We removed the cylinders from the new tub/shower handles and lo! there was a fit with the old shower valve assembly (that multihole brass thingie that distributes and mixes hot and cold water for the tap and the shower). We reassembled a mix of old shower valve (very nicely connected with the pipes) and new cylinders, handles, spout, and shower, and it’s gorgeous and non-leaking.
We have, in effect disassembled our tub down to the porcelain bare holes, and reassembled it with new parts, which is every part of installing a tub/shower except carrying it into the house and seating it in its carpentry ‘nest’. We have fixed a drain 3 plumbers and the best plumbing supply store in town swore couldn’t be fixed. We have pretty new knobs, better drainage, 2 drains that work and drain briskly (the previous lever-based ones were as kaput as most lever-drains in the USA), and Jane has begun to post pictures. First a tour of the plumbing of the tub. But we have many, many more…
We are finished all but the trim, and rather than spend megabucks on prefinished or, heaven forfend, special order trim, we have figured a combination of 2 trims, one plain, one a rope that matches the rope tile border of the mural, and as soon as it warms enough for us to clean up the garage and get the miter saw out of its box, we are prepared to do a really, really nice finish on that cabinet top.
We have many areas in the house that could use some trim work, so that miter saw will see work. But not this year! We are pretty well done except the molding around the kitchen door and the molding on the edge of the new bathroom counter.
Yay us!
Happy dance! I suggest that you take a breather now that you have this latest massive project nearly completed and do something else for a bit. You have been going like gangbusters trying to get the bathroom under control for at least the last year; unless something that needs immediate attention rears its ugly head in the home improvement department, I think a change is in order. When was the last time you went skating? Time for something ‘frivolous’ to recharge your batteries.
We actually had the whole project just hanging around collecting “we could do thises” until I gave Carolyn the mirrored medicine cabinets we’d decided on for Christmas and started the chain of events to finally committing and doing. What I haven’t put up is all the stuff I did to the house in the months following my bout with anemia. They wouldn’t let me skate, so I climbed ladders! 😀 I’m now officially sick of DIY and am ready to get back to the CC site revamp and YAY writing!
Not to mention skating.
~ Congratulations! I agree with Chondrite- it’s Party Time! ~
We thought a few hours ago of how to get a filtered water output to the stainless kitchen sink [drill a hole on the sink top for another line/faucet and put a filter in-line of a hose on a splitter from the main water line]—but, y’know, we concluded we can do that next winter.
It’s snowing great fat flakes, bread is baking, it’s peaceful, and we’re pretty well done with immediate jobs, even if the office is piled a foot high with paper and bookkeeping that needs doing. We’re back on our diet of vegetables (last night we had steamed green beans, a red potato, a beet, a zucchini, a crookneck squash, rice with sweet chili sauce, and a little bit of ham…) and I’ve already dropped 2 pounds of the 8 I gained during our wild three month orgy of cakes, holiday cookies, pasta and general anything-we-want. We each have a 3-door medicine cabinet and a drawer…and we compared stuff to see how much duplicate we had bought because we couldn’t find anything in the jumble of baskets under the counter. We are set up now to start whittling away at the duplication problem.
Life is good.
Congratulations!
Congratulations and Kudos! It’s fascinating reading along with all your experiences. I hope you get a bit of physical relax time, too – amid enjoying the new bathroom of course.
I raise my mug of tea in a toast to jobs well done!
How good are you at repairing garage door openers, laying wood floors, and doing taxes? Just askin 😉
CJ and Jane, handypersons at large. No job too obnoxious.
Hey, should that writing gig not pan out… :devil:
Lol—if your garage door opener is busted, the spring on the button is probably dead-ish or a contact is gunky. Screwdriver. If the spring is gone, probably you need a new unit. Wood floor? I’ve seen it done. You tongue-and-groove it, while making sure there’s no ugly grain in the boards you leave long, and that you have no adjacent ‘ends’ within 6″ of each other: cut the others to do short runs with (I’ve done this with laminate flooring); then sand it (big machine: I’ve done this), wipe it down with a tack cloth (hands and knees: done it), and then, starting with your back to the door! you apply stained varnish (done this one, too). If you do it while facing the door, plan to spend the next day and a half standing in the corner.
Taxes? You either trust TurboTax, or you hire an accountant. 😉 Hint: we discovered a great way to get a ‘pattern’ for a tricky flooring cut. Never mind a paper pattern: they’re hard to draw, especially when working in cramped or overhung spaces. Just use aluminum foil, which you can score with your fingernail.
I rather think those three plumbers you had out were thinking to themselves, “Is there any way I can fix this that does not result in a call for me to come out and, at best, stop a leak, or, at worst, replumb it all, at 3AM?” And the answer to that was an emphatic “No!”
As long as the leak was on the drain side and not the supply side, nothing would have necessitated a 3 a.m. repeat call; that is reserved for catastrophic main plumbing failure. Even then, shut off at valve (I know both CJ and Jane know where that is!) and wait until a reasonable hour. Unless you are doing gardening or something even filthier, showers can wait a bit.
One thing I ask when close to buying a house: I want to see the fuse box (the one in this house is a right-angled wires/bright and shiny work of art) and I want to see the water cutoffs—all of them. 😉 What I find may affect my decision. And I’ve seen some real horrors in the name of both kinds of systems. Our basement is a wonderful place: the 2 outside faucet lines (which also go to the lawn sprinklers, such as we’ve left operating) have a nice convenient on-off lever, and right beside it, a little screw-out tap in a little brass fitting inserted on the line: open the outside faucet, throw the lever to closed, let the faucet go on draining the pipe, and screw out the little tap, less than dime-sized, which admits air to the line and dries it out for winter. No frozen outside faucets in this house. It’s just the bathroom plumbing that was a horror. The plumbing team that installed that bathtub and the sinks in the house was NOT up to the standard of the guys that did the main water lines. Has to have been two different crews, or they handed the apprentices the tub and sink install and left them to it.