A quick break to decompress.
So I'm renovating the house I'm living in. There are some things that had to happen in order for me to be able to move in. I had to have a working bathroom, for example. And that was an Odyssey. Because the bathroom was tiny for no good reason. And not well set up. And badly plumbed. So there was some work involved. See, it's an old house and was probably built without a bathroom. Then the bathroom got tacked on next to the kitchen; a kind of lean-to affair. Penthouse, if you want to use the archaic form of the word. And it was designed around toilet, sink, and clawfoot tub. So it was too small for a standard tub and had a low ceiling to boot.
Then, when they added more house around it, instead of ripping out the old framing and redoing it, they just built around it. So the ceiling was still low enough to accommodate the sloping roof of the old structure. And since the floor also happened to be sloping, they cut some 2x2 strips on a wedge to level the floor. Of course raising the floor made the ceiling even lower. Luckily, this meant none of the interior framing was structural so it could be ripped out. They also did add a weird jog to the wall to allow a standard length tub, but found this odd narrow little tub that fit in the width of the old bathroom. So pretty much the entire bathroom wound up gutted. The wall sharing the back of the old house, I was able to leave. Probably should've put fresh drywall on it, but I decided not to. Oh, and because this was a makeshift, retrofitted bathroom, the pipes ran outside the wall with a clunky hollow baseboard constructed around them.
Well I was able to fix a lot of this. After ripping out about half of the interior framing the room was able to fit a standard sized tub. I decided the floor could have a little slope to it but did put down mortar a bit thicker as I was laying down the Hardibacker and tile. Redid all the plumbing in the miserable crawlspace under the bathroom. And between the tile floor and wainscot on the walls, I was able to tuck the plumbing behind a normal baseboard (I did have to router it out in a few spots). Then, because the back wall is shared with the basement stairwell I was able to cut a hole above the toilet to install a counter base cabinet so half of it is hanging out over the stairwell (it is high enough up that you can't bang your head on it) to allow a decent sized linen closet. Again, since the walls weren't load bearing and the studs on the back wall had likely rotted, they were cut off a few inches above the...sole plate? They didn't go all the way down. This allowed me to get the pipes tucked back into that wall and then I cobbled together braces for most of the studs so they went all the way down. (We'll get back to that later, as the reason for this post.) Replaced the vanity sink with a pedestal sink because otherwise the space looked too cramped and replaced the hanging mirror with a medicine cabinet to make up for some of the storage lost by the sink (the linen cabinet more than made up for the rest). Tile the tub surround, slap up the new drywall, followed by the aforementioned wainscoting, stick a narrower door on so the bathroom door can actually open in instead of out, like it had been, and get the sink and toilet back in. Paint the walls and call it good.
But drywalling isn't my forte. So along with having to do some caulking and painting the trim, I'm really should go in and touch up the drywall tape plastering. And repaint, of course. I might just ignore it, except there's one spot where I have a horizontal join between the medicine cabinet and the linen cabinet, where the stud just happens to stop above the seam--and is maybe 1/4" back from where it should be. I tried sinking a screw through the bottom drywall to catch it and pull it tight--and then slapping enough plaster on to strengthen and hide the transition but it didn't work. So that's going to force me to be honest and go back, touch up the plaster work and repaint. Also, I turned out to be wrong on the best way to have the door open for the medicine cabinet. Since this was (hopefully) a relatively simple project, it is raining out right now, and I wasn't quite ready to start my day, I decided to just git 'er dun.
Now the medicine cabinet, the door isn't set up to be moved. You just flip the cabinet over to have the door open from the other side. So that was going to give me access to fixing my framing problem (the cabinet is partly recessed. Wouldn't do that again going forward, but it actually helped out for this.) This is a simple matter of zapping out 4 screws. Except the screwgun wasn't where it belonged. Turned out I'd brought it out to the garage to do some roof repairs. So I'm out in the backyard in the rain like Arthur Dent, in jammies, bathrobe, and slippers. Got everything apart. Figured out how to pull the bottom of the stud forward so the drywall would be flush (it involved screwing it to the linen cabinet and adding some duct tape in the back). Then it was time to retape and plaster the seam. Or it would be, once I figured out where I'd put my putty knives. Found them, got it all done, got all my toothpaste and deodorant and stuff back in the medicine cabinet, and now that I've vented sufficiently, it is time to tackle the day.
Oh, I also addressed the sink. It's supposed to be lag-bolted to the wall, atop its pedestal, but I didn't do that right so the best I could manage was drywall screws, which weren't large enough or wide enough to keep things from wobbling (if I'd had some proper sized washers I might've been able to make them work, but I didn't. So while I was doing plastering, I went ahead and packed spackle in around one of the screws. (I'd have done both but they're a pain in the butt to get at.) Amazingly, it seems to be working pretty well, so I guess I should tackle the other side too.
