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9:15 p.m. - 2004-08-12 On The Subject of Home Repair and ImprovementThis posting is dedicated to Marn and Mom-on-roof who ALMOST have me re-inspired to pickup where I left off on the home improvement project I started two years ago. I really admire Women with tools. Good sturdy women who are not afraid to climb a ladder, pick up a hammer or handle cement. (I have not done cement yet and by Marns description, I think I never will).I live in a handy man special. As a matter of fact, it has been a handyman special for 18 years, but the place was not physically falling apart and looked good from the outside, so we just lived in it. For the first six years it didn't look so bad through an alcohol induced haze, but about 12 years ago with renewed sobriety, it started to wear on me. That is when I started learning how to use tools myself. I did all kinds of little things like building shelves in closets and my first paint job. I tore the bifold doors off of a closet and built a cabinet into the recess and built floor to ceiling shelving in a room. My bathroom was always a sore point with me though, that and my kitchen floor. The bathroom intimidated me and I thought the only way we were going to have a nice bathroom was to pay some guy to do it for us. We refinanced our home 2 1/2 years ago and borrowed extra to have a new kitchen and bathroom put in. I was happily deciding what I wanted to have done, looking at design magazines and asking other people who they used to do their construction work. Then we got the news that my husbands company was laying him off after 30 years...right in the middle of a recession. Soon, our little "extra" started dwindling away, dollar by dollar and we could no longer afford to have the work done. I already had my heart set on new decor, so I decided that I would renovate the whole place myself. I slowly learned new skills as I completely rehabbed two bedrooms. Having learned a thing or two from that experience, I decided to tackle the bathroom. I decided that since I couldn't get a new tub and new tiled wall, that I would regrout the one I had. I was able to restore the tub pretty well with strong chemicals and then took my raw hands and a grout knife and scraped all the grout from between the tiles. The next day, I applied the grout. The directions said to make sure I wiped the grout off before I let it set 10 minutes and I had every intention of doing that, but I got so engrossed in the grouting process that I did not notice the time passing. I finished the whole tub surround and then went back with my giant absorbant grout sponge to clean the excess off and guess what...it had dried fast...My tile looked like a badly frosted cake. I cried. I cried some more. I cursed myself for being an idiot. I cursed my husband for not helping. Every bone in my body ached from two days of scraping and gooping, yet I knew that I had to give this another try. The next day, armed with a razor blade, I painstakingly scraped every inch of the tile wall, re-scraped in between the tiles and regrouted the entire bathroom, this time, wiping off the excess grout more often. The result, although not professional, was very good. My tub surround looked almost brand new. I painted my old sink cabinet, bought and installed a new sink top, enlisted my husbands help to put in an Armstrong textured ceiling and repainted my old medicine cabinet. I even took the old light fixture and repainted the pocked gold parts and made that look like new and colored the walls a deep ocean blue. The last thing left was the floor. The tile on the floor had been layed 27 years ago when the house was new. I tore it up and underneath was a tar like glue called cut back adhesive. I tried every kind of adhesive remover known to man. My neighbors suggested gasoline, but I didn't want to inhale gasoline fumes in a tiny bathroom. I started scraping it and 10 days later, I was still scraping and not making any headway. This is when I found out that there is asbestos in cut back adhesive and that it was dangerous to scrape it. The guy at the local Home Depot told me that I had to cover the tar with a layer of Henry's Glue. The directions said that it could be put down over cut back adhesive and was only supposed to take 90 minutes to set up. I got into this 5 X 5 bathroom with the glue and the trowel and squatting in duck walk fashion, I troweled some on. So far so good. I duck walked along trowling the glue along the left side of the bathroom and my plan was to finish that side, turn around and trowel it on the right side and then trowel it in front of me and duck walk backwards out the door and let it dry for the 90 minutes. Well....the left side went on smoothly, I turned around in the tight quarters to do the right side and as soon as I had trowled some on, I lost my balance and fell forward into the goop with both hands. I tried to right myself and lost my balance in the other direction and went over on my butt, landing in the goop on the left side of the bathroom. I managed to right myself but I was now covered completely in Henry's Glue and the trowel was glued to my right hand. I yelled for Mike to lay towels on the carpeting outside of the bathroom door for me to climb out onto so I didn't get the glue on the rug. After much struggling, I did get the glue on the whole floor, level, and worked my way out the door onto the towels. I was forced to disrobe right there. We discovered after that, that Henrys Glue could only be removed with Mineral spirits and we only had about a teaspoon left in the can. I had to throw my clothes away, and stand naked in the kitchen, with a trowel glued to my hand, while Mike ran to the hardware store for more mineral spirits. The Henrys glue did not dry in 90 minutes. 4 hours later, it was still not quite ready, but having taken up our only toilet to lay the floor meant that we had to finish the tile that night. I had never done tile before and wore myself out with the glue troweling. Thank God for daughters with handy boyfriends. A sweet young man named Brian finished the tile for me. I now have a nicely done bathroom for under 500.00, but the job literally did me in. After the bathroom, I never wanted to pick up a tool again. The only reason my living room finally got patched and painted was because I got new furniture and it had to get done. I still have a bedroom, complete with old wallpaper that must be removed, (Oh Joy), and a kitchen job to do. I don't know about the kitchen. That old kitchen floor is looking better and better to me all the time. I'll call it my antique floor...that's it....If I go to sell the house, I will advertise that it has a genuine 1970's, antique, tile floor, original condition.....a retro look. Yeah....that's it. P. I. Yarnsmith
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