Delaying Tactic #3 -- Redoing the Bathrooms, update

It's been a productive day on the bathroom remodeling front. Thanks to some scheduling issues with the plumber, they did the demolition on the guest bath today -- and we finally discovered exactly why the shower leaked. In short, the backing for the tile surround was regular wallboard rather than cement board or some other water-proof wall material.

In some ways, it is amazing that we don't have major water damage in those walls. Tomorrow the "guest" bathroom gets new walls and plumbing. Today it got a new shower pan.

And in the master bathroom upstairs, we also got a new shower pan put on top of that extremely sturdy subflooring. No more cracks and leaks for us!


The new shower has the same "footprint" as the old Jacuzzi tub, so it's going to be fairly large. Along that back wall, there will be a bench so lazy people like me can sit down in the shower. Also, the bench will hide that strange little jog in the corner (which is there because of a plumbing issue). Today, they built the support for the bench. Tomorrow, with any luck, the bench and walls will go in.

It always surprises me, but once things get underway, they usually move pretty quickly -- except for the kitchen we replaced in our previous house, which we lived without for 9 months. That was a lot of fun with four young children in the house.

But this whole bathroom remodeling work reminds me of a defining episode in my life -- something that happened long, long ago when the Drama Queen was but a babe.

The Wizard and I took the baby Drama Queen (whose talent for drama was as yet unknown) to visit my parents, who were living in New Orleans at the time. While we were there, the faucet for their tub broke so, as a temporary solution, we were using pliers to turn the water in the tub on and off. A year or so later, we returned to New Orleans (with the DQ, of course) for another visit. The water in the tub was still being turned on and off by using pliers. For over a year, my parents just hadn't gotten around to dealing with this relatively minor plumbing problem.

I decided right then and there that, while my parents had many admirable traits that I wanted to emulate, failing to do minor household repairs was not one of them. I was thinking about this today because, on the one hand we have been living with sub-adequate bathrooms for almost a year. On the other hand, we have been in the process of getting ready to do the bathrooms for most of that year. And we dealt with another major issue -- the kitchen -- during the same time frame. So I'm cool with where we are.

And it's going to be so nice when the new shower upstairs is done. I'm tired of going up and down stairs to take a shower.