Part 6: Master Bedroom/Workout Room

20210112-19

The Trip

The Photos

The photos below are what we saw.

The "before" photo taken after some of the items were move to other rooms.

The horizontal chest of drawers were heavy and awkward and required removal of all the drawers to move them.  They were moved to an area just to the left of the photo above.  The Bowflex was moved outside and the balance of the items were placed in boxes and moved to another room for short term storage.  The carpet was pulled from the tack strips, rolled up and moved outside.  The intense wear on the blue carpet padding was from walking on it after the carpet was removed.

Kathleen cut the padding at the junction between the rooms.  The previous owner had removed a wall to make a huge master bedroom.

We did discover some cracks in the slab when the padding was removed.  No way to tell the age of these cracks, but we will fill them with concrete patch and proceed with the installation of the tile.

Old baseboard and carpet tack strips were removed.  The old wall location is clearly visible on the floor.

The sliding doors of the closet were removed and stored in another room.  The contents of the closet were moved allowing access to remove baseboard, tack strips and make painting possible.

Our hard work was rewarded with a nice sunset with subtle colors.

After the workout room floor was scraped and the closet painted, the horizontal chests were moved back into the room to allow access to the bedroom floor.

The transition between the bedroom and sink area was removed.  The carpet was marked, cut and removed to outside.

The carpet in Kathleen's (converted hallway) closet was removed followed by the contents of the closet.

Carpet tack strips were pulled creating huge craters in the concrete slap and plenty of debris.

Next, the contents of Kathleen's other closet (yes, there is a trend here....) were removed and and the wood flooring was pulled up along with the baseboards.

The floor was scraped to remove glue, drywall mud and paint splatter.

Removal of some concrete nails that held a hinge-point for long-removed closet doors created a huge crater in the slab that required multiple applications of concrete patch.

The bed was dismantled and moved into the sink area to allow access to the headboard and vertical chests.

The vertical chests were put on sliders and moved to the sink area to allow access to the two parts of the headboard.  The mirrored section is separate from the base which is a good thing because it was very awkward and heavy.

The upper portion of the headboard was sufficiently heavy that we concluded that we could not move it without risking injury.  So, we built a holding area at the same height that would allow sliding the item without having to bear its weight.  A 2"x8" plank was cut and then screwed to the metal saw horses to create a landing zone.  Two separate movements were required to get the assembly away from the wall enough to allow further actions.  Also, note that when the last painting was done, the furniture was not moved resulting in a large unpainted area on the wall.  Baseboards and tack strips were removed prior to painting.

The raw wall was painted and then we could actually start laying tile.  To insure a straight line installation, we did a chalk line across the entire room and used that line as the reference for the tile.  Once 5 or 6 courses of tile were laid, we moved both parts of the headboard assembly back into its location.

Several courses of tile were laid that spanned the pony wall to allow us to get a straight-line installation for the balance of the room.



Once a sufficient distance of tile had been laid, we shuffled the furniture around to allow laying additional tile.



The chest of drawers had to be moved multiple times to allow access to the bare floor to continue work.



The geometry of the room was the most complex of any of the rooms we have done and therefore required careful planning and a lot of irregular cuts.



Soon, we had to address the issues of tile around the entrance threshold.  The door jams needed to be undercut and special shaped pieces of tile were cut and tapped into place underneath the undercut.



Since there was a transition piece in place from our installation of the grey tile, we decided to re-use it as it already matched the door jam.



The bathroom sink area was completed and we discovered that the toe kick was not square with the wall -- by a lot.  We cut custom strips to finish of the last course in the main area.  Baseboard will be measured, cut and installed in a later step.



Meanwhile, another long-delivery-time item arrived.  This is the so-called "Elton" lighting fixture for the new track lights in my office.  These were quite pricey, but in my opinion, they look great in a nerdy-techie-contemporary sort of way.



The lighting tracks had been installed as the last step of rework in my office but we discovered that the switching power supply that had been provided became flaky when the rated power was used.  It was specified to provide 50 watts and worked flawlessly with 2 heads.  When 3 heads were added, the operation became intermittent and sadly, 4 heads were required to provide my desired illumination in the room.  So, a higher wattage, old-school iron-core transformer was ordered (again with a substantial delivery time).  We'll save the installation for a later day.



We spent a whole day cutting and installing baseboard.  Once the baseboard was in place, we could move furniture back to their desired locations and provide an unrestricted walking path through the room (something that we had not had for more than a week).



During the baseboard installation, Kathleen painted my closet.  The sliding doors remain to be painted and installed, but the weather turned against us preventing doing it outside.



We were pleased with the final look of the tile, but there were still a number of outstanding actions.



The old transition "trough" at the threshold to the master bathroom was not viable for the new tile.  So, we chipped out the old grout material and cut a new trough.  A small portion of the new (asymmetrical) transition material was cut for test-fitting purposes.



Attachment holes in the concrete were drilled with my hammer drill and carbide bits.  This was a dusty and noisy process.



The final piece of transition material was measured, cut and notched to fit the door jam and then pressed into the trough.  It fit nicely despite the non-uniformity of the granite tile surface.

Photos and Text Copyright Bill Caid 2021, all rights reserved.
For your enjoyment only, not for commercial use.