Dirty business!

After a couple of months living with our toilet choices we figured it is time to weigh in on their performance.

Basement bathroom: American Standard Cadet 3

Spec:
- ~$180
- Round bowl
- 2 piece
- map score: 1000
Overall we're pretty happy with this toilet. It's flushing power is really awesome. It also has a high water spot. The water spot was a big deal for me. In our last place we had one toilet with a high water spot and one with a low water spot, and the one was filthy a lot of the time. Given that this toilet was in our basement bathroom, it's size and price were also big selling factors. The main downside of this toilet is that it's bowl is a quite small. Larger people may not be so comfortable on this toilet.

Upstairs bathroom: Kohler Archer

Spec:
- ~$350
- Elongated bowl
- Comfort height
- 2 piece
- map score: 800

This toilet came to us by chance. We were planning on getting the Cadet 3 in it's 1 piece version for upstairs, but saw that the Kohler was a similar price and it matches our vanity. Surprisingly this toilet extends the same distance from the wall as the smaller Cadet 3 (this was a big surprise!). It's basic performance is good. The map score so far has been adequate and it also has a nice high water spot. The comfort height is not so comfy for shorter people, but overall it's not a huge down fall. The main point I'd fault this toilet on is the design of the mechanism inside the tank. The chain attached to the flusher lever wraps around the lever very easily. This results in the toilet filling and filling and filling until the problem is rectified. We had a bad situation where this occured before bed and the thing wasted water all night long (all the cold water pipes in our house were dripping with condensation :oS). A quick fix with a paper clip fixed the issue, but to have to "doctor" a toilet in this price range is kind of pathetic :oP

Not bad for a month of work and ~$5k

The bathroom is basically done now. All it needs is soap/tooth brushes and it will be usable! We finally got to unpack our white towels (in storage since we moved because the upstairs bathroom is just too sketchy). Without further ado... my attempt at after pictures ;o)




Vanity and toilet. Vanity was a floor model (1/2 price, and it came with the mirror :D).




Glacier bay faucet. I *heart* this faucet. I was super amazed to see it was among the cheapest at Home Depot.




Pictures over the toilet, B&Ws of Mission hill winery in Kelowna, BC. Good memories.




Shower with clean white towels *woot*.




The kind of fallic looking shower faucet with our vertical subway tile.

We're super happy with how this project came out, especially given that it's basically all cheap stuff from Home Depot. It'll be exciting to do the upstairs bathroom where there will be a bit more budget to play with.

Shower door installed...

No pictures today... just pure unadulterated frustration. After 3 hours of cursing and staring at instructions that may as well have been printed in Greek we finally got the shower door installed. We got a Maax unit from Home Depot because it was cheap and short for our low ceiling basement bathroom... but oh boy was putting it together an exercise in frustration. We had about 2 screws strip so bad we had to use vice grips to screw/unscrew them (when the directions lead us astray). We also had about 2 screws where the heads just fell off them. Seriously, what the hell, the heads just fell off the screw as we were screwing them in. Then there was directions to put screws through 2 pieces of metal when only 1 of the pieces of metal had a predrilled hole.

*ARGH*

Basement bathroom... chugging along

The subway tiles were grouted last night. Today the walls got painted and the floor tile got started. We forgot how time consuming floor tiling is... especially when you have many holes to go around... blah.

The end is nearly in site for this room. Our main motivation right now is getting it done so we can start on the upstairs bathroom. Right now it looks like we could start demo on Easter long weekend, which would be nice so we would have an extra day off work to fill up the dumpster. I think we may be a little nuts doing the bathroom marathon like this.. but the upstairs bathroom is *sooo* gross.

Basement bathroom tiling

Today we painted the ceiling in the bathroom, and installed the ceiling odds and ends (fan, pot light, vent). In more exciting news, we installed the tile around the shower. We're super excited by how the vertical subway tile came out.






Still needs grout etc....

Bathroom Walls: part 3

This week we finished taping the walls. Today we sanded them and primed them. Our blue-sky box is looking more and more like a room we might use :D.


Post-sanding


After priming




The entertainment station! (ipod touch + beer ;o)

Bathroom Tiles

Yesterday we picked up our floor tile. Here is a picture of it with the wall tile. We're planning on doing the subway tile in a vertical pattern in hopes of making the ceiling look a little higher.

