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closeEditor's column: Home projects aren’t as easy as they seem
By Heather Meier/of The Herald
My dad has always been a firm believer in the power of three.
If you think hanging a photo will take 30 minutes, bank on 90. A new kitchen countertop should take one day? Be sure to leave enough room for three. A deck that you plan as a week-long project, count on it lasting closer to a month.
I honestly believed I was adhering to his rule of three when I set out on my shower renovation project.
Because you never know what you’ll find behind sheetrock, I figured I would allow an entire weekend for the project to err on the safe side.
Half my shower is in the bathroom where it belongs while the top portion has been moved from its living room resting spot to the hallway to make room for the Christmas tree.
The project started out as a simple facelift. I wanted to hang wallpaper and add wainscoting to brighten up the small space. But it seemed counterproductive to do so much work and leave the 30-year-old brown and orange shower. Practically speaking, the shower would have to go, too.
It all started out pretty well. I researched what would need to be done, picked a weekend and my husband and I bought everything we would need a week in advance. When Saturday rolled around, we got up early, turned off the water to the house and started tearing down the shower walls.
A few hours in, it looked like it would be smooth sailing. After ripping down all the sheetrock, we were thrilled to discover there weren’t any rotten spots. We patted ourselves on the back and geared up for the home stretch.
And then we tried to remove the shower pan. We wrestled with that thing for nearly two hours before I broke down and called my guy at the hardware store. Gosh, he said, he forgot to tell me that sometimes you have to go under the house to saw the pipe so that the pan can be lifted out.
While my husband headed out to find a saw to use for the pipe, I studied up on the next step in the project: Replacing the shower faucet. On the box it had looked easy enough but when I opened it, I quickly learned it was going to involve cutting into copper pipes, fitting the next plumbing into place and then sautering it all together. It was all far more complex that what I had envisioned, forcing me to decide that an updated faucet wasn’t going to make a huge impact.
Exhausted, we called it a day and turned the water back on.
Sunday, my husband headed into the crawl space and cut the piping so we could remove the shower pan. With that finally done, we were able to start moving the new shower into place. It took the better part of an hour trying to angle the bottom half through the bathroom door and into its proper location. As we set it into place, it overlapped a portion of the bathroom floor. So, it was back to the hardware store for another saw.
With a portion of the flooring removed and the new shower pan in its correct spot, we stood back to survey our hard work. Finally, we could start nailing the shower rim into the studs.
Only, the studs were five inches away from where we needed them. Out came the measuring tape and back to the hardware store we went. We’re still waiting for the wood to dry but it looks like we’ll be working on this weekend project next weekend as well.