Schluter, Pebbles, and Shower Panel

When we were planning our bathroom, the original plan included a one-piece steam shower (something like this . But we weren't sure if it would look a little crazily out of place in our fairly old-fashioned looking house, so instead we decided to build a large-ish custom shower and put a nice shower panel in there. However, this meant I needed to make a 4'x4' waterproof room. I went with the Schluter system, which is as close to a shower room in a box you can get. The kit contains a pre-sloped polystyrene base, a drain that integrates with the base, a polystyrene curb and plenty of waterproof membrane to cover the walls and floor. You just cut the base and curb to the correct sizes (it's just foam), mortar them in place, and coat everything with the orange membrane.
Here you can see the shower room after I coated everything. The membrane (called Kerdi) is about the weight of tar paper, with one side covered with a fleecy material. You just spread thin-set (unmodified) onto the wall (backerboard or fiberglass-faced drywall like DenseArmor) and bed the fleece side into the mortar. Then you basically treat it like wallpaper and use a large trowel to squeeze any excess mortar out from behind the sheet and get any air bubbles out. You overlap all of your edges by at least 2" and they provide you with pre-made corners, so you don't have to figure out how to cut things that fit into the corner. I can never cut the squares in the right way to flash corners, so those were very nice. It only took me about a day to figure out what to do and do the whole shower, so I'm really pleased with the Schluter stuff. Since we didn't install a steam generator, I didn't have to kerdi the ceiling, but I wanted to show off our shower light.
I have always wanted to use the pebble tile and the 12 sqft of our shower room is about the only place I can afford to use them, so I went for them. Installing them is fairly easy, grouting them is hell. Ignore any recommendation about grout coverage guidance and buy the biggest bag of grout you can, you'll need all of it. You'll also need about 10 sponges and as many buckets filled with water as you can find. Then prepare yourself for a mess.
I've heard of advice to use your hands to put the grout in, but I think those people are crazy, that sounds even messier. What worked for me was cleaning as best I could with the float and then letting the grout dry longer than you normally do. I think the quantity of the grout makes it dry slower, so I had to let it set for 45 minutes or so before I could start working it down to where I wanted it. It was firm enough I had to scrub a little bit in order remove grout, but that made it relatively easy to get to the exposure that I wanted. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. Before you grout, you'll want to seal the pebble so that the grout comes off a bit easier, I used the Dupont Stonetech Sealer, Enhancer, and cleaner. The seem to be really good products, pricey, but good. The difference between this sealer and the spray-on sealers is night and day. Water beads on the grout in the shower, and no water condenses on the grout on the walls, it's pretty impressive. I also used strips of the pebble tile for an accent strip (about 4" wide) about halfway up the shower wall and a strip of little 1" tile just below the ceiling. We used a faux-travertine tile for the walls, as we wanted something low maintenance in there.
Here is the little cubby I built in. It's a bit.... cramped. I made the hole the size I wanted, then I boxed it in (-1"), then I membraned (-1/2") and tiled (-1"). So now it's a little small, but it still works to hold razors and normal size shampoo bottles. We'll have to add an aftermarket shelf to augment the storage (http://www.raficreations.com/existing_tile_installation.html).

Lastly, here's a picture of our showerpanel. It's red and fantastic (if painful to install). A word of warning, these things mount REALLY close to the wall, so cut your stub outs and install threaded (male) adaptors that just barely come out of the wall before you membrane or tile anything. I didn't do that and had a hell of a time getting things to fit.
It was a lot more work than a steam shower (which requires plugging in), but it came our really nice. We'll install a frameless glass door at somepoint, they're expensive and the shower curtain works fine for right now. But otherwise, it's ready to go and a pleasure to use.

Max Herding

As promised movies of Max running around like a fool after sheep. This was at the farm where we got Sweep, they are very nice people and seem to be willing to indulge Julie's whims.




Max is fast when he wants to be!


