Features

Illustrations: Zachariah O’Hora

By Ezra Dyer

Imagine your dream bathroom. Perhaps it’s as vast as a Roman bathhouse, or maybe it’s Cape Cod rustic. Or it could be modern and sleek. We’d probably disagree, you and I, on what constitutes the ultimate bathroom. But I’m sure we’d agree on the definition of a mediocre one: grubby vinyl floor, disintegrating fiberboard vanity, a light fixture that belongs in Wayne Newton’s dressing room. The sink would definitely have an integral soap dish molded in the likeness of a seashell (classy!). The trim around the floor would be that adhesive brown plastic stuff you’d expect to see in a fifth-grade classroom or the RMV. Do you have a mental picture yet? I do. Because I just described the upstairs bathroom in my house.

One day in early spring I’ve had enough. I decide that the only way to learn how to renovate a bathroom is to renovate a bathroom. And I’m handy, sort of. I have Internet how-to videos and a book about do-it-yourself home projects. What’s the worst that could happen? If it all goes completely off the rails, then I admit defeat and call in the pros. That’s what I tell myself as I sink my DeWalt reciprocating power saw into the vanity. As the blade spits cheap fiberboard onto the cheap vinyl floor, I feel the flush of fear that comes when you realize there’s no turning back.

There’s hardly any need to hack up the vanity. I could unscrew it from the wall, unhook the water lines and wrestle it free. But I need to lift the sink to extract the drain pipe from the lower half of the plumbing. And that procedure is roughly one percent easier if I saw things up with a nice, cathartic power tool.

I’m five minutes into my remodeling when I nearly make a catastrophic mistake. Suppose that a stubborn vanity, in one last act of defiance, grips the power saw blade and momentarily stops it. With the blade stationary, the saw kicks my arm back. Just behind me are glass shower doors, precisely in reach of a flailing elbow. Somehow, I merely knock the door off the rail without breaking it, but there’s no doubt I just came perilously close to a trip to the ER with a shredded limb.

The rest of the demolition works better, and the bedroom adjacent to the bathroom becomes a junkyard. Out comes the sink and vanity. The floor gets diced into strips with a utility knife. I’m keeping the bathtub, since that’s actually not too offensive, but now my bathroom is nearly a blank slate.

My wife, Heather, comes home from work to find the toilet sitting in the hallway. I regale her with tales of its wax sealing ring, which I pried off with steely determination and a small measure of dry-heaving. She is impressed, I think. I’m not sure whether I told her I’d decided to demolish our bathroom. Um, surprise, honey?

I’m proud of my handiwork thus far, but my confidence remains shaky. After all, anyone with a bad temper can destroy a room, but rebuilding one requires skill. And tools. I head to Lowe’s on the first of what will become many, many visits.

My first stop is the flooring aisle. A helpful fellow asks me what I need, and I cheerfully list off tiles, cement and grout. And, I allow, I’ll need a trowel. And a grout float. And a grout sponge. And a couple of buckets. “What size spacers do you need?” he asks. I reply that I’ll need some of the appropriate size, and what are spacers? A contractor standing nearby casts me a skeptical glance and asks, “What are you using to cut the tiles? You have a wet saw?” The Lowe’s guy agrees that I should probably have a wet saw. My shopping list is growing unexpectedly long.

The wet saw is $90, but I tell myself that this will be a good thing to own. I mean, how many times have I been working on a project and said to myself, “Man, I could really use a wet saw right now”? Well, never. But that’s gonna change, now that I have the means to quickly and accurately cut ceramic objects. This is the beginning of a glorious future.

Back home with my materials, I surf YouTube to watch people tiling floors. The prevailing message in these videos is, “Tiling floors is basically quite simple, but there are a bunch of ways that you’ll probably cut your fingers off. Have fun!”

I decide to lay down the new floor underneath everything else—instead of tiling around the toilet and new vanity, I’ll just tile the whole room and plop things down on top when I’m done. On one hand, I’m wasting tiles on places nobody will ever see (like under the vanity), but this decision doubtlessly saves countless hours worth of measuring and cutting. And, as I will soon discover, the wet saw is not my friend.

My second good decision is to lay the tile out on the floor without cement, to see how it fits. You don’t want to just start in a corner and radiate out, because you’ll probably end up with weird slivers of tile on the opposite side. You center the tiles on the dry floor, then you go drink a beer because you spent so much time at Lowe’s that it’s now nighttime and far too late to begin tiling a bathroom. Once you mix that cement, you’re a tilin’ fool until that floor is done, and I want to enjoy my current sense of self-satisfaction before poisoning it with a grout-related disaster.

