It was supposed to be done before The Roommate got home from Spain. That was a month ago, and while we're close enough to taste it, new suprises have come up. You may be guessing from the title of this post where I'm going with this. If you guessed electrical, well, you'd be part right.
Let me back up. In Part II of the Saga, I hired a contractor to hang cement board in the shower surround and greenboard in the surrounding areas. I thought we had agreed that they would also hang the greenboard for the ceiling at that point but that didn't happen. Instead, I ended up installing almost everything (shiny bathtub!) in the bathroom before they could get back for the installation of the ceiling as well as the vent/light combo. This is important because - mark my words - there will never be mold in that bathroom again.
The day finally came last Friday and I was looking super forward (read: I took vacation) to getting the ceiling up so I could finish painting and wainscoating and other trim installation. A real, working bathroom?! Woooot! The Roommate and I could barely contain our excitement.
The plan went something like this: We intended to keep the existing ceiling and just go over it since there were studs to screw into for the drywall. We were just supposed to cut a hole for the new bathroom fan/light fixture and use the electrical from the existing light fixture. No sweat, right?
It doesn't look too bad to start:
The guys started by taking out part of the ceiling tiles (you can see where the first one came out in the pic above on the right edge). A rather quick deviation from the plan but it was getting covered anyway, so I went with it. A new problem arose when it had to be set deeper into the ceiling than the ceiling tiles plus the drywall would allow. So, down came another chunk of ceiling but the fan got inserted pretty quickly and vented outside.
Crisis averted. I don't mind pulling staples holding up the ceiling tiles. Considering my experience as a kid with pulling them when my parents got rid of the carpet in favor of the hardwood underneath, I'm pretty quick. The whole thing took me about 20 minutes to pull - staples included.
The real problem came when they looked at the electrical in the ceiling that we wanted to use for the new fan. The whole reason I hadn't done a fan in the back corner with a standard bathroom light fixture was because I didn't want to run new electrical for the fan to the back of the room. One dual-function fixture and I thought things would be good.
I was told when I bought Isthmus House that it had been fully re-wired to replace knob and tube wiring a few years back. During the inspection, we found some dead knob and tube (that's fine, it just can't be live) but the outlets we checked were grounded (knob and tube doesn't have the copper grounds that make the electrical safer) and I saw the approved permit inspection myself.
None of that matters. Because there was old wiring in the ceiling in the bathroom. The ceiling I didn't want to pull down or rewire.
Since we couldn't install the fan until there was new wiring, the contractor headed out having only been there for about 90 minutes and I found an electrician who could come out same day.
He arrived just a few hours later (let me tell you, that's normally a coup) and fixed the wiring in less than an hour. I think he'll be doing my electrical from here on out.
I called the contractor back and he informed me that they wouldn't be back that day and we'd reschedule. It's been a week and nothing but here's what we've got now. The important thing is that silver box - that's the fan!
It's light and ceiling-less, but I'm soooo close to paint, trim and completion I can taste it! Since I can't contain my excitement, stay tuned for a special edition of The House on the Isthmus early next week!
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