One Room Challenge Week 3: Electric and Plumbing

The plumbing and electrical got roughed in during week three. Which means we had to walk around our bathroom with our contractor, and decide where everything would go. It’s a little bit more complicated than it sounds. Making permanent decisions is hard!

Okay, the placement of the electrical fixtures and shower parts aren’t actually permanent, but it would be pretty damn expensive to move them, so we’re not planning on ever doing it. We want to get this bathroom right the first time, and then enjoy it for the rest of the time we live here. Which will hopefully be the rest of our lives. So no pressure, right?

If you’ve just arrived at DIY in PDX via the ORC blog, welcome! I’m Rachel, and I blog about everything DIY, from fixing up my old house, to making accessories and decor, to growing plants and cooking. For the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge, I’m sharing the gut renovation of the most-used bathroom in my house.

This was our first time ever doing a remodel that involved plumbing and electrical and a contractor, so there was a lot we didn’t know. But our contractor recommended that we get all of the fixtures, cabinet, sink, and bathtub ordered as soon as possible, and have it onsite and ready to go. The start of this project was delayed due to Covid, so we had plenty of time for that.

Here was the plan for the electrical work:

There was no light switch in the original bathroom, so we needed to add one of those.
There wasn’t a fan, either, so we needed one of those, too.
The original vanity light was over the mirror, but I wanted sconces on either side.
We were keeping a ceiling light close to the original location.
We added some outlets, including one in the medicine cabinet.

One of the reasons for having all of the stuff from the beginning is that it makes it way easier to decide on the placement of everything. Lots of decisions kind of cascade off one another. Like the vanity height affected the medicine cabinet placement, which affected the light sconce placement. Having all of that stuff on-site to take measurements from made decisions easier, which made everyone’s job easier and faster (and cheaper).

Sometimes stuff still sneaks up on you, though. You can see in the photo above that we were actually limited in our electrical placement by that surprise duct all the way on the right. We put the righthand sconce and outlets as far right as we could. So I’m really glad that the medicine cabinet we ordered wasn’t any wider.

Here was the plan for the plumbing:

The toilet was staying in the same spot.
The bathtub/shower combo was staying in the same location, but the layout and trim was being retooled.
The sink was staying on the same wall, but moving over a few inches, I think.

Our old shower had a hot and a cold knob, and you fiddled with them to get the water temperature you wanted, then pulled a diverter on the faucet to make the water come out of the showerhead. I think this faucet style, with separate hot and cold knobs (the righthand one is behind the shower curtain), isn’t even up to code, because it makes it more likely you’ll scald yourself. But other than that, it was pretty standard.

For the new shower plumbing, we did something slightly non-standard.

Steven really wanted to be able to turn a knob to set the temperature, then turn another knob to have the water come out of the faucet or shower head. But his whole thing was that he wanted to be able to leave the temperature set. We never would have been able to figure out how to accomplish this, because it’s surprisingly confusing. Maybe not if you’re someone who doesn’t even know that the visible parts of the shower are the “trim,” and the parts inside the wall are “valves,” but it confused the hell out of me. Luckily, there’s a Kohler showroom in Portland. We went down there to look at the faucets, then told a saleslady what we wanted, and she ordered everything.

Yep, it cost more than the standard set-up. But the heart wants what it wants.

When it came time for the plumbers to rough in the shower plumbing, we had to decide where everything would go. We laid the trim pieces on our floor, and tried a couple of different arrangements. We stood in the tub and pretended to shower. We measured the locations, and Steven made a sketch.

Then we drew everything out 1:1 on a big piece of cardboard.

When the plumber was installing everything, he said he liked our setup, and said something like, “You guys have obviously thought this through. Some people don’t put any thought into it.”

Maybe we over-thought it, but better to overthink it than underthink it!