The next day, I dump half of a 25-pound bag of cement into a bucket, add water and get to work. If you think your bathroom’s too small, try cementing individual six-inch tiles across the entire floor. I promise you’ll soon feel like you’re tiling St. Peter’s Square. Each piece has a bar code that must be removed. Then you smear cement on the floor and on the tile, set the piece and arrange plastic spacers so it’s neither crooked, too high, nor too low. When you get near the edges, you need to measure and visit the wet saw, where you cut the tiles to the appropriate size while mists of dirty water and debris spray everywhere. At one point, I’m setting a tile when I hear the wet saw start running in the next room. By itself. From now on, I unplug Demon Saw whenever my back is turned.

Repeat the procedure—bar code, cement, spacers, cutting as needed—140 times, because there are 141 tiles in the bathroom. This means you’ll get down on your hands and knees at least 140 times. And we haven’t even talked about the grout yet. That $7,000 estimate is starting to sound like a major bargain.

I wait another day before messing with grout. Grouting, while mind-numbing, at least offers the benefit of closure. Ten pounds of grout and countless sponge-rinsings later, my floor is rendered in Italian San Marino tile with antique-white grout, and I completely understand why they went with linoleum last time. But everything looks straight, so it’s on to fixtures.

The first thing I do is reinstall the toilet. I remove the rag I stuffed in the floor’s toilet pipe, wrestle the throne into place atop its new wax ring and bolt it into place. Everything looks good. Everything except the water shutoff valve, which apparently self-destructed when I turned it off to remove the toilet in the first place. Back to Lowe’s. The valve they sell me is a larger diameter than the pipe at my house, and despite including a threaded adapter, it leaks, the water disappearing down the side of the pipe and into some unseen part of the house. Back to Lowe’s.

I ultimately return with both a functional valve and a nifty flange around the pipe to cover the hole in the floor. (I bought a circular diamond-coated drill bit to cut a hole in the tile around the pipe, but could never get it to do more than grind away fruitlessly at the tile while heating itself to approximately 2,000 degrees. Apparently, my tiles are harder than diamonds.)

Next it’s back to the store to pick up paint and a new vanity, medicine cabinet and lights. I’m temporarily confounded by the selection of light fixtures—they’re Wayne Newton Specials, every one of them—until I realize that I need to look in the electrical section instead of the bathroom section. Problem solved. The vanity doesn’t come with a faucet, so I grab one of those, too.

I paint the room in about an hour, the whole time thanking the chemists at Valspar for developing one-coat paint. As a former housepainter, I’m well acquainted with the Sisyphean feeling of futility that comes when you finish painting a room, only to start right back on the other side for a second coat. Primer and finish all in one bucket—in my opinion, it’s right up there with electricity and the invention of the phrase “bunga-bunga party” in the annals of human achievement.

The new medicine cabinet goes up quickly. The new light fixture does too, after I make about 20 trips from the third floor down to the basement to figure out which switch on the circuit breaker cuts power to the bathroom. The vanity looks like a straight bolt-in, too, until I make a disheartening discovery: no matter how I position the sink atop the vanity, the drain won’t quite line up with the pipes below. It’s just a fraction of an inch off, but it’s off. So I call a plumber to move the pipe.

At least, that’s what I should’ve done. Instead, I muscle the pipes together and screw everything into place (after a couple more trips to Lowe’s for the proper adapters). Then I seal it all up with caulking and prayer. While the sealant is drying, I turn my attention to the trim boards I bought for the floor.

This part, I figure, will be easy: Measure the sections, cut the board, nail it into place, paint it. The only problem is, I don’t have a power saw. I can sort of cut straight sections with a hand saw, but the corners will require beveled edges—each piece getting a mirrored 45-degree angle to fit snugly together. I realize forlornly that I need to buy another tool.

About $110 later, I have a Hitachi miter saw to complement my Skil wet saw. A miter saw is a terrifying instrument that can cut at an angle. The first time I bring the blade down on a piece of trim, I’m afraid it will somehow kick back and sink itself into my femoral artery. If I could operate it by remote control from another room, I would. But it cuts cleanly and, with a little trial and error, my bedroom is successfully coated in sawdust and useless wood scraps. After much more error, I have a few usable pieces of trim. They’re not a perfect fit, but that’s what caulk and paint is for. My painting skills will make up for my miter-saw deficiencies.

After nailing in the trim, painting it semi-gloss white and putting up a new shower curtain, I’ve got myself a renovated bathroom. I’m mildly amazed that I was capable of executing this kind of project armed only with a book and Internet how-to videos. I can’t walk past without pausing in the doorway to admire the neat lines of tile and the crisp fit of the trim around the vanity. I probably saved myself about $4,000. And, in my own grout-addled opinion, my handiwork looks like a pro job.

Almost. The sink leaks because the pipes aren’t quite square. I should call a plumber. But I think I can fix this. Who knows? I might even be right.