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Porch Goodness

Our porch languished over the winter in a structurally sound, but unattractively partially finished state. It was a little depressing to pull in the driveway everyday to see the exposed 2x10 headers and 4x4 posts.
This was a welcome sight last December after the great header replacement operation, but those bare posts got old over the winter. I had started working on the railing last December, but winter got the best of me. I was out there futzing with the railing in blowing 15 degree weather when I said the hell with it. Now that the weather has warmed up (I think it broke 70 yesterday!), it was time to get back to work. I finished installing the railing about a week ago, I'm particularly proud of how the stair railing came out. I think most people will think we're crazy for doing the railing the way we did it, but I think it looks wicked sharp.

This past weekend, I tackled boxing the headers. I got S4S 1x10 hemlock from a local mill, and got everything laid out in the driveway to prime and paint everything. Two coats of exterior primer, one coat of paint on the the ground and one more once everything was up. I ended making good use of the flush trimming bit in my router in order to trim the ends to make everything relatively neat. It looks like a different porch once the boards were up, but it does accentuate the busted up drip edge trim and the pieces of aluminum trim. I won't burden you with my ranting about aluminum trim, but it sucks. It's ugly, it doesn't work, and it generally sucks.
The first blooms have opened, our star magnolia opened up late last week. I thought we might have lost the blooms, as we had 20 degree night last week when the blooms were about to open. I was worried the blooms might have frozen, but it proved hardier than that. Apparently there is a reason that tree does so well here, it does not appear to be impressed by the cold weather.

We did a fair amount of moving tulips around as well, but we've got a couple more weeks before they'll open though we think we'll probably have fewer blooms than usual. A lot of the transplanted bulbs don't look like they'll bloom this year, but that's OK.

To completely change gears, Max had a herding lesson today! Amazingly, he didn't suck! We have some movies of him tearing around chasing sheep, I'll figure out where to post those. We'll probably stick them on YouTube or something, they're pretty funny!
We took him to Fetch Gate Farms, which is where Sweep came from. Generally speaking, Border Collies of unknown breeding and who aren't introduced to sheep at a young age are hopeless. Amazingly, Max actually appears to have the instinct. He was interested in the sheep and understood what we was supposed to do. He was a little spazzy, but everyone was amazed at him. Poor Sweep on the other hand was hopeless. He didn't know where the sheep were, and couldn't really do much. He was really glad to see his former owners though, which was cool. As many people know, he doesn't really dig strangers, so we were glad he remembered his previous owners.

Our Bedroom

I've been quite slack in putting updates here. I had my first vacation in a year over Christmas break, fortunately Cornell has year-end shutdown. I celebrated by giving our room a make-over! With Baby on the way, we figured doing it now was the last chance we'd get to take care of it for a while, so I went for it.

Here are some before pictures of our lovely room. We had green plush carpet that ran into the bathroom. We had a small closet in one corner and a pseudo-closet (left picture) that was built into the rafters. It wasn't particular useful, it was deep with no headroom, and kind of trashy. The room was also very dark, partially because of the thick drapes we had never gotten rid of, partially because of no overhead lights, and partially because of the dark carpet. So in our plan we wanted to fix the floor (it was sloopy and creaky underneath that awesome carpet), get rid of the lovely floral wallpaper, add closet space, add a ceiling fan, and improve the lighting. So we set out to reinforce and flatten the floor, put down new hardwood flooring, remove the wallpaper, add a overhead light/fan, and increase the outlets so that we could place more lights around the room.

Reinforcing the floor was pretty much the same trick as in other rooms, except here I was able to use 2x glued and nailed to the exisiting joists. The picture below on the right shows the first reconstruction. This was a new floor that was built as a second level expansion in the mid 80's on top of what was an original closed-in porch. The porch was converted to interior space at the same time. It means that the framing in this area is some what chaotic. Load-bearing walls aren't always where they should be, and things are a bit strange. The beam running parallel to the window runs through the center of the room and marks the original exterior wall. There is a faux beam in the donstairs underneath this. Most of this section was in fairly good shape, but the connections to the now exterior wall were feeble, and some of the connections to the beam weren't right. On the far right of the picture are new joists that extend and are tied directly into the joists on the other side of that beam. Before, there wasn't much holding the ends of those up.














