6th Full Day of Bathroom Renovations

Since the last bathroom update we've visited Buffalo and Louisville, submitted drafts of conference papers, and dealt with assorted other work and research stuff, but didn't really touch the bathroom.  Also when we got back from Louisville they closed all the roads (ALL the roads) to non-emergency traffic due to snow and extreme cold, which gives you a reason not to go to Home Depot for supplies for your next step.  There had been some minor touching up (I closed off the hole in the decking from moving the register box for instance) but the biggest difference was that all the wet nastiness has dried out completely, as far as we can tell.  All the wood that is still in looks good.

This is from before scraping the wood clean and drying it out - from before we left for Buffalo.

This is the after bleaching, scraping and drying - looks a lot better.

As you can see from the picture above, we decided to remove the plaster from the ceiling.  We originally hoped to keep that but when touching up some of the edges to try to get a flatter surface to mount sheetrock to, it became clear that significant areas of the plaster were already detached.  It was either drop the plaster or face the likelihood of a lumpy ceiling - we dropped the plaster.  The lathes look more level and they're holding up the insulation so I hope to keep those.

 Also I got serious about electrical stuff and put routing holes through the studs that should make putting in all-new wiring a snap, complete with nail plates so nobody like me later electrocutes himself installing a mirror or something.  One concern is that it appears that this room and like, half that side of the house are on a single circuit that MUST be original - it is cloth-wrapped and mounted on ceramic insulators and it goes all over the place.  As a lot of the attic floor is already up and I dug through insulation to find all the connections  (OK there are still a few missing, but I found a lot of them). I think we're going to go ahead and replace that monstrous circuit with about three separate smaller circuits that make more sense (ie, one per room for three rooms).  I will probably leave the old circuit in place, run new wiring where it needs to be, and when the old wiring is no longer connected to anything I'll just disconnect it from the source without removing it.  I will need to pull another 2-3 strategically placed pieces of attic decking, but once that is done I don't think doing the cable routing will be that bad - most of the walls are open to the basement or crawlspace and I already have several clear shots to the attic open.  I am going to need a lot more wire though.

It is now clear that we will not complete the renovation before the end of the break, in part because on Friday we're going to visit friends in Cincinnati.  Still, I am pretty sure we are not going to have a day as dirty as today again - that was the last of the plaster.  One of these days we're going to stop tearing things out and start putting them in.

We also spent a couple hours looking at vanities, fixtures, and fittings.  We bought some things, ordered some things, and haven't decided on some things.  Most of these aren't holding us up but the plumbing items are...Ana blames me for making the plumbing 'her' project, thus assigning it her luck instead of my own notably superior luck.  Everything we wanted or needed was out of stock everywhere, with expected restocking in March.  We won't be waiting that long and have chosen different components.  Not thrilled to pay more for stuff we like less but it will all be fine in the end.