Sink Repair

A few months back I did some repair to the 2nd-floor shower. I prefaced it by saying that plumbing repair is something that I approach with some trepidation, because even though it is a straightforward trade, even the smallest jobs seem to become involved projects, and the potential consequences for getting it wrong can be pretty bad.

So when I resolved to delve into why the 2nd-floor sink was draining very slowly, I approached the job with the same reservation I did with the shower. But I am a homeowner, dammit, and I can Do It Myself! This repair, like the last, involved a lot of cursing, particularly at those unknown people responsible for the state of things. Why, for instance, does the sink not have shut-off valves for the hot and cold supplies? Why would you slather five coats of paint all over the pipes and fittings, knowing that it would make it impossible to properly service the thing without chipping that paint away? Why bolt a sink to the wall in the first place, leaving the plumbing underneath exposed?

In any event I grit my teeth and dived in. I did not have the presence of mind at the outset to get a picture of the plumbing before I started. At the time, I didn't think that I would end up replacing most of it. I undid the slip joints for the trap, breaking a lot of old and peeling paint, and not a small amount of rust and corroded copper. The drain - from sink to floor had a nice, gooey, disgusting, but mercifully removable 1/4" coating of accumulated slime. This would go a long way to explaining why the drain was slow. The trap - a single cast piece of brass that was certainly decades old - had a removable plug at the bottom to help with cleaning. I pulled a nice motherlode of unidentified gunk from there, too.

Twenty minutes well spent: I started reassembling things. It was here, while tightening the last joint between the trap and the drain pipe sprouting from the floor, that things took a bad turn. My pliers slipped, and I ended up crunching a 1/4"-square window right through the pipe. The pipe, as I noticed when I had everything disassembled, was chrome-plated brass, heavily corroded, with walls not much thicker than aluminum foil. I could chip away at the edge of it with my fingernail. The coats of paint on it were probably structural. My first quick-fix solution was, of course, to wrap it in duct tape. This, however, was not watertight, partly because the crack extended into the joint, but also because it was hard to get a good purchase on the old paint.

The real solution was to lop the pipe off and hope that it was more sound a few inches below. However, this meant that I would need to somehow extend the pipe somewhere else to make up the difference. This spawned trip to the hardware store #1. I purchased a 6" pipe extender and, for good measure, a replacement sink drain assembly. The sink drain assembly is what mates the pipes to the ceramic bowl of the sink. There's a flange - the part you see at the bottom of the sink, which is threaded into the pipe that extends down below. This length of pipe usually also has the built-in plug that you can open or close by pulling the knob between the faucet handles. How it seals to the sink is actually underneath: a big rubber washer gets pressed to the underside of the sink with a wide nut.

The new sink drain assembly went in easily enough. The old one was very reluctant to leave, however: it had basically been frozen immobile by accumulated corrosion and grime. The resulting splatter when I broke it loose was unpleasant to say the least. But I'm a man! A Handyman! A Homeowner! and I laugh in the face of such trails!

Next came the old trap. Before I screwed the plug back into it, I started chipping away at some of the accumulated paint. I did not realize at first, but I was also managing to chip away the dried and cracked gasket that sealed the plug to the trap itself. Casting about for a suitable gasket material from which to cut a replacement, I settled on garden hose: slit it down its length lay it flat, it actually has a decently rubbery inside lining. Close Enough, I declared. And, believe it or not, this worked.

Chopping down the old drain pipe proved difficult. I first tried a pipecutter, but all it did was flex the flimsy thing out of round, which opened up a nice crack along its length. Next I tried a hacksaw. This worked at first but, as the cut progressed, the pipe began to chatter so much that I worried about breaking it more. My final solution: tin snips.

I assembled it all back together, tightened everything down, and turned on the faucet to test. It worked at first, but after a few minutes I started seeing drips welling from, well, every single joint. Cursing, and knowing that I wouldn't really be able to live with a drain that leaked that badly, I started poking around to diagnose. My conclusion: none of the joints were lined up properly; they were all slightly askew, which made it difficult to get a good seal. The root of this problem stemmed from the fact that the location of drain pipe in the floor and the sink above, and the fact that the trap that joins them is a single rigid piece, leaves little room for misalignment.

