Category: Rentals, Remodels, Relocations and Real Estate

The handsome and cheerful Oscar-the-tile-guy said he and Enrique would be back at 7:00 this morning, but it was the kindly, bumbling Todd who came knocking at 6:30, wanting into my dining room to access the electrical outlet on the opposite side of the wall he was working on. Luckily, the screech of drywall being cut with a power saw had already gotten me out of bed. I had barely managed to get dressed and had not yet stumbled into my kitchen for my coffee.

The fact that I have to get dressed before I get my coffee is only the first of many challenges in the mornings nowadays. Discovering guys unexpectedly crawling around underneath my dining room table this morning was better than our emergency all-hands meeting at 6:00 yesterday morning when the countertop didn’t fit.

Yes, we are remodeling again. After taking a break, we have hired a large company to remodel the master bathroom. We didn’t give this job to Neil because he doesn’t have a large in-house crew. He has to schedule independent tradesmen for everything and is dependent on their schedules. Plus, Neil just isn’t all that organized. So everything takes longer.

Our new guy, BJ, doesn’t do any of the work himself, and either does his right-hand-man, Kevin. Instead, their tradesmen arrive early each morning, usually one or two at a time, but sometimes up to four guys crammed in that bathroom.

I’m really glad it’s getting done rapidly, but it is very stressful. The faster a project goes, the faster the problems come flying at John and I. And there are always problems, particularly in a house this old.

They initially installed the plumbing for the shower on the wrong wall and then tried to convince me it was better that way. No. Do it the way the plans show, please.

Luckily we caught it before the drywall was installed. The controls are on the right, reachable prior to going into the shower. Otherwise, we’d be unable to dodge the initial blast of cold water.

We wanted the the shower head is on the short wall, because it’s a very small shower and it was too cramped when the shower head was on the wall where the controls are. I would back up and hit my head on the wall every time I tried to wash my hair. It’s like I never learned! Retrofitting old bathrooms is definitely a design challenge.

I think that pink stuff might be some sort of water barrier. It’s quite an impressive color.

This orientation is still not ideal, because we will have shower spray in the direction of the toilet. But if it’s too bad, we can add glass to the top of the pony wall. The toilet is going back in place where it was originally, which is where that bucket is sitting. We’re keeping the same toilet, but we’re installing an electrical outlet for a washlet.

Hopefully they don’t get confused and install the new toilet I just bought for the hall bathroom (more on that later). It’s still in the box sitting in the garage next to the other building materials. Maybe we should hide it somewhere until John gets a chance to install it. The hall bath is already done, so John’s just going to install it himself.

Speaking of more work for John, one morning our irrigation mysteriously sprung a large leak right next to where Todd and Brandon were doing cutting and other staging work in the backyard.

I didn’t make any accusations – these things happen. What annoyed me wasn’t the break, it was the guys trying to pretend they didn’t do it, even though I had never even insinuated that they had. Todd kept saying it was always like that – he had seen it leaking for the whole time. Seriously guys, if you actually saw water streaming from a break in our irrigation line continuously for the past week and a half, don’t you think you should have mentioned it? In my opinion, that’s more egregious than having accidentally whacked the irrigation line.

Anyway, one more thing for John to fix.

One morning the excitement for the day was all about the wrong paint color:

At least they checked the match before painting everything that dingy dark greenish-brown. Then I had to listen to lots of chatter about who’s fault it was or wasn’t that they bought a gallon of the wrong paint. It doesn’t matter! It’s just a gallon of paint! Go back and get the right color, duh.

Then we had a false alarm when it looked like the guys were tossing out critical parts to our very expensive solartube:

But no, according to our contractor, they were just using that garbage can as a table, and our delicate solatube lens was perfectly safe and sound and not scratched (never mind the fact that that the lens was piled on top of drywall scraps and plastic packaging, under a discarded empty plastic bottle, a roll of orange tape, and a sharp metal wall grate). Grrr, can you be a little bit more careful?

I don’t even know why they had to take the lens off, maybe to protect it? Buy putting it in the garbage can? We’re not nearly ready to paint yet.

Then the pony walls were installed at the wrong height, with the outlets in the wrong places. They had already cut the wire short, so we had no slack in the wire left to move the outlets back to the end of the wall, where they had been originally, and where they were still supposed to be. Now we have an extra junction box on the wall, because by code you can’t splice wires without adding a junction box at the splice. The box will be hidden behind a dresser, but still, there will be a cover plate in the wall tile forever now, due to their goof.

Instead of buying a standard cabinet, we had our friend Gonzalo, in Taos, make a beautiful cabinet front piece that matches our bedroom furniture.

But it’s only the front piece – just the cabinet doors. We didn’t have Gonzolo build the whole cabinet box that goes under the sinks, because that part doesn’t show. We asked our contractor to build a cabinet box with cabinet-grade finished plywood to go behind the front piece.

But when John came home that night, he discovered they were just using 2×4’s on the sides, no finished cabinet walls, and they had used a crappy piece of regular plywood for the bottom. He quickly ran to Home Depot late at night to get finished cabinet-grade plywood.

Building the cabinet box is a simple task, but a bit unusual, and poor Todd was in over his head. John realized that and drew a schematic for him.

It’s often on John and I to notice the detail problems because the guys are just doing what they think they’re supposed to be doing. They’re working away, thinking everything is fine and don’t even know there’s a problem.

