Scattered Thoughts . . .

I somehow managed to have a couple of productive days... yesterday and today... which allowed me to install the new temporary flooring in our master bathroom and our new toilet! We've been without our master bathroom since mid-January so it was nice to finally feel well enough to be productive and get it up and running again.  We had a problem with our toilet way back in January. The toilet was falling through a rotting floor. We have bigger plans for this bathroom but, at this point, we're not ready to completely renovate this room so it needed a relatively easy and quick fix. A toilet falling through a collapsing floor moved this project ahead of all of our other projects. Emergencies like this really screw up a schedule! Being forced into this repair project meant making another 'clean spot' with some temporary upgrades and repairs.  I re-framed the floor... re-framed toilet support... added reinforced subflooring... painted the wall behind the toilet whil

I started a rather small repair/renovation in our master bathroom about two weeks ago and my health is interfering enough to continue to put this small project on hold. As of today, this bathroom is still only partially usable... it sits in a vulnerable, unfinished state with bare wood exposed to a humid room (we are still using the shower daily) as I wait for my health to recover.  This time, the primary issue keeping me from this project is related to my extensive spinal injuries rather than my Systemic Mastocytosis. Although the past few days have been more about recovering from Systemic Mastocytosis problems, overall, my extensive spinal injuries have interfered with this project more than anything else. We've had to cancel a few other plans recently because of these issues as well. That is never fun. Everytime I need to cancel social plans because of my health, I worry that people will just stop inviting us to social events because we cancel our plans so often. This just a

My spine was feeling "fair" this morning... which, honestly, is about as good as it gets... so I decided I should attempt to finish up this bathroom toilet project.   I took a day or two off from this project because I needed some galvanized deck screws for me to screw down the subflooring as well as for screwing down the flange. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any among all my tools. Also, my spinal injuries were screaming at me for a break. When I placed the new toilet over the flange to see how it fits (between the wall and the flange) I realized that I forgot to pick up a new longer braided stainless steel supply hose. This new toilet is an ADA toilet so it sits a bit higher than the old toilet...  that means a slightly longer run to the tank from our toilet supply shutoff... so I needed to purchase a 16" or 20" supply hose. On Monday night, we first went to a local hardware store to pick up these rather standard building materials... that was a complete

Rotten wood cut out and framing in place... I had a productive day today. Our toilet issue in our master bathroom is just about fixed. I have a few more parts and supplies to buy before I can get anything else accomplished but today was a productive day. Boy, oh boy... this is messy, stinky work that I do not enjoy in the least! That being said, it will be nice to know that this toilet is secure and not leaking when I'm done. A couple of days ago, I removed the old toilet... I removed all the wet, nasty finished flooring (it had been ruined by the leaking toilet so it needs to be replaced)... and cut out all the rotten wood. Yesterday, for the most part, I let my spinal injuries recover a bit before tackling some more work today.  Our new ADA dual flush toilet waiting to be installed... Today, I framed the big hole in our bathroom floor with additional supports and nailers for the new subflooring. Not only did I need nailers for the new solid wood subflooring but I a

I was feeling halfway decent this morning so I spent the morning working on the master bathroom. (Having only one toilet in the house this past week is getting old already! I'm definitely looking forward to having a nice new second toilet in the house!) I had previously removed the old finish flooring to reveal a lot of rotten wood subflooring and about three layers of old, nasty vinyl flooring. Today I needed to figure out how much of the floor was rotten and remove it all. I started pulling up the subflooring with my hands... it would just crumble as I grabbed it so it pulled apart quite easily but made a huge mess. It wasn't long before I decided to just cut back enough to make a 24"x24" hole. First I marked off a 24" square... then out came the circular saw... and I started cutting... first, at only a 1/2" deep... I pulled up more subflooring...  then I cut a bit deeper... pulled out more subflooring... I changed the depth of the cut four times

New beadboard ceiling... Yesterday's exceptionally bad luck was left behind and today ended up being a productive day! I decided to install the ceiling in the new half bath. I had already pre-finished the boards for this project because it is easier to stain and poly when the boards are on sawhorses rather than on the ceiling. Gravity works against you when staining anything above you so I was thinking ahead and pre-finished the ceiling. Today, I installed this ceiling and it is looking great! The hallway and laundry room adjacent to this bathroom both have wood ceilings. We really like the warmth of the wood ceilings and plan to continue installing wood ceilings as we renovate each part of the house.  I also added a bit more drywall today. I managed to salvage just one small piece of drywall from yesterday's catastrophe. This one piece allowed me to continue on with another project too... I had to install an electrical switch box that is deeper than this thinner-th