So came trip to the hardware store #2: I purchased a new trap assembly. This one, however, broke the S-bend into two parts, which can take up a lot of misalignment between the pipes above and below. For good measure, I disassembled the new sink drain assembly and, while reassembling it, applied liberal amounts of caulking. The joint where the trap meets the drain pipe in the floor received similar treatment. Then I left it to cure overnight:



So $40 in materials, two trips to the hardware store, and about five hours later, the slow drain has been fixed. A Pyrrhic victory?

Plumbing

Today I managed to pull off a bit of plumbing repair. Plumbing is something that I usually approach with some trepidation: it seems deceptively easy (just connect the pipes, dummy), yet it almost always causes me grief whenever I take it on. Plus, unlike electrical work, where a few sparks will trip a breaker and you're all set, a plumbing problem will result in a great deal of mess and possibly some real damage.

But the situation was serious: our shower was failing. Unlike our kitchen, which was a main selling point of the house, we have no great love of the bathroom on the second floor. It is cramped, it's equipment is shoddy and poorly constructed, it looks like it was finished by a 7-year old, it has no logical storage for towels and the like, and it doesn't strictly speaking even meet code (example: there are no shutoff valves accessible for either the sink nor the shower). Our ultimate desire is to gut to it the studs and rebuild it completely. However, that is no small task, and is something we plan to wrap in with other, structural, renovations that are farther down the line. So, we have resolved to live with whatever aesthetic and functional deficiencies it presently has.

But the shower was failing. The mechanism built into the tub spout that diverts water up to the showerhead was no longer sealing very well. As a result, about half the water would be diverted up, and about half would spray from the tub spout. This meant that we were using a prodigious amount of water, and yet getting very little benefit from it. What is more, the initial priming of the shower spout - that first surge of water up the pipe to the showerhead - was increasingly loud. The noise and the waste annoyed me enough that half the time for the last few weeks I've been taking navy showers.

I had poked around at the tub spout a bit in the past, but found it fairly opaque in terms of its repair options. It is one of the very particular things I dislike about this shower's construction: you can't service any of it. The pipes, joints, fittings, and all crucial workings are sealed within the stud wall separating it from the toilet, and so there is no possibility of accessing them without half-tearing the wall apart. When we do embark on our grand renovation, I shall be sure that a proper access panel or three gets added, and all of the plumbing fixtures replaced with more sensible hardware.

Today I did finally resolve to figure out what was going on. Failing at that, I'd bite the bullet and call in the plumber. After some poking around and craning my neck, and some creative work with my Gerber tool, I was able to extract the cause of the problem:


The lever you see if what gets pulled up to divert water up to the shower. As you can see, it raises a sort of gate that, presumably, shuts off the tub spout. The black gasket is what is supposed to do the shutting off. The problem is that this gasket is supposed to be a nice continuous circle, not a torn C.

Reflecting on the design of this contraption, I kept hearing over and over a line about another contraption seen in The Ghost and the Darkness:

"Are you running a high fever, man? How could you conceive of something so idiotic."

Apparently, this kind of design for a tub diversion spout is widespread. And yet to think that sliding a circular gasket like this would work as a watertight seal after the first few dozen times is ludicrous!

Unfortunately, the current state of the world is such that I would have to spend a few hours scrounging around a junkyard to be able to hope to find a matching, replacement gasket. Perhaps a plumber would have [Holy Crap! while composing this a 3.1 earthquake came rumbling through!] a drawer of them somewhere, a vast array of ten different sizes from each of a hundred different manufacturers and models, but I would have no such luck. In the end, I had to replace the whole spout assembly - a $20 part - to be able to fix a ten-cent piece of rubber. A hassle-free shower is definitely worth $20 to the family; it's not the money that irks me. Nor is it even the time it took me to fix what I hold to be a terrible design. What bugs me is that, in our modern world of mass-produced consumerism, the best way to replace the nickel-sized gasket from a cheap piece of crap was to buy...another cheap piece of crap.

And don't even get me started on the slow drain!

Cabinet Trim

Brynna's arrival sorta sidetracked the finishing steps in the bathroom renovations project. In hindsight, we're lucky I managed to get as far as I did.

