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Home Improvement
Nov. 22nd, 2020 10:47 amWe have shower doors!
Rather, I should say we have shower doors installed in our master bathroom shower. The difference between the two statements is that we actually bought these doors in February, and then they sat in the garage for most of the year.
The reason? COVID and bookshelves. Early in the year I was collecting things for projects at Home Depot, like the screen door we installed on our lanai and everything needed to put doors into our master bathroom shower and wood for bookshelves for my office closet.
And then we spent about six months on those bookshelves, in part because it was a large project, done a few hours at a time a few days a week and in part because we had multiple breaks of between a week and a month, either because there was a lockdown or because either my dad or I was cautious about getting together because of potentially risky COVID behavior (e.g., them going to a 100th birthday party or us going to Oahu for Kimberly's seizure study).
So anyway, most of a year after we bought them, those doors are installed.
(Still loving having a master bathroom after decades of having to wander down the hallway to get to a bathroom and wandering downstairs to get to our acceptable shower.)
It actually took us three afternoons. Maybe 8 hours total. We went about 2.30-5.30 the first two days, and then lounged around and did a little work on the last one.
The first day, our big problem was that my caulk had gone bad. It had never been opened, but it had been bought back in February, and by the time we opened it up, it had partially hardened and was impossible to work with. After that, the afternoon was spent framing out the door. I had not really known if this was a hard or easy task, but once we got to the part where my dad was cutting the metal (alumninum?) frame on his table saw, I realized it was definitely something I wouldn't have been doing on my own.
The second day, our big problem was that the shower isn't level(!). I mean, it wasn't far off, somewhere between .25 degrees and .75 degrees, depending on how we measured it, but the bearings (or wheels or whatever) on the doors were very, very responsive. So after we mounted the doors, they kept rolling down the track to the bottom side of the tub. Which just wasn't useful. We searched my garage and my dad's garage for things to wedge below the top frame and finally decided to cut out a thin piece of oak from the floor trim my dad recently cut. It props up the downward side of the top frame, to keep things more level. It might eventually rot out, but if so I bet the door doesn't move as easily by then.
The third day was just caulking the doors and installing the handles.
So three days or ten months later, depending on how you count it, we have shower doors.
In the process we learned that our downstairs shower doesn't work right. The spout doesn't divert all the water up to the shower head any more. Sigh!
My dad and I looked at it and couldn't figure out how to unscrew it either. Apparently they don't just unthread when you twist them, like they would in California.
The home improvement list never ends: that's something to fix by the time we invite guests here, maybe next fall at this rate.
Oh, the flooring project. I never wrote about that. It was a fun project over at my dad's house.
The problem, you see, is volcanos. They're recent enough in Hawaii's past that we have very red dirt, which stains everything. Yet mysteriously everyone likes to lay down white or beige carpets. So the carpets downstairs at my dad's house had gotten a bit grungy over the years. (They've been here 12 years now!) So Mary requested that my dad replace the carpets in the downstairs hallway and family room with flooring (pseudo-wood). So I joined in and we did.
That was a project that took my dad and me 10 afternoons: 4 afternoons laying floor in the hallway, 3 afternoons laying floor in the family room, 2 afternoons putting down the trim, and 1 afternoon tearing out old trim and nails and cleaning up linoleum. I suspect my dad spent somewhere around the same amount of time himself: doing the rest of the prep (especially in the hallway; I just helped one afternoon in the family room), repairing and repainting the hallway and the family room, cutting all the quarter-round trim, and doing the last bit of trim laying, which ended up being a few hours.
But I helped.
It was actually a good project because I was able to help a lot, and felt pretty competent with most of the work by the time we were done.
The material is all plastic pseudo-wood that's "floating", which means that it's held down by gravity. It all (theoretically) links together if you lay it right.
That makes the laying of the flooring pretty easy ... except for at the edges of the room. We started out in the hallway, and that turned out to be the hardest work, because we constantly had to work around door frames and corners. In contrast, the family room had big spans where we only had to cut the first and last pieces of each row (to vary the spacing) and everything else was clean sailing.
I felt pretty out of my depth on day one, but by our second day of work, I felt increasingly competent. For edges and corners and door frames, I'd take the flooring strips out to the backyard, and do most of the cutting myself: measuring, then marking with a knife, then cutting with a jigsaw (really a multitool, apparently). It was very empowering.
The hardest work was down at the end of the hallway, between the guest room, the water heater closet and the laundry room. Ay. Tons of door frames, none quite the same.
Here's something I learned: you actually don't have to be that neat when cutting edges of flooring, because it should all be under door frames or trim. But still I did some scribing of weird jig-jogs around door frames that I was quite pleased with. I got pretty good at doing the short cuts, though long cuts often ended up not straight (and if we going along the "grain" of the "wood", I just let me dad do that).
So that was the flooring project, and it encouraged me to refloor our carpeted offices downstairs, in part because they'll look nice, in part because they'll be more resistant to cat vomit, and in part because they'll hurt Kimberly's messed up scar less.
For possible future projects here at the house in the near future, I have: a second screen door for the other door on the lanai, rewiring the fence in our front yard (with some fencing that my dad brought back on a plane years ago), and at least flooring Kimberly's office. I also told my dad I'd like to help when he builds some new shelves for the family room / game room that he's been renovating.
And I need to find a carpenter to build us some shelves.
Of course the holidays are pretty much here, so we'll see what gets done between now and the end of the year.
