I’m beginning to feel like Roger Clemens in front of the grand jury talking about his history with performance enhancing drugs … and his tendency to misremember.
I have the same tendency to mismeasure. It’s incurable. I don’t really get it. It just happens. Luckily it is one of those things that doesn’t really matter in DIY. 😉
As an aside, apparently mismeasure is not a word, but don’t worry, I won’t let that stop me from using it over and over again in this post. 🙂
Remember what happened with the new vanity? It’s the fatal inch. That last little bit of space that sneaks up on me.
So I really couldn’t help but laugh when the tile in the shower was done and the large shampoo bottles I built the cut-outs for didn’t really fit.
I mean, they fit. But you can’t exactly pump the product out of it since they touch the top. Joel just shook his head and said “Shocking” when I told him. Sarcasm gets us through the day. Neither one of us were really that surprised. 🙂
I mean, I used the actual bottles to gauge how big to make the little nook.
Just goes to show that I need to go back and read my own advice sometimes.
Luckily this little mismeasure was something that could be solved by the dollar store. I just found a bottle I liked and since it didn’t have a pump I also bought another bottle with a pump. If I had been thinking I would have just used the pump from my shampoo bottle and cut the straw to fit the shorter bottle. But this post is evidence I am not always a thinker. 🙂
I peeled off the label from what was a bubble bath product (And you know I’m using the bubble bath, I just poured it into a glass jar.) and used this trick to get rid of all of the gooey sticker residue.
A simple hand-drawn S to indicate it is shampoo, because I’m going to have to make another one for the conditioner, and we’ve got a decent looking $2 monogrammed shampoo bottle that fits in our new niche.
Now this other little mismeasure might be considered less of a mismeasure and more of a misinformed situation.
So I bought this tub.
And I ordered it at the last-minute possible so we weren’t the neighbors with a tub in their yard for too long.
So I pulled the spec sheet off the internet to determine where to drill the drain hole in the floor and tile around it.
And low and behold that was not the right spot for the hole. Huge bummer.
But luckily it turned out to be a fairly easy fix since my wrong hole will forever be hidden under the new tub.
Since I had ordered the tub with an overflow drain the drain hole wasn’t supposed to be directly under the tub drain location but in front of the actual tub where the overflow drain came down. Something you should definitely verify before making any drain hole decisions. Says Captain Obvious.
Now with the tub and drain on hand I just used the drain to determine where the hole should go.
Then I used a chisel and a hammer to break away the tiles over where the new hole needed to go. I actually first tried to put tape over the tiles and wet them and use a hole saw, but the hole saw I have didn’t work on the tile and I didn’t want to buy a new one, so I went the chisel and break route. But there are hole saws made to cut tile, here’s an affiliate link to a bunch of good options.
Once I broke through the tile the hole saw did work to drill through the 1/4″ cement board and the subfloor and then it was just a matter of cutting and placing a few new tiles around the new hole and grouting them. Remember, these cuts don’t have to be perfect because they will end up hidden under the flange around the drain pipe.
I wish I had more beautiful pictures for you but sometimes I like to share the little mishaps that happen along the way, too. Thankfully these did nothing more than slow down the progress of the bathroom renovation. I actually have yet to complete a project without at least one thing going wrong or not as planned.
Speaking of things not going as planned, our shower glass is still missing in action and even though our new window has been installed in what was the gaping hole in the bathroom (YAY!) the installers want to come back to seal around it so I can’t trim it out yet. Hence the lack of more pretty pictures.
But we’re down to the final details on this whole redo, and I’ve already started working on the bedroom and closet. Can’t wait to see what I mess up in there. 😉
How about you, is there anything you tend to mess up over and over when you’re doing a project?