But, hey, after only 5 weeks, I'm back at it.

Actually, I was back at it after only 3 weeks, when I purchased some interesting trim profiles and cut them to length. Ordinarily, one could just use a piece of 1" quarter-round molding, or something similarly easy to find in any lumber store, and install pretty quickly. However, the gaping hole into which the cabinet was inserted required, as I have said often before, a lot more than just one inch of cover. As a matter of fact, it requires about 2-1/2". So, instead of a single large piece of trim molding, what I did was stack two types. The first is a 2-3/4" baseboard molding, which is basically a flat board with a slight taper on one end. Onto that I added a 1-1/2" cove molding (in order to save on the amount of wood involved, the cove molding was made from 2" x 3/8" flat stock, rather than 1-1/2" square stock, and is designed to rest at a 45-degree angle). This stacking of different pieces at different angles is how one can produce the intricate profiles on, say, a mantlepiece.

During the following week, I stained and put a few coats of finish on the wood.

Then, every evening of last week, I said to myself: "Right, so tonight you're going to put that trim up," only to have it suddenly leap from 5 pm to 11 pm without even getting my hammer out.

But yesterday, at last, triumph!

After a lot of frustration, more curses than I would have liked for Brynna's tender ears (she actually slept through all the pounding), and about a dozen bent brass nails, I managed to get it in place. The difficulty I encountered had several causes including:

• The wall onto which I wanted the trim to sit flush against is not actually flat
  
• The non-flatness means that the miter corners wouldn't come together properly
  
• I don't own a chop saw, and my table saw with miter gauge resulted in some poor miter cuts
  
• The wall is plaster-and-horsehair, which is at once impossible to nail into, and won't hold onto a nail if you do
  
• The nails I used, brass-finished for looks, were tiny and very difficult to drive in straight
  
• I needed to basically hold onto and nail both the baseboard trim and the cove molding at the same time
  
• Gravity
  

I only hope that whoever next buys the house doesn't take too close a look at the mitered corners.

But, so long as you don't scrutinize it too much, it mostly makes the cabinet look like an elaborately framed mirror.

Much as I wish this were the end of the lengthy project, there are, still, one or two odds and ends still to take care of. The observant in the audience will notice that, despite the 2-3/4" of coverage, there's still a gaping crack between the top of the cabinet and the bottom of the light fixture. I can probably fix that by just moving the light fixture down. Probably. One might also notice that the light switch to the right of the cabinet has no cover. Because of the width of the trim, I'm actually going to need to cut away the left third of the coverplate.

Another Milestone in the Bathroom

Let there be Light!

This post is actually about a week late - I got this thing installed at last on Tuesday. I'll skip the tedious account of running up and down the stairs about a dozen times to flip the circuit breaker as I made the electrical connections and tested them. Suffice to say, it works. The image below also shows how it comes together - there is a wall bracket of trim (which also provides the necessary space for the wiring and sockets) to which the solid panel with the sockets and brass plate attach.




All that's left to do in this project, at long last, is to put some trim around the cabinet itself to cover up the jagged edge of the hole in the wall. Not sure when I'll get to that, but hopefully it won't be too much longer.

More Progress in the Bathroom

With the medicine cabinet in, I turned to what I thought the next thing on the list in the bathroom - replacing the lighting fixture above it. The one that used to be there was a bit odd, with a random wrap-around of white-painted wooden paneling, and a right-angle piece of brushed aluminum (gold color anodized). It wasn't all that bad, it just wouldn't have worked well with the new medicine cabinet and painted walls.


I did, however, hope to salvage some of the bits of it - an ethos of makers. The light sockets were just fine, with long tails, and the anodized aluminum reflector would be useful in the new fixture. The sockets came out easily enough with some pliers and persuasion, and the right-angle aluminum was very soft and easy to cut on the table saw.

It helps that, being an engineer, I have access to a really well-equipped machine shop. Tucked in one corner are four drill presses, and bits and hole saws to go with. A 1-1/2" hole saw makes the necessary cutout in the sheet metal and wood that would fit the salvaged light sockets. It does take a fair bit of time to make such a hole - one has to go slow to prevent chatter or even stalling the drill, but it does make for decent results.