(But we get to put up our artificial tree this coming weekend, for the first time in two years!)
Rather, I should say we have shower doors installed in our master bathroom shower. The difference between the two statements is that we actually bought these doors in February, and then they sat in the garage for most of the year.
The reason? COVID and bookshelves. Early in the year I was collecting things for projects at Home Depot, like the screen door we installed on our lanai and everything needed to put doors into our master bathroom shower and wood for bookshelves for my office closet.
And then we spent about six months on those bookshelves, in part because it was a large project, done a few hours at a time a few days a week and in part because we had multiple breaks of between a week and a month, either because there was a lockdown or because either my dad or I was cautious about getting together because of potentially risky COVID behavior (e.g., them going to a 100th birthday party or us going to Oahu for Kimberly's seizure study).
So anyway, most of a year after we bought them, those doors are installed.
(Still loving having a master bathroom after decades of having to wander down the hallway to get to a bathroom and wandering downstairs to get to our acceptable shower.)
It actually took us three afternoons. Maybe 8 hours total. We went about 2.30-5.30 the first two days, and then lounged around and did a little work on the last one.
The first day, our big problem was that my caulk had gone bad. It had never been opened, but it had been bought back in February, and by the time we opened it up, it had partially hardened and was impossible to work with. After that, the afternoon was spent framing out the door. I had not really known if this was a hard or easy task, but once we got to the part where my dad was cutting the metal (alumninum?) frame on his table saw, I realized it was definitely something I wouldn't have been doing on my own.
The second day, our big problem was that the shower isn't level(!). I mean, it wasn't far off, somewhere between .25 degrees and .75 degrees, depending on how we measured it, but the bearings (or wheels or whatever) on the doors were very, very responsive. So after we mounted the doors, they kept rolling down the track to the bottom side of the tub. Which just wasn't useful. We searched my garage and my dad's garage for things to wedge below the top frame and finally decided to cut out a thin piece of oak from the floor trim my dad recently cut. It props up the downward side of the top frame, to keep things more level. It might eventually rot out, but if so I bet the door doesn't move as easily by then.
The third day was just caulking the doors and installing the handles.
So three days or ten months later, depending on how you count it, we have shower doors.
In the process we learned that our downstairs shower doesn't work right. The spout doesn't divert all the water up to the shower head any more. Sigh!
My dad and I looked at it and couldn't figure out how to unscrew it either. Apparently they don't just unthread when you twist them, like they would in California.
The home improvement list never ends: that's something to fix by the time we invite guests here, maybe next fall at this rate.
Oh, the flooring project. I never wrote about that. It was a fun project over at my dad's house.
The problem, you see, is volcanos. They're recent enough in Hawaii's past that we have very red dirt, which stains everything. Yet mysteriously everyone likes to lay down white or beige carpets. So the carpets downstairs at my dad's house had gotten a bit grungy over the years. (They've been here 12 years now!) So Mary requested that my dad replace the carpets in the downstairs hallway and family room with flooring (pseudo-wood). So I joined in and we did.
That was a project that took my dad and me 10 afternoons: 4 afternoons laying floor in the hallway, 3 afternoons laying floor in the family room, 2 afternoons putting down the trim, and 1 afternoon tearing out old trim and nails and cleaning up linoleum. I suspect my dad spent somewhere around the same amount of time himself: doing the rest of the prep (especially in the hallway; I just helped one afternoon in the family room), repairing and repainting the hallway and the family room, cutting all the quarter-round trim, and doing the last bit of trim laying, which ended up being a few hours.
But I helped.
It was actually a good project because I was able to help a lot, and felt pretty competent with most of the work by the time we were done.
The material is all plastic pseudo-wood that's "floating", which means that it's held down by gravity. It all (theoretically) links together if you lay it right.
That makes the laying of the flooring pretty easy ... except for at the edges of the room. We started out in the hallway, and that turned out to be the hardest work, because we constantly had to work around door frames and corners. In contrast, the family room had big spans where we only had to cut the first and last pieces of each row (to vary the spacing) and everything else was clean sailing.
I felt pretty out of my depth on day one, but by our second day of work, I felt increasingly competent. For edges and corners and door frames, I'd take the flooring strips out to the backyard, and do most of the cutting myself: measuring, then marking with a knife, then cutting with a jigsaw (really a multitool, apparently). It was very empowering.
The hardest work was down at the end of the hallway, between the guest room, the water heater closet and the laundry room. Ay. Tons of door frames, none quite the same.
Here's something I learned: you actually don't have to be that neat when cutting edges of flooring, because it should all be under door frames or trim. But still I did some scribing of weird jig-jogs around door frames that I was quite pleased with. I got pretty good at doing the short cuts, though long cuts often ended up not straight (and if we going along the "grain" of the "wood", I just let me dad do that).
So that was the flooring project, and it encouraged me to refloor our carpeted offices downstairs, in part because they'll look nice, in part because they'll be more resistant to cat vomit, and in part because they'll hurt Kimberly's messed up scar less.
For possible future projects here at the house in the near future, I have: a second screen door for the other door on the lanai, rewiring the fence in our front yard (with some fencing that my dad brought back on a plane years ago), and at least flooring Kimberly's office. I also told my dad I'd like to help when he builds some new shelves for the family room / game room that he's been renovating.
And I need to find a carpenter to build us some shelves.
Of course the holidays are pretty much here, so we'll see what gets done between now and the end of the year.
(But we get to put up our artificial tree this coming weekend, for the first time in two years!)