Bathroom Makeover

The guest bathroom renovation was Grandpa's big project over the past several weeks. The old guest bathroom did not have a shower, which meant that the guests had to hike across the garage every morning to use the shower in the other part of the house.

The renovation was finally completed last night. Throughout the project, I learned a lot of things about construction and developed a real appreciation for how complex these kinds of undertakings are.

This project was a complete tear-down of the existing bathroom: demolition, moving a doorway, plumbing, drywall, tile floor, paint, and re-installation of the new fixtures.


Here are a few of the many lessons we learned:

1. Always get a second opinion. When there is more than $1,000 difference between two plumbers' bids on a relatively simple job, somebody is probably trying to screw you.
   
   
2. Lowe's puts Home Depot to shame. In our experience, one trip to Lowe's is equivalent to at least two trips to Home Depot...borrowing from Andi and Brian's measure of construction efficiency. I think by this point Dwayne knows half of the staff at the Lowe's in Monroe by name. He also knows that the Starbucks next door is open at 5:45 AM.
   
   
3. Power tools are fun, but power tools with lasers are really fun. I'm actually looking forward to re-doing the fence next summer now that I have a saw equipped with a laser beam.
   
   
4. Someone else has probably had the same problem before. When we finally got the shower installed, we weren't getting any hot water. After a few minutes digging around on the internet, I read about someone with a similar problem. It turns out that the "scald guard" in the shower faucet was factory preset to only allow a minimum amount of hot water. 5 minutes of adjustment later and we finally had a fully-functional shower!
   

The bathroom really turned out great! Thank you Grandpa!!!