Unfortunately, good equipment is only as good as the person using it. In my case, they did not prevent me from messing up the hole layout and drilling three evenly spaced holes, instead of the four I actually wanted. The wood wouldn't be such a problem, since I planned on the metal covering it up. But, there's no way to fix the botched layout in the aluminum piece. So, I had to redo it, but this time out of 3/32" brass sheet metal, since that was what was available by that point. The brass was tarnished with time, but some fine sandpaper and scotch-brite pads cleaned that up, and some clear coat over that would keep it looking nice.


Some stain and urethane finish on the wood, and here is the partially assembled lighting fixture. Some more coats of finished are called for, plus adding the light sockets, assembly, and installation.

Bathroom Milestone

It has taken a whooooooole lot longer than I anticipated from the outset, but I have at least gotten this whole bathroom project to a new milestone: the medicine cabinet is in. I got the last coats of finish on over the weekend, and put in some anchors to hold it in the wall. Hilary was kind enough to puts the screws to the hinges while I held the door up (going from three doors to one makes for one big, heavy piece of work). A magnetic clasp helps keep the thing closed. The mirror looks great, and big, too - about 24" x 32".

I still need about two inches of decorative trim around the cabinet to cover the ragged hole edge. I am also working on a replacement four-outlet light fixture to go above the cabinet (notice the bit of wire sticking out). So, things ain't done just yet, but at least things are a lot more usable.

Continuing Our Preparations...

The Von Trapp family sings...the Moose family builds!

Today, Alex was hard at work on the medicine cabinet...we're going to be attaching the door tonight.


And I assembled our new dresser, which we picked up at Ikea yesterday:



Look! Now we're a little bit ready for the crumpet!


This dresser will eventually go upstairs, in the nook with the crib (which is currently out of stock at Ikea), but we're trying to give important things a spot downstairs for the first month or so, where it's cooler and we don't have to worry about navigating the stairs in the middle of the night.

Yesterday we spent much of the day in and around Minneapolis. Ikea was a bummer because they didn't have the crib (however, we're going to have a cradle that my Grandpa built for me for the first couple months, so we can wait a bit). But then we picked up my mom, who was on an intentionally long layover at the airport, and had a very yummy lunch at the Namaste Cafe.


We also took her to visit Twin Cities Green, where we picked up a couple of things off of our registry and she was also able to order an organic mattress for the cradle. And we also retrieved a set of newborn sized gDiapers that I had arranged to buy via Craigslist...so now we have 5 of the little g pants in different colors and a bunch of the washable waterproof liners. I made up all five with the flushable liners to practice, and assembling them seems pretty straightforward. We've got some 7th Generation unbleached disposables, too, for the initial chaos. And one, single, solitary Huggie that the company sent us to entice us into buying more. That one has a little umbilical cord stump cutout.

Here I am with the orange g pants (we also have red, pink, cream, and purple):


Yes, I am rather round these days! One might say enor-moose. The crumpet will be 37 weeks tomorrow, which is full term. She may well not make her appearance for another five weeks (as 40 or even 41 weeks is the average), but the doctors would not be concerned about her development at this point. So that's a big relief. She continues to be a wonderful baby, still not waking me up in the middle of the night. We're getting quite eager to meet her, though!

A Busy Weekend

Why is it that 3-day weekends are so much better than ordinary weekends? Oh yes, because there's that whole extra day! H and I put this past weekend (and it's oh-so-nice extra day) to good use.

First, I got some work on the medicine cabinet done. The actual carpentry is pretty much done, at long last, so I've moved on to finishing. Friday I put on a coat of a nice stain onto the wood, which will end up being a close (but not perfect) match to the (veneer) oak of the vanity cabinet. It doesn't matter too much for it to match all that closely, since you won't actually be able to see the two kinds of wood side-by-side, there's a bit white piece of cultured marble sink in between. Still, it does provide some really nice color to the (real) oak of the medicine cabinet. Saturday I started applying polyurethane varnish. A couple coats of that and I'll actually be able to fill that gaping hole in the bathroom wall.




