Scattered Thoughts . . .

Leading up to Christmas, I had finished the new half bathroom (I finished it on Christmas Eve just before Sheila arrived home from work) but I just realized that I never did shoot any photos of the finish room. I had already shown some photos of this project but those previous photos did not show the ceiling trim being finished. Actually, my previous photos purposely avoided showing the ceiling because none of the trim was installed yet. Now that the trim is installed, I should shoot and post some photos of this project before it is looking a bit rundown. I had some exposed plumbing running across the ceiling over the pedestal sink that needed to be hidden somehow. I decided to hide it by building and installing a faux beam around the plumbing. This plumbing was the hot and cold supply pipes running to the kitchen.  I also hung a few photos... added a wastebasket... and some accessories. We 'settled' for this particular wastebasket because we could not find one even c

Today was a good day!   I actually accomplished quite a bit on the half bathroom today in the way of finish carpentry. I had hung the new custom door I built yesterday. Today I cut and installed the door stop... trimmed out both sides of the door... cut and installed a top rail for the wainscoting... added some architectural details... cut the wood needed for crown molding... and even masked off the new tile floor in preparation of painting.  There were a few plumbing fittings to assemble and I managed to assemble those today as well. I had two supply valve assemblies for the sink and one supply valve assembly for the toilet which needed to be put together. Since it was nice outdoors today, I managed to get those done as well.   I hope to get some staining and painting accomplished tomorrow. If that goes well, I will cut off the water supply so I can install the three valve assemblies that I assembled today. Things are moving along and I'm happy report that I made some

The door... finally cut, sanded and assembled! I finally had a productive day today! It has been a rough week or so of lousy health which caused the installation of the new half bathroom to stall for almost two weeks. Today I managed to get some significant work accomplished! I was having some cognitive issues first thing this morning so I decided to weigh my options... take another day off to recover or try to accomplish something. In the end, the weather forecast was the determining factor. The moment I saw that the rest of this week is supposed to be rainy, I knew I had to try to accomplish something outdoors in the decent weather. The thing to accomplish today was cutting up all the pieces for the custom door since this particular project needed to be done outdoors. I cut up all the lumber... shaped all the joints... and then sanded everything. By the time I finished this, it was definitely lunchtime. My stomach had been telling me the same for at least an hour at this poin

I've been actively working on building and installing a new half bath in our house over the past couple of weeks. "Actively working", considering my health, means working on it only on relatively good health days for a few hours each morning. To say this is a slow moving project is an accurate statement. One of the problems with only working on a project of this sort a few hours at a time is that I spend far too much time setting up, cleaning up and searching for tools I put away a night or a few nights earlier. Unfortunately, I don't have the energy to do anything longer than a few hours in a day so I do what I can when I am feeling capable. My health is kind of lousy today and tonight so I am spending a little time on the computer and thought I should share about a problem I had with this bathroom project over the past few days... The new drill and hole saw necessary for this small half bathroom installation. The latest frustrating problems arose while w