Because drywall goes up pretty fast, Mr. Remodel knew that it wouldn’t be long before he came to a standstill if he wasn’t ready to take out the toilet and shower downstairs because, if you remember, they were preventing us from completing all the new walls. That meant turning the main scene of operation upstairs to the guest bathroom. And that mean installing cement board.
No one had worked with cement board before and everyone presumed it was like drywall, only harder to cut and made of cement. We did know that cement dust was not kind to people’s lungs and asked everyone to wear masks, which is something.
So people set about cutting it and screwing it in with drywall screws.
Oh look how nice it looks. Tra La La.
Because we weren’t installing a shower with the bath two sections of the wall around it did not need cement board. However, because it was still a wet area, it would require purple board.
Meanwhile, the soffit was covered with regular drywall. Tra La La.
Then, we discover that the cement board we were using needed to be attached with special screws. So Mr. Remodel and Mr. Fix-It took out every drywall screw and replaced it with cement board screws. It was annoying but we wanted to do things right.
Phew that was lucky to have caught that in time…
The following day Mr. Remodel sat down for an hour and read the bathroom book he bought weeks ago and made a disturbing discovery. The cement board needed to have plastic sheeting behind it on the walls as it doesn’t have the same moisture barrier that green board had, and it needed a layer of mortar underneath it on the floor to make the floor level. In addition, it needed to be installed with a 1/8” gap between the boards.
As a result, Mr. & Mrs. Remodel proceeded to take ALL of the cement board out again. Plus we had to take off all the soffit drywall as well because that needed to be either green or purple board. That left us with only the ceiling drywall left in place. That was only the start of the fun.
Of course this had to be a holiday weekend and we couldn’t get anyone at the cement board company to advise us exactly on the kind of mortar we should put on the floor, although it would have been nice if they had called us back after the holiday as the one person manning the phones there said they would. Lowe’s is usually very helpful, but the young man on duty in that part of the store isn’t too sure about what we need. Self-leveling cement, which would probably have been easy, wasn’t going to work because it would run down into the bath plumbing cavity.
After a significant amount of time staring at the myriad bags of mortar in the tile department, Mr. R chose one, and with our plastic sheeting, we wended our merry way home to re-install cement board instead of enjoying some time at the beach.
Mr. Remodel laid the mortar and leveled the floor, which went pretty well. What was difficult was taking removing 1/8” off each piece. The way to cut cement board to size is not to cut it at all because it produces nasty cement dust particles that human lungs don’t like. So you ‘cut’ it by scoring it and then cracking it over a beam (much like you can score and crack tile). But you can’t score and crack 1/8” off the edge. So we had to score it and break it off with a pair of pliers. It was hard on our hands and took FOREVER because we could only break off less than an inch at a time.
Once we had done that for the floor pieces we laid them on the mortar and screwed them down before we put the plastic sheets on the wall.
Then we took each piece of cement board for the wall, took off the 1/8” one by one and screwed them back up.
Then we cut new pieces out of green board for the soffit and installed them.
By the time we were finished we were very tired, and more than a bit fed-up over the three days we had lost. But as I reminded Mr. R, it could have been a lot worse. We might have gone further and found out our mistake from the inspector when we called for the drywall inspection. And Mr. Fix-It and we had all learned a lesson about how to deal with cement board.
Sometimes the best lessons are learned the hard way. (I'm too far way, you can't kick me.)
ReplyDeleteWhat a lot of work. You and Mr. R. are very brave to have undertaken this large task.
It was a good lesson to learn. What you do or don't do in home improvement has implications.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if we are brave or stupid!