Bathroom Project Day 2

First on the agenda for Day 2 was the tub. It's the original cast-iron tub, which means two things: 1) It's heavy. 2) It can be smashed to pieces for easy removal.

I used the long handle sledgehammer to deliver some house-shaking blows. The tub was covered with an old towel during smashing to prevent sharp fragments from flying.

Before I could fully remove the tub, I cut the drain pipe. I intend to re-route it so the P-trap and drain pipe don't hang down into the future 3rd bathroom in the basement (which is where this picture is taken from).
The tub is history, and now it's time to smash the floor tile.
End of Day 2: All tile, mortar and drywall is removed. The towel on the left side of the picture covers the hole for the toilet.

A project like this is never without some surprises. Here I find a little water damage in the subfloor. It's not too bad, but should be fixed so the floor tile has nice sturdy support.

Bathroom Project Day 1

I took some time off between Christmas and New Year's to remodel our downstairs bathroom. Here are some "before" pictures:

We're not a fan of the avocado/black tile scheme, as well as the oak cabinets that don't seem to fit right.

The sink, vanity and medicine cabinet are history.

Next I take a small sledgehammer to the drywall. I had to be careful not to punch through to the adjacent room. Note that the tile sits in a thick, steel mesh reinforced bed of mortar.


I made a mess...
The ceiling drywall is removed also - could of probably lived with it, but there were already two layers and some history of mold. The bathroom didn't have a fan, but we're going to fix that. It was kinda fun punching the ceiling out from the attic.

Now that the tile is out of the tub surround, I had to wrestle out the steel mesh from the wall.

End of Day 1 progress...

Brand New Basement

The next house project was to clean up the laundry room area of the basement. The plan was to paint the floors and walls so that we could comfortably turn some of the area into storage. This part of the basement probably hasn't been cleaned in the lifetime of the house, so needless to say it needed some elbow grease to clean up.

Here are some "before" pictures. Just to warn you, it's not pretty. Whenever we dropped a piece of laundry on the floor, we wanted to re-wash it.
I guess the old oil furnace was to the left in this picture. I couldn't wait to get rid of these kiddie hand paint art pieces on the right.

The walls have been cleaned in these two photos.


Farley comes to visit.
Now we prepare for the acid etching of the floor concrete. The acid is a pretty nasty product to use, and you need to be fully protected for obvious reasons.

The respirator worked great. I took it off once because I was getting hot, but put it back on once I smelled the fumes. After the acid is applied, it's scrubbed in with a broom and sits for 20 minutes. Then it's rinsed off with water. We fed the hose into the basement, and the floors were rinsed 4-5 times. The water was removed with a shop vac.

As you can see, the floor looks almost brand new after the acid treatment.

There were some stains left - such as what appears to be wood stain and rust marks.
Now we're ready to paint. We used basement waterproofing paint (white) for the walls, and a grey floor paint.

It feels great to paint over these hand prints!

A couple coats later, and the walls are finished! It was almost painting with spackle - this stuff was really thick.

We've had dozens of uninvited residents to our basement - rolly polly's.


Cendy gets us started the floor painted started with some edging.Call me jelly, because I'm on a roll...

We plan it out so we don't paint ourselves into a corner.And about an hour and one coat later, we're done!

Mud Run Recap

It was a memorable First Annual Delaware Mud Run 5K for the Mud Daubers team, led by Coach Micah. Two late additions to the team, Jenn and Rob, led the way as we finished a respectable 60th out of 476 teams with a time of 45:28.2. Most importantly, we beat rival Teamkam.org by 15 minutes, thus winning the friendly bet between teams.

Thanks to the News Journal for allowing me to save these pictures off their site.
We decided to start with the "competitive" group, which ended up being a good decision. We anticipated a long line at the first wall obstacle, but we didn't expect it would as long as it was.
After the wall climb, the trails were wide open through the jungle portion of the race. We ran up and around trees, stumps and vines. This is where we built our distance from Team Kam. But this is also where Micah and I showed our lack of training/lung capacity. Jenn and Rob took the lead for the team, and pulled Micah and I through the rest of the race.
After the jungle run came the tunnel crawl. We made our way through these half-submerged tunnels, but not without injury. It turns out that Micah caught his pinky on the front lip of a tunnel, and suffered a tear of the webbing at the bottom of his finger. It was clear that it would require stitches, but we weren't going to let a little blood stop us from finishing. I gave him my headband to help stop the bleeding, and we kept going.
After what seemed like miles of running through the corn, we finally could hear the finish line. We exited the corn fields, ran around the parking lot and arrived at the last wall obstacle. It was a lot less crowded, for obvious reasons, than the first wall.

