Hooking up the Fixtures
The bathroom work is drawing to a close with this weekend the plumbers coming in to hook up all of the fixtures. Before they arrived, I bought all of the supply lines in brushed nickel which was a challenge because brushed nickel is not easily available and then finding quality pieces is also tricky. Once I located the lines, it’s also tricky to sort out the variety of plumbing sizes. There’s different sizes used for copper versus threaded iron pipes and to make things even more confusing, copper switches between 2 different sizes. Sometimes you’ll see the actual size of the pipe and other times the nominal size. The nominal size is the interior diameter where actual is the exterior. It feels similar to the Imperial system of measurement where a patchwork of rules from 100s of years ago still persist to this day.
I avoid doing any of the mission critical work like electrical and plumbing so I’m happy to have the pros do this part and since it takes them about 6 hours to do the job, that gives me some conslation (not for my checkbook) that this was the right choice since it didn’t look easy. Anytime you have to go under the crawlspace and cut and solder pipe, that’s above my ability. They finish up and the new fixtures look great.
Of course there’s always few issues. First is that they had to chip away some of the tile to get access to the tub’s pipes. I expected this since the pipes were tight and we tiled right up to them. For this, I’ll just stuff in some foam and then add some cement and grout to fill in the gaps. The second issue is the faucets on the salvaged sink leak. The plumbers don’t want to deal with them, so they recommend getting new faucets. I’m going to try and disassemble them and see if I can put a new washer in. Otherwise I’ll have to buy replacements.
Faucets look cool, but they are leaky.
With the plumbing done, the next profession to come in is the electrician to hook up the lights. On my end I’m focusing on finishing up the remaining woodwork. I have the main door and built-in doors that need stripping and finishing. The main door I did stain and shellac it, but I did a sloppy job with a lot of weird bumps on it. I sand it down and try applying a glaze product that is supposed to go on over an existing finish. It seems like it works OK and hopefully next week I can start working on applying the Waterlox top coat to be done with this.
Sanding out the rough patches on the door.
The built-in has 75% of the doors stripped. There’s one last door that needs to be complete stripped so I go to work removing the fiberboard veneer and then removing the white paint. This is just scraping, CitriStrip, and some heat.
Chipping away the cheap veneer top.
CitriStripping away the mess of paint and glue from the veneer top.
Most of the other pieces from the built-in have already been stripped and oiled with boiled linseed oil. The other large door has been stripped, but now needs some oiling. I do a final sanding of this door and then wash it down with linseed oil soap. After that dries I apply and coat of 40% BLO and 60% turpentine to the door. Finally after that I do a coat of BLO.
Applying the BLO.
Plumbing installed and waiting for electrical to be finished off.
Beautiful.