Bathroom Walls: part 2

Today/tonight we finished hanging the blue board and did the first round of taping (durabond... fun). Our blue box looks kind of like sky/clouds now..

Bathroom Walls: part 1

Between yesterday afternoon and today we managed to get the majority of the drywall/cement board put up in the basement bathroom. The rest of it will have to wait until we stick down the shower pan.




Our neighbor left his handy drywall square. It makes cutting easier, and is also good for mapping out where the studs are.







Soon to be shower.



The outside of the bathroom. This is the only finished part of the basement so it is a bit amusing to have a big blue box in the middle of a messy concrete and brick basement.

Tiles for basement bathroom

Today we went to Olympia tile to pick up some tile for the basement bathroom. We ended up getting a 4"x8" white subway tile. We had hoped to find some floor tile there too, but they didn't have anything that could match the Depot's 99 cents a square foot ceramic. We're trying to do this bathroom for as little $$ as possible, so we'll probably compromise on the flooring style to keep it within our current budget.

Overall we were pretty impressed with Olympia tile. This was our first time going after reading about it in many local blogs. For identical items Olympia was cheaper than Home Depot and the amount of styles was amazing. We're pretty excited to get on to the main bathroom/kitchen where we'll have a bit more budget to work with. :o)

Bathroom Walls: part 0.5

Well, the bathroom is starting to take shape. Our neighbor installed our plumbing and his electrician friend came to connect up all the electrical today.

Once they were all finished we insulated and installed the vapor barrier. Next up... install the pile of blue board/cement board that is occupying our porch.

Pieces of Bathroom 3

houston we have framing...

Pieces of Bathroom 2

Bathroom progress continues. So far the our neighbor jack hammered up the floor. Holes were dug to the drain line (you may remember the drain line from this post). The drain lines were all connected. Once the glue dried the dirt was put back in the holes. Today we helped our neighbour put down the concrete floor (2nd pic).

Pieces of Bathroom

basement bathroom is now officially under way...

Basement bathroom update

Our basement bathroom has hit an unanticipated snag. Our neighbor is ready to do the rough in.. but we made some unanticipated progress on another project....

In October we had our water tested by the city because we knew we had a lead service line . We tested at twice the allowable lead limit (good thing we weren't drinking the water...). We were put on a special waiting list to get our water pipe replaced (initially they said 8-10 weeks but it's been longer) and a week ago we came home to find some yellow lines and flags in the snow (pictures above, now without snow). Since then we've been waiting for the city's contractor to call to set up the replacement and quote us on getting our part of the line replaced. They finally called on Wednesday to quote us for a replacement to happen on Thursday. We were a bit upset that they didn't give us time to arrange for our own quotes to get our part of the line replaced and tried to charge us more than it needed to cost but after some bartering we agreed on a price.

Unfortunately on Thursday it rained/poured. So now we're scheduled to have our water supply replaced Tuesday afternoon.

Given that our portion of the water pipe replacement will be happening in the basement we figure it's best to get that done first and then do the bathroom rough in once it's done.

Basement Bathroom

Since we can't start doing anything on this project yet, we're brainstorming/planming what we're going to do. We finally got around to making a more accurate rendering of the layout.




Also, since this bathroom's main function is to be a temporary bathroom while we complete our main bathroom the budget for it is *cheap*. Although we are reluctant to spend big on this project, we still want it to look half-way decent. The current plan is to find an inexpensive beige floor tile, and paint the walls a light beige to go with the floors. Since we plan on using subway tile when we do our main bathroom we'll probably use it around the shower in this downstairs bathroom so any left over tile can be reused upstairs.

Next Project...

Now that the holidays are over we're getting ready for our next project....

...a bathroom in our basement.

Given the state of large portions of our living space this project may seem a bit random.. but the hope is that by building a bathroom in our basement we'll have a bit more forgiving timeline to complete the gut-job renovation on our main bathroom.

This is the space in our basement that will house the bathroom:




We're lucky that the space around the stack just happens to be an ideal spot for the bathroom. Below is the floor plan for our proposed bathroom. To save space and $$ we're planning to put in a neo-angle shower and a smaller vanity. The diagram below gives quite a bit of space for the vanity, but we'll likely end up cutting it down by ~6" or so.


We'll frame out around the stack and install an access panel, this will be in the corner by the toilet (not illustrated) so there will be some extra storage next to the toilet.