The Bathtub Fiasco + The Wonky Pipe

Hubby decided to leave the bathtub to the professionals. Which is a great idea—if the professionals know what they're doing.

Ready for a bathtub!

Cliff found a company with great reviews on Yelp. They told us it would take a few hours to install the bathtub and move the shower head up. Well...They ended up being at our house ALL day and made four separate trips to Home Depot. I thought I was going to have a heart attack watching/listening to them carry the bathtub upstairs to the second floor. Eeeeek!

Cliff took one look at the bathtub when he got home and realized it was totally wrong. There was a one-inch gap between the floor and the bathtub. These dudes! They should've known they couldn't sneak something past an engineer. The gap would still have been a problem if Cliff was using cement backerboard under the tile. He was using Ditra, which is even thinner, thus making the problem even worse. The owner agreed with Cliff after he sent him pictures, but the soonest they could come back was a week later.

Ruh roh.

So the plumbers came back a second time and had to rip out the tub (at this point I'm thinking there's no way this tub is going to come out unscathed...). They were there most of the day again.

As icing on the cake, the plumbers took some of Cliff's tools (we THINK by accident), and we later discovered the toilet flange was wrong as well. I recently found one of Cliff's tools that he said they stole, so mayyyyybe someone just needs to be more organized with their stuff. Ahem.

I don't have very exciting photos of the before and after, so here's a video of me trying to get Ryan on my side about doing shiplap in the bathroom. The newly installed tub is there, so it's totally relevant.

The Wonky Pipe

Right around the time the plumbers were doing their thing, we realized that a drain(?) pipe sticking out of the wall toward the floor would prevent us from putting a normal vanity in. It's hard to tell from the picture, but the pipe sticks out right where a vanity leg would go, making it so the vanity couldn't be pushed back flush with the fall.

The bane of our existence

We discussed ways we could work around this stupid pipe (namely, cutting a leg off a standard vanity) as well as getting those mod vanities you see in hotel rooms that are wall-mounted. This wasn't the look I was going for, but I was willing to work with it. Cliff ultimately decided to cut into the wall to see if he could figure out where it was coming from/going to and whether he could reroute it.

We asked the oh-so-wise plumbers about it while they were there, and they hemmed and hawed and basically shrugged their shoulders. To their credit, they did actually help in the end. More about that later.