Then the highlight of the course - the Mud Pit. Jenn and Rob were waiting at the entrance of the pit for us, and we headed in as a team. It was lined with cheering spectators, which was very cool. But they were quick to boo anyone willing take a dive under a rope obstacle.

I was happy to oblige, and dove underneath the barbed wire. I was glad that it fake, as I came up for air right up into the wire, just like this young lady.

I found this nice picture as Jenn, Micah and I make our way over the hill at the end of the mud pit.

Here's the team as we approach and cross the finish line.

And not to deny our friends on Team Kam:

Jackson plans his approach, begins the dive, performs the dive, and lands in the Mud Pit. Jenna opts to step over the obstacle but enjoys Jackson's performance (gotta love the expression on the guy's face behind her.) Joanna is not impressed. Team Kam crosses the finish line.

New Doors

Been a while since the last blog update. The latest news is our new front and back doors are now installed. The first step was to paint the door slabs, which took a few coats. Then on installation day, we locked the cats in a bedroom and got to work.

It was a rather challenging demo of the old doors. First the door trim was removed, then I cut the old door frame and pried it out.

It took some wrestling to get these 2x8's out. The concrete stoops were cast against them, and they were about a foot down into the floor.

The back door has some similar issues, and here I discovered we had to anchor the door frames into a masonry wall instead of a stud.


Once we have the rough openings ready, the new door and frame are set in place, leveled, shimmed into place and screwed into the walls. Now the trim goes back on and the gaps are caulked. Here's the finished front door with the old door in the foreground. We still need to paint the trim white to match.

Here the trim on the back door gets nailed into place.

There's some touch-up and caulking to be done on the outside also. Hope to get this done next weekend.

My Name is Mud

It's been a slow month for the blog, which is probably due to the fact that we've taken a little break from the home renovations. The latest buzz is about an October race in Delaware... the first annual Delaware 5K Mud Run. This team race has roots in a Marine corps boot camp obstacle course in the mud. My buddy, Alex Peters, introduced the race to me, and plans to be a part of a work team. Rumor has me joining another 4-person team, so stay tuned.


Obstacles are spaced about a quarter mile to mile apart, depending on the race. There are short walls to negotiate, mud hills to slide down and giant mud puddles to crawl through, just to name a few. Fun!

After some Internet research, this seems to be a pretty popular race. There's one in the Dallas-Ft Worth area that has been going strong for 10 years. I found one in California and also Virgina. And after watching some videos of some races (Challenge Run and Mud Run in California), it looks like more and more like I have mud in my future.

Some races or 5K or 10K. Some 4 miles or 6. Some races require pants and combat boots, where some have a looser dress code and encourage team costumes. But the one common rule is to finish as a team, i.e. no man left behind just like the Army mantra.

20 Year Cycle

When movies are re-made, there seems to a magic number of '20'...as in 20 years since the original was released. It's not a hard-and-fast rule ... more like a rule of thumb. We saw this with "Transformers" which was originally released in 1986. Just for fun, you should rent the original just for the opening line in the movie: "It is the year 2005..." A few years ago, before the re-make was released, we watched the original. Needless to say, it was amusing to hear the opening line considering we have actually not yet been overtaken by robots. (Click on the movie posters for the trailer).

I found the 2007 re-make to be slightly entertaining. They went a little overboard on the robot dive-roll manuevers in the movie.
Lately we've been seeing trailers for the new live-action G.I. Joe movie (yawn). I really don't have a desire to see this in the theaters, and consider it barely rentable based on the trailer alone. It doesn't seem to have any resemblance to the original series.
The original from 1987 looks much more amusing! I'm saw I watched it as a youth, and will add it to my Netflix queue to refresh my memory. UPDATE: this movie is not available on Netflix!
Speaking of GI Joe, do you remember the 'public service announcements' at the end of each episode. The only one that I can remember is the one where we are warned not to touch downed power lines. And knowing is half the battle! Here's where to watch 27 original public service announcements from GI Joe.

Next up in the category of "20-year Remakes" is Karate Kid. The 1984 original is a classic flick and created one of the most recognizable pop culture icons of the decade in Daniel-sen. Not to mention all of the quotable lines, memorable scenes (shower curtain anyone?), signature moves (crane kick... hi-yah!) and a musical tribute with the song "Sweep the Leg" by the No More Kings. See if you can count all the cameos (I counted 5).


Needless to say I was a little disappointed to hear that a remake was in the works. Kung Fu Kid, starring Jackie Chan as Mr. Miyagi and Jaden Smith in the lead role. The movie is scheduled to be released in 2010.

Have any 20-year remakes turned out better than the original?