We hit up the farmer's market on Saturday. We picked up what may be the last good strawberries of the season. But that's OK, the raspberries will be in soon enough. Then we dashed off to pick up some more baby odds and ends. We have, until now, been laboring under the assumption that the crumpet will, if anything, be full term or a touch late. The possibility that she might show up early has only recently crept into being. So, we've decided to pick up those things that we would absolutely need in that event: car seat and diapers. There's are some other stuff, too, but we've got the basics at least.

Saturday was also the wedding of some med school friends of ours. They've been together since high school, and have finally tied the knot. They also put on an awesome party.

Unfortunately, Hilary and I had to sheepishly slip into the back of the church a few minutes into the ceremony. It wasn't really our fault. We went to what all signs called the "Church Main Entrance" at 2:02, only to find it locked and hear "Here Comes the Bride" playing on the organ. Who locks the main door of a church for a wedding, even if it is two minutes late? Even more pressing, what wedding actually starts on time? We kept wandering around the church, peering through doors, and every time, it seemed that the whole congregated mass was looking right at us. We did eventually make our way to the back of the church by sneaking through the attached school, and found a few other stragglers.

change in medicine cabinet

Well, I haven't made much forward progress with the medicine cabinet the last week or two - mostly progress sideways. I've spent a fair bit of time at it, and made an awful lot of oak turn into sawdust. At the heart of it is my inability to find hinges that will work well with the design, which has led to a significant design change.

The medicine cabinet I am replacing (and the commercial cabinet we intended to use originally) had three doors. The use of three doors is that you can open the left and right doors and get a sort of U-shaped mirror that gives you side views of your stylin' do. Of course, this means that none of the doors have their hinges on the vertical sides of the cabinet frame. Instead, the hinges are attached to the top and bottom of the frame. Believe it or not, finding a hinge that works well in this situation is really hard. A complicating factor is that you don't want the cabinet doors to bind up on one another as they open, so some cleverness is involved.

Really, what I ought to have done was buy hinges before I designed the rest of it. As it was, my first choice, while functionally appropriate, was far too large and bulky to work with the relatively thin bezel I was putting around the mirrors. My second choice was mechanically simpler and more compact, but required me to make some rather large cutouts in the cabinet frame and shelves to allow the doors to swing freely. Of course, in both cases, I got about 2/3 along before deciding it wasn't workable. I'd have to backtrack, scrap some pieces, and start again.

So, change in plans: to heck with three doors, I'll just do one large one. I can use just a plain ol' set of hinges for that, get one large continuous mirror instead of three segments, and overall just get a cleaner finish. I'm now more than 2/3 into building this, and I still like it.


Cutting glass is really neat. It amazes me that you can get something like glass to break predictably along a nice clean line, using a tool the size of a pencil.

Now comes a long process of sanding, staining, finishing, then assembly and installation. But, at least I know there aren't major design problems ahead. Fingers crossed!

Back to Blogging

So, we've been a bit lax about posting over the last week...it's been so busy, even with both of us at home, that we look at each other around 11 PM, say "what happened to the time?" and collapse into bed.

A few quick updates:
-We road-tripped to Chicago so that I could do the clinical skills portion of the Step 2 licensing exam. This was about as fun as I would imagine a root canal to be, involving 7 hours of graded interactions with standardized patients. I found the time limit difficult to deal with, but did remember to drape each patient modestly and to wash my hands, so that's something. The first couple of nights after the exam, I kept waking up thinking of all of the questions I should have asked and physical exam maneuvers I should have performed, but that's stopped now and I will just cross my fingers that when the scores come out in a few months, I will have passed.
-I started my community pediatrics rotation, which is wonderful. It is quite a change to introduce myself as a fourth year rather than a third year! I've had great preceptors so far and am learning a lot. We're doing a lot of well-child visits, which is a good opportunity to create a picture in my head of what healthy kids of different ages are doing developmentally (having a baby will help me out big time in this regard as well). I'll have two more weeks in this rotation.
-Alex is hard at work on the medicine cabinet. He's altered his design plans slightly, but I'll let him post on that at a later date. We won't have a hole in the bathroom wall for too much longer! The painting that he did while I was away looks fantastic.
-Jasper continues to enjoy the summer, bouncing in and out of the stream several times on our evening walk. He's doing very well with the loose-leash walking and "come," which are our current areas of focus. He's even let us sleep until our alarm the last couple of days, which is delightful!
-The crumpet has continued to be a very cooperative kiddo, not waking me up at night but nice and active during the day. We drove up to the Cities today and picked up a rocker/glider and footstool that we found on Craigslist, which is a baby gift from Art and Denny! It's going to be great, and I'll post a photo soon. My friend Beth also hosted a wonderful shower for us today, so look for pictures from that in the next few days, as well!

