Monday - September 06, 2010
How I spent my holiday
Mrs. 458, having Had Enough, has decided that Something Must Be Done. The little bathroom in this place has had a carpeted floor since the unit was built 34 years ago. In all that time it’s likely that the carpet has never been cleaned, just vacuumed. Wall to wall carpet in a bathroom is a stupid idea to begin with, but par for the course here. I swear the builders went out and searched for the laziest and least intelligent people they could find to build these condos.
So it was decreed that a nice tile floor would be installed. One that was watertight and could be sanitized. So I got out the claw hammer and ripped out the carpet, pulled off the pad and all the zillions of tacks and staples that were used to hold things down, and immediately found something strange ...
The toilet appears to be resting on a chunk of 2x10 that’s been cut into the floor. Huh? What on earth for? And it’s apparent that the wood is getting a bit manky, and that there have been (or is) some bit of leakage around it. I am baffled why anyone would do this. Why not just rest the bowl on the concrete, even if a bead of caulk was needed between bowl and floor? I had an idea, but could only prove it on the next part of the job.
If you put down a tile floor, you want the floor beneath it to be both sturdy and level. We’re on concrete slab here, so the sturdy part is taken care of. But level? Well, that’s another story entirely. I got out my big level and a marker, and found that the floor slab slopes down 7/8” of an inch to the corner by the doors. And it isn’t an even slope, as the crack in the slab that runs across the whole thing testifies to. My guess is that the builders used a narrower joist under one part “by accident” or that they didn’t do a very good job (hah!!) of getting them all to the same height. That left one edge of the slab unsupported, and it cracked. And the crack runs right under the front of the toilet. So instead of sistering up a couple floor joists with the new ones laid down properly and then installing another slab, they cut out a chunk of concrete under the lav and put in a chunk of wood. The wood was probably originally a little thicker than the slab, so the toilet would rest on it. And carpet would hide any vertical offset from sight. Mr. Holmes would not approve. [ Have you seen this latest home improvement TV show? Holmes on Homes it’s called. We are in love with it. This ace builder goes around to all these houses that were built like crap, job where the contractors ran out halfway through the job, and he and his crew fix things up by doing the job right. The garbage work some contractors do is mind-blowing. And these projects passed ( or somehow avoided ) code inspection. The only way I could improve the show is if they outed the contractor and the inspector. Those folks ought to be fired, or at least shunned. Yeah, the show would need an extra big legal team, but so what? ]
So the next step is to get the floor level. We got a few bags of that self-leveling thin cement and went to work. Today we put down the first bag, to fill in the worst part of the angle. First we had to put damns across the doorways. I cut them from some scrap lumber and covered them with wax paper, and the Mrs. helped put them in place. This will keep the thin cement from leaking out. We also rolled on a good coat of that latex bonding liquid first, and let it dry overnight. This helps the self-leveling cement stick to the slab better.
Then we mixed up a 50lb bag in a big plastic tub and poured it on. The bag says the stuff will cover quite a large number of square feet in a 1/8” layer. 12 square feet in a 1/2” thick layer. Ours covered a triangular area about 30” x 48”. Call it 5 square feet. That shows you how much slope the itty bitty little 60” x 67” floor has.
There was no point in feathering the edge of this pour, or even of troweling it smoother. The next layer will cover it right up, and be about 1/4” thick. That one I’ll smooth out. The next bagful should also cover quite a bit more floor, as it will be thinner. I guess I should be prepared for that, and have the toilet out and the wood block replaced ahead of time. I’m going to buy several new wax donuts for the bowl, because this is the only bathroom we have. I want to minimize “down time”, so if I have to take the toilet in and out several times as the project progresses, that’s okay. That’s still better than begging a potty break off of the neighbors. Embarrassing.
Tiles will go on when the floor is leveled and the new concrete is dry. The bag says this stuff needs 16 hours to dry, but we’re giving it a day and a half. We’ll go visit the relatives for a bit, so at least we’ll get some holiday in our holiday weekend.
Posted by Drew458
on 09/06/2010 at 09:37 AM
Filed Under: • Daily Life •
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