Bathroom Redo

When we moved in to the house the bathroom was OK. And because it was OK, and a lot of other things weren't, the bathroom was pretty far down on our to-do list. That was until I noticed a water leak beneath the toilet. Let's just say one thing led to another and before you knew it, the bathroom was stripped down to the studs. We decided to remove the window that was inside the shower wall because in my opinion, windows and showers don't mix. Aside from the privacy issue, windows inside showers are bound to have problems with water infiltration. We still wanted natural light in the bathroom, so I installed a Solatube skylight (about $200 at the home center.) I installed it myself in a couple of hours, and we love it! It provides a ton of natural light, so we never have to turn on the lights during the day.

We chose the Kohler Bancroft pedestal sink, a Kohler cast-iron tub, a Kohler faucet (under $200 at home center), and our cross-handle shower fixtures are from American Standard ($170.)

We opted for classic white subway tiles in the shower. These tiles may be overused due to their recent popularity, but they are so much cheaper than anything else, that it's hard to justify spending 5-10x more to get something unique. Plus, they look great! This was my first tiling experience. I had read several times that it's a good idea to peel off a tile after you've done a couple of rows, so that you can check the consistency of the thinset. When you remove the tile, the back of it should be about 2/3rds covered with thinset. If it's 100% covered, then your thinset is too wet. If it's not covered at all, then your mixture is too dry. My first attempt was way too dry, so I took off all the tiles and cleaned them. Then I let them dry and started again. I'm really glad I did because it also gave me another opportunity to get my tiles smooth, flat, straight and level.

I ran all new electrical wiring and installed a GFCI outlet (which code requires if it's near a sink.) I also installed a bath exhaust fan. A friend of mine recommended the Panasonic Whisper Ceiling fan. It works great and it's very quiet, although after a year's use, it seems a little less quiet than when I first installed it. I put on fan on the GFCI circuit because the fan was partially over the shower stall. Code requires that any vent fan over the shower be on a GFCI circuit. All this meant was running the wire first through the GFCI outlet, and then to the fan. Everything worked great, except that every 4 or 5 times we turned off the fan, it would trip the GFCI outlet. After a little research I learned that some of these GFCI outlets cannot handle the power from a bath fan, and so they will trip periodically. An electrician told me that the code requires it, but the technology of these GFCI outlets hasn't yet caught up with the code. He recommended trying a different brand GFCI outlet. I swapped out the Leviton outlet that I had purchased at Home Depot with a new commercial-grade GFCI made my Cooper that I bought at an electrical supply store. Both were rated for 20 amps, but switching them out made all the difference. I put the Cooper GFCI outlet in a week ago, and it has yet to trip! I've turned the fan on and off at least a 100 times trying to see if it would trip and it hasn't, so I think the heavier duty Cooper outlet fixed the problem.