Water in the Bathroom

...which is exactly where it is supposed to be. Not on the floor, not on my clothes, but in the bathroom nonetheless. After finishing off a second coat of paint on Saturday, this afternoon I installed the new vanity, sink, and faucet. There were some small difficulties encountered - like the fact that the floor tile was cut around the footprint of the last vanity, so I had to shim the back of the cabinet up to be level, or that I had to cut out part of the back to get the cold water supply to fit in.




With the painting done, I can do some more tasks to get the bathroom back to normal, like removing the masking tape, bringing in the shower curtain, replacing the linen closet doors, and reinstalling the toilet paper dispenser (very important). The medicine cabinet is coming along, but there's still a fair bit left to be done there. I'll keep you posted as it comes together.

Bathroom shaping up

I have managed in the last day or two to get the first coat of paint up in the bathroom. The color, according to the paint producer, is "Cracked Wheat." It is a light shade of yellow-gold, which you can see against the white primer below. I have to admit that it appeared more subtle when looking at the color swatch. I had some angst that it would be too much, too bold, a color to put in the bathroom. Would it play nicely with the (existing) light green trim? How about the finished oak of the vanity and medicine cabinets? How would it look under the soft-white of the vanity lights (which are currently sitting in the corner. I suddenly felt out of my depth.



But, now that all the walls are covered and dried, I think it will be alright. The yellow-green combination of colors is a favorite in hobbit clothing, if that is any comfort.

And yes, the gaping hole in the wall is still there, and still gaping. I won't be able to fill it until the painting is done and the cabinet it finished. I am making some progress with that, though. I recently got the hinges I need in the mail, although laying out holes and cuts to make them fit and line up right will be tricky. That's a job for the weekend.

Dispatch from the trenches

In the few hours a day when I am at work, sleeping (not nearly enough of that), or just plain dealing with the world, I have been painting in the bathroom. At this point I have the walls well coated with white primer and ready for painting. It hasn't exactly been a cakewalk getting to this point, however. I have learned that, due to more false advertising in the dimensions of the new vanity cabinet, it is a touch narrower than the existing cabinet. As a result, in order for the paint job to look right, the vanity had to come out so I could paint behind it. On course, with the vanity went the sink (I tried to conjure a bathroom sink joke, but came up with nothing). So, ever since last Sunday, I've had no bathroom sink. Ah well.


Next came the long process of scraping loose paint and sanding around the rough edges. In the process, I learned that the walls have a skim-coat of plaster over the much harder, horsehair-reinforced plaster over the rough slats. Sanding the created a tremendous amount of dust, as you can well imagine. I set up a fan in the bathroom window to try to help suck it out.

Next came the primer - first around the edges with a hand brush, then in the main areas with a roller. Considering the relatively small amount of square footage involved, both seemed to take a lot longer than I would have expected. But, I now have gleaming white walls and a firm foundation to take up the off-white paint I'll put up next. It's a little tough to get an accurate read on how the dramatic color change (speckled dark green to gleaming white) has affected the tone of the room, since it is missing sink, medicine cabinet, shower curtain, and blinds.

Painting the bathroom was really the whole impetus for this whole project - replacing the vanity, sink, and faucet seemed a good idea to take care of at the same time, while replacing the medicine cabinet seemed necessary to match the new vanity. I am also considering replacing the lighting fixture above the medicine cabinet, also to ensure it matches. At the least, I'll redo the wiring between the switch and that lighting fixture, because it was held together with just a wrap of electrical tape. I have set the medicine cabinet aside while waiting for hinges to come in the mail, and for my glassblower colleague to clean up the edges of the mirrors I cut. At this point, I'll focus on wrapping up the painting and getting the new sink in before H comes back in a week and a half. Medicine cabinet she could do without - a sink would be a bit tougher to deal with.