Until the countertop didn’t fit, and then everyone knew there was a problem. Even BJ came out for that one.

John’s drawing was correct, but Todd had installed the interior front crosspiece flat rather than on end, which didn’t allow for enough room for the sinks behind it. It was also installed too far back, resulting in the cabinet doors also being installed too far back. The resulting cabinet was not deep enough.

But most concerning was that the space between the side walls was no longer wide enough for the full length of the countertop. The countertop literally would not go into the space.

The countertop had originally fit. It was installed back when the kitchen countertop and hall bath countertop was installed; all cut from the same batch of quartzite slabs. Here it is, being installed in January. We set it on the old cabinet without gluing it down, because we knew we’d be lifting it to put a new cabinet under it later.

It lifted out fine, but now the opening between the side walls was too small to get it back in. At that point I nearly panicked because I didn’t want them to break the countertop trying to wedge it in there. Our contract specifically called out that they were not responsible if they broke our countertop because it was a prior installation and not their responsibility. The countertop is the most expensive thing in that bathroom and was my top priority – but not theirs. They were disinclined to spend days rebuilding everything just because the countertop was now 1/4 inch too long.

I was frantically trying to reach John, who is nearly impossible to reach at work. He does not have a desk phone and is not allowed to have cell phones in the limited area. He checks his texts once a day at lunchtime, and his email when he can. At first I was trying to be diplomatic about it. I wrote, “There’s been a lot of remodel issues today and I think we need to reevaluate you only being reachable once per day”. Fifteen minutes later I was getting more desperate and wrote, “We’ve got some issues and you are going to need to be here when the countertop is installed, you’re going to need to take time off…”

The countertop should have fit because the plans did not call for any alterations of the location of the side walls. But in the process of moving the showerhead to the other wall and rerouting the electrical to clear the new, standard height cabinet, they had stripped the walls down to the 2×4’s.

Except the the wall on the right, which turned out to be lath and plaster.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with lath and plaster, it’s an old fashioned way to make walls. The lath is perforated metal sheeting (imagine super-strong thick chicken wire), which is used to hold the plaster, which is a cement-like substance, that used to be used to build walls instead of the more modern sheets of drywall. It’s very difficult to cut or remove.

It’s unusual to have lath and plaster in a house built in the mid-1960’s. It was mostly discontinued in the 1950’s. Only a few of our walls have it, which makes me wonder if the 1964 build was possibly done around a smaller original structure built at an earlier, unknown date.

Anyway, the problem at the moment was the countertop didn’t fit. When the the new drywall was installed and textured on the left wall between the sinks and the shower, somehow the wall turned out to be a bit wider than it had been. The space for the countertop was now 1/4 inch too narrow. In exasperation, Todd wondered aloud if I could just get a granite guy to “shave half an inch off” the edge of our countertop! Uh – no!

Suggesting we shave off the side of our countertop to make it fit is the sort of joke BJ would make, just goofing around, but Todd sounded serious there for a moment. He was understandably desperate to not have to rebuild everything. We suspect that BJ takes it out of their pay when they make a mistake, because they are surprisingly reluctant to take responsibility for anything – even the minor issue of a gallon of paint the wrong shade. But in this case, Todd was beside himself apologizing over and over, saying he had made a major mistake and really messed it up. He was quite upset.

I figured so long as the countertop wasn’t broken, we could work through it. My next goal was to protect my precious countertop from any fallout.

After finally getting my increasingly alarming text messages, John came home to assess the issue. He instructed them to cut notches out of the incorrectly-placed interior crossbar to make room for the sinks, and cut grooves into the wall to make room for the countertop.

In the end, we lost about half an inch of countertop behind the sinks where it jutts into the back wall, and another half inch to the left of the sinks where it juts into the left side wall. But once the tile is in, you’ll never know there’s countertop buried in the walls. Also the countertop hangs over the cabinets a bit more than it should, but it’s not noticeable.

Here you can see how far they had to cut into the wall to fit the countertop in.

They did not try to cut into the lath and plaster wall on the right, which means the sinks were shifted left slightly and are no longer quite exactly centered. I don’t think it will be too noticeable.

Then yesterday morning’s issue was pencil tile.

We thought we had picked out an off-white pencil tile for the trim work around the wall tile, but when I got to Floor and Decor to pick it up, it was clearly gray.

Gray was not going to work. The cabinet is honey oak with reddish willow branch trim and the the accent tile pieces are bronze. We went with cool blue-greens in the hall bath, but this bathroom is being done in warm tones.

Did I get the code mixed up with the gray pencil tile we used for our hall bathroom? Or did it look off-white when we picked it out and now it looks gray all piled up like that? Who knows, but it was clearly gray and I needed to choose a new color – immediately! The tiling has already started!

Here’s the new pencil tile I choose, on the left. It matches the color of the base of the tile rather than the raised pattern. The new tile has a slightly different curve, so I had to clear it with Oscar to make sure it would still work. He said it would actually be easier.

But with the last minute switch, Floor and Decor didn’t have enough in stock. It’s coming, they say, hopefully on Monday. Maybe? Meanwhile we’ve got two tile guys who already started installing the tile yesterday (Thursday). What happens if the pencil tile is late?

We’ll find out next week!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.