Shower Remodel, Weekend 12-14

Well it's long past time for an update.  I'm excited to say we are getting close to a functional shower again!  I think it's been 3 weekends of work now (maybe 4?) although some didn't have much more than a few hours of work.  It started with the last of the tiling on the curb and leading up to the corner where the shower will meet the wall tile outside it.  Here is the curb:

 

 

Once the tiles were finally set, it was time for the grout.  This should have gone quickly, but of course I didn't want to use standard grout!  Everything I've researched says grout is the weak link - it is porous enough to stay wet and provide a home for mold and mildew growth (unless you wipe down the shower with a squeegee or towel every time you use it and that is so not happening).  So there are epoxy based grouts which are better and don't require sealing, but they are supposedly very difficult to install on walls.  And then there are a couple of urethane based grouts.  They have the same qualities as epoxy and are slightly easier to install on vertical surfaces. They also have the best color consistency, and they are the most expensive of course!  So guess what I used - Urethane.  Specifically QuartzLock 2.  

Grouting the walls was SLOW!  This stuff dries super fast so you have to clean as you go or it leaves a shiny film on the tile plus well adhered sand where you don't want it.  Fortunately I discovered acetone is my friend for clean up in the places I was really concerned about the film. Now it's finally done and the grout does look nice.  All I have left is caulking the corners and installing the shower fixtures.  

and some closeups...

 

The drain still has a protective film on it - it will be brushed stainless when it's removed.

and lastly, I've started on the corner.  It will have the shower tile, slate on two surfaces, and Travertine marble on the flat shelf.  This sucker is tricky, but I have a plan now so it should move along quickly. 

Memorial Park Maintenance

Our Memorial Park event turned out to be a big success! Somehow I remembered to take a few photos after lunch so here is our work crew:

Joining the faces you may recognize is the Pratt family (PratFamily777) on the left, who discovered letterboxing two months ago. They also brought their adorable "baby" Cooper who made fast friends with Dragon Warrior (Alex). I have to admit I'm not much of a dog person, but Cooper was an absolute angel!

We started off with the usual round of exchanges and split up for the morning to check on different sections.  We regrouped for lunch shared our mud stories.  While the weather was beautiful Saturday, it rained enough Thursday night and Friday to make the trails a mess.  Some of the boxes required wading to reach them, and everyone had to navigate sticky portions of the trails.  We are proud of our mud!

After lunch we headed back out on the trails for the afternoon.  Somehow after lunch, most of the group ended up boxing together and this turned out to be a big help.  We found several boxes by pure accident just by having several people looking in the general area.  Our big find for the day was The Patchwork Girl of Oz.  It's home turned into a clearing (probably bulldozed) filled with logs and branches.  Can you find the box in this photo?

Let's make it a little easier.  Try this view:

Give up?  Ok, here is the answer:

Somehow Wry Me managed to spot the little corner sticking up out of the dirt. So she was our hero for the afternoon.  The box was broken and soaking wet,

but somehow the stamp was in great shape.  So we put it in a new box, added a logbook and moved it to a new and hopefully safer home.

When it was all said and done we had a great day with some great company!  I'd like to thank everyone who came, and Boots Tex who recently updated the Nada Clue series everyone enjoyed so much.  (and the new location is beautiful!). Thanks for playing in the mud and saving some boxes!

Memorial Park Information

Memorial Park in Houston is a significant part of Texas letterboxing history.  It was home to several events and at one point boasted the highest concentration of boxes in the state.  Sadly the drought in 2011 caused many of the park's pine trees to die, and the park is actively removing them and changing some sections of the trails.  On May 11, I'm hosting a small gathering of letterboxers to check on as many of the boxes as we can, update their status, and move any which are in danger.

Memorial Park is a delight for letterboxers and filled with boxes.  Don't expect to find all the boxes in one weekend.  It will keep you coming back for more with new suprises - boxes with high find count restrictions, mystery boxes, puzzle boxes of different levels, and others I can't talk about.  Many of these are there thanks to dewberry who hosted events and planted numerous boxes in the park.  So enjoy the park, and if you are looking for dewberry's boxes - she has very short steps!

Here are some link's to maps of the park:

Memorial Park Conservancy's official map - the best one for