The picture on the right shows the other problem I came across while tearing things up. All of our windows have crappily applied aluminum trim and water has been leaking through. Things weren't too bad once I got everything out. The wood was still in good shape, the drywall and insulation was gross. I replaced two of the moldier cripple studs, scrubbed everything down with bleach and caulked outside. This spring, I'll need to remove all of the aluminum trim and fix the actual problem outside. I did the floor in halves, so I left the flooring on one side, while I replaced the half by the window, then put down new OSB subfloor, and replaced on the other side. The old subfloor was (as expected) an amalgam of sorts. There was a layer of 1/4" underlayment over everything, then below that, half the floor had plywood, while the other half was the original T&G with floral linoleum on top.
The wallpaper didn't come off well, so I ended up replacing more drywall than I had intended. The ceiling is only about 7'6 in this room, so there was barely room for the ceiling fan. We decided to move the bed and placed the ceiling fan centered over where the bed would be. With the bed in place it looks fine, but it may be trouble f we ever want to move the bed. The bottom of the light is only about 6'6", so it's tight. The ceiling is low due to a mildly botched insulation job, I would have only gained 4-5" inches in trying to fix it, and it didn't seem worth it. So I left it alone. We'll just have to deal with a low-ish ceiling.















I decided to do built-in closets that would sit in the room. I glued and screwed 1/4" maple plywood to the wall behind where the closet will go and then built modular carcasses out of maple and stacked things up. As usual, I built things a little large, I made the boxes 27" deep, which is about 6" too deep. Foolishly, I took the depth of a reach-in close and used that as my dimension, but that doesn't make as much sense for cabinets at waist level. So there's going to be an awful lot of wasted space in the cabinets that are a full 27" deep and above waist height.
The cabinet that has a bottle of glue in it, is the poster child for this closet. I ended up reducing the size of the cabinet in the middle of the main closet area in the picture above. That area of the closet is where the closet rod goes, so that cabinet will be a 18" deep and 18" wide, so there's more room for a bottom closet rod. Eventually (cough), I'll build cherry face frames for the carcasses. We put 6" cherry hardwood down in here, and used maple plywood for the cabinets. I'll either use cherry or maybe walnut, something dark to set off the light cabinet wood.

Baby

Green is the new blue...or pink

Well, as most of you know, Nate and I are having a baby! I'm due in July - I'm ~ 16 weeks along - we don't know if we're having a boy or a girl yet, but we should know in a couple weeks at my next appointment. Things have been going smoothly for the most part - I've had some morning sickness but nothing that I couldn't recover from (I'm something of an expert of the boot-and-rally!). I'm glad I'm past the part where I fall asleep at 9:00 pm, and I'm getting used to sleeping on my side - even though it makes my ear hurt.
We're trying to be "green" about this because let's face it - a new person is a pretty big carbon producer. So, while we don't expect anyone to get us anything, if you do want to get us stuff, we're proposing mostly gently used or handmade items. There's lots of great stuff on your local craigslist, consignment shops, freecycle.com, Goodwill, and this spring - at yard sales. This way, your money goes to local people, there's much less packaging waste, and let's face it - the world probably doesn't need more plastic stuff from China. It saves money too! And don't forget - we don't need fancy wrapping - that all winds up in a landfill somewhere too!
So while we realize this is more difficult than just registering for stuff, we think with a little cooperation and communication it can work and be fun. Take your time, the baby isn't due until July which gives everyone lots of time to peruse the local "recycling" scene. If you look to your right, there's 3 lists - used stuff, used crib info (because cribs are one of the most recalled baby items you can get new or used), and new stuff. If you get something, just add a comment to this post (look at the end of this post for the add comment button) and we'll check it and cross it off for you! For a list of recalled items you can visit the U.S. Consumer Safety Commission at http://www.cpsc.gov or http://www.recalls.gov.

Baby Its cold outside

Well, this morning on my way to work it was -5 F, I had an apple in the back seat and it froze into mush by the time I made it to work! At least we're supposed to get some snow this week! Which is exciting. Since I haven't been able to run lately, the dogs have had to settle with playing ball with Nate and I in the backyard. When its really cold, Max doesn't like to have his paws touch the snow too much, so he tries to pick up his feet, it doesn't work so well, but its pretty funny!


But Max seems to recover, I don't think they're suffering too badly.


Maybe playing catch doesn't make the dogs tired, but I seem to be tired! And in my unguarded state, Nate is able to take pictures of me drooling on the couch!