Bathroom Update

The long weekend has provided some time to work on the bathroom. Between that and the knee walker project at work, I've done little else this whole weekend. Last I mentioned, I was faced with the conundrum of a purchased medicine cabinet that needed to be returned because there was no hope of it fitting into the hole in the wall. As it turns out, that particular cabinet is meant to be slapped right up against the wall - not set into it. Scanning the local hardware stores revealed no "framed" cabinets (i.e, meant to be set into a wall pocket) anywhere close to the right dimensions. It's not like medicine cabinet sizes are standardized, so unless it were new construction, I wouldn't have had much hope anyway.

So, I fell back on plan B - built my own. Norm Abram (I mean Naaahhm Abraahm) I am not, but I've got some power tools and enough experience to do a decent job of it. The only bugger of the situation is that it'll take me a fair bit of time, and materials alone will cost twice what a prefab cabinet would be. Ah well. I relish the challenge.

For some reason, I took our smaller car to the hardware store to get the first supplies. Stupid me - I could'a had the station wagon. Now I know that it is exactly 10 feet from the back of the trunk to the front of the windshield. I had to get clever to get a 4x8 sheet of thin plywood home, too. Namely: chop it in half, lash it to the roof, drive at 35 mph, and hope the winds don't get you.


First order of business - the base frame. I could have gotten fancy with dovetail joinery, except that without the proper jig, it'd take me about ten times to get it right, and being set into the wall, no one's ever going to see it anyway. Instead, I just did a simple rabbet joint, and will rely on the sheet of plywood in the back to keep the box rigid. Some work with the table saw and router, and things were looking pretty good.



The cabinet frame even fits into the hole about right, especially once I did a little extra trimming around the jagged opening.

Cabinet Difficulties

Since I now have sizeable hole in the bathroom wall right at eye level, I though I'd try to fill it. I'll still have to paint before I install a new cabinet, but it's nice to have a look.

Before she left, H and I picked up a medicine cabinet, vanity, sink, and faucet to put into the bathroom. Tonight I cracked it open. I had some difficulty sizing the medicine cabinet when we bought it, because it was tough to tell what the actual width, height, and depth of the pocket were that I'd have to fit into. The trim around all four sides threw me off - it's tough to know what its covering. Now that the old cabinet it out, it is trivial to measure.

As it turns out, the cabinet we purchased is a non-starter. I'm not sure it's really meant to be set into a wall - the trim is wrong for that. Plus, the dimensions are wrong by an inch or two all around. The dimensions of the cabinet don't even match the dimensions on the box. Compare 30W x 29-1/2H x 5-1/2D that's on the box to the 28-7/8W x 28-1/2H x 4-1/2D the thing actually measures (minus the trim).

But, we're going to need that hole filled, somehow. I'll take the cabinet back and see if there's something similar in a different size. If that fails, well, I'm kinda handy with a table saw...

A New Project

So, per the advice of a real estate agent, and our own desire to improve our living space, Hilary and I have decided to redo some stuff in the bathroom. Since Hilary is in Scottsdale, this means that I am actually redoing the bathroom. No, really, this was planned - this avoids exposing the unborn to paint and other fumes, or so goes the theory. Also, if there's going to be serious disruption in our one-and-only bathroom, it's best if only one of us, the not-so-pregnant one, is inflicted with it.

Goals: replace the vanity and sink, inset medicine cabinet, and repaint the walls to something less...uh, spongy.

The first task: remove everything so that I can paint. For tonight, this means you, Mr. Medicine Cabinet of the 1970s!

It took me a little time to figure out how this thing was held in place. Turns out it was a combination of screws into the ineffectual walls and a whole lot of caulking around the edges. After slicing the caulk around the edges, and a little persuation from a crowbar, the cabinet actually came out pretty easily.





I suppose I should have realized, given the vintage of the house, that the walls were honest-to-God plaster and horsehair. Still, it's a bit of a shock when you're confronted with the shocking horror or reality.

That's all I was able to get tonight.