Master Bath ceiling is installed

I finally finished installing the master bath yesterday. I had run out of boards the night before and had to wait until morning to prep more of them. Here are a few pictures of the prep process.

This is my salvaged woodpile. I wish I had a shed to store this stuff in.

First the boards are laid out on the sawhorses to dry. Then I scrape them down to remove the loose paint.

I then spray them heavily with a bleach solution to kill the mold. After letting it sit for a while they get sprayed a second time then scrubbed with a scrub brush. they are then wiped down and allowed to dry.

Once they are dry they get primered on both sides and allowed to dry.

Once the boards were dry I brought them upstairs and finished hanging them.

R30 installed.

Ceiling installed.

Next for the ceiling I have to wood putty the larger cracks, then caulk and reprime before I can paint it. I'll probably take care of the walls first though.

Bathroom ceiling update

As is par for the course, the bathroom is not going as quickly as planned. The other day I went to prep the reclaimed 4" T&G for the ceiling only to find that it had a lot of mold on it. I'm having to store it outside since there's no room in the house for it. I had it covered with hplastic but obviously it didn't do much good. I set up some sawhorses and laid the boards out on them to dry for a day. Once they were dry I scraped all the loose paint off of them, sprayed them down with a bleach solution then scrubbed them with a scrub brush. After they dried I painted both sides with Kilz2 primer and let them dry.

Yesterday evening they were finally dry so I started hanging them. It's a really slow process, I have to juggle the board, hammer, hammering block, and the nail gun all at once to get it hung because the scaffolding is too far down to reach down to pick something up while holding the board in place.

R13 is as thick as I could go in the sloped area. R30 will go above the flat part of the ceiling.

This is as far as I got last night. I would have gotten farther but I had to go back and correct a screw-up. I forgot to measure from the beginning of the sloped ceiling to the break where it becomes flat and place the boards so that they matched up exactly with the break. The last board before the break ended up about an inch short. That's a little too thin to try to rip a piece to fit so I ended up lowering the flat joists an inch to meet the boards. It's not noticable and was a much quicker solution than taking all of my work down and starting over.

Once the ceiling is up I'll give it a light sanding, caulk the joints, give it another coat of primer, then paint. After that I can move on to the walls.

During the time that I was waiting for the boards to dry I rewired the sconces I mentioned earlier. Everything electrical had to be replaced on them, they were in sorry shape. I've ordered some pretty cool black and gold candlestick covers for them.


I still have to run the romex for all the sconces, it's not going to be fun for the ones at the top of the stairs. there's no room in the ceiling for me to run it there so I'm going to have to come up from the crawlspace below. We bought a really cool electronic dimmer switch for them, when you turn it on the light gradually brightens. I'm hoping to have them wired up before the weekend.

Bathroom and upstairs hall electrical

As usual I didnt get near as much done yesterday as I had expected. I've almost completed the electrical, the only thing holding me up is that I need to know the size of the vanity so I can install the boxes for the sconces. The vanity is a serpentine front dresser, that is 3 drawers wide and tall. It's between 5' and 6'. I dont know the exact measurements though because it's up at my moms house right now. I'll be installing 2 sinks in it and a mirror will go on the wall above each sink. there will be a sconce on either side of the mirrors for a total of 3 sconces.

Of course this has a domino affect, since I cant install the sconces I cant patch up the walls, I cant install the beadboard until I patch the walls... and on and on.

Anyways, here is some of the electrical I did yesterday:

The box on the left will hold 2 GFCI receptacles.

I ran all new wiring all the way back to the sub-panel in the attic. this required that I install a new junction box up there also. The sub panel only has room for 8 breakers, they are now all filled. I'm going to have to buy a larger panel to complete the rest of the upstairs wiring.

Since I was at a stand still on the bathroom we decided to test hang the sconces for the upstairs hall. They are really cool art nouveau pieces we found on Ebay. They're going to need a bit of work though, like new wiring, sockets, candle-stick covers, and crystals. Some of them have their original glass crystals, for the rest I'm going to have to find them on Ebay.



We'll probably put a large mirror between these two, once we do that and put the crystals on the sconces it shouldn't look so bare. We're planning on putting a Victorian settee on this wall.