially in Tennessee) my Dad & Stepmother financed the gutting of the shower & replacing the tub/drain/shower head & getting it all ready for Mom & Bob to come in.
Left: the 'before' photo.
Middle: The shower all gutted, and tub replaced. A few things of note: There's no insulation in the walls aside from around the tub faucet which was added last year when fixing a leak after having had to get to it via an outside wall. Also, in the left corner you can see some of the original wood siding still in the joint which confirmed my suspicion that the house was originally built without indoor plumbing. We also removed the window as being a custom size & the potential of lead being present, the price to replace it was astronomical! One more thing, some of the wood has dark sections, that's tree bark, still on the wood after the saw mill, something you'll never see nowadays...
Right: Mom & Bob scoping things out.
Left: You'd never know a window had been there on the outside!
Left-middle: The bathroom will now have the only insulated walls in the house, though there's still a vapor barrier to avoid moisture build up issues.
Right-Middle: Bob's starting to set the tile (btw, Mom & Bob are retired tile contractors).
Right: Mom's cutting tile & all is going fairly smoothly.

Indeed all went relatively smoothly till the very end, but I'll tell you about that tomorrow after I have the 'finished' photos downloaded from my camera. We were all too exhausted after that last 'snag' last night for me to bother with uploading photos to facebook (for the far flung relations to see) as well as for me to get them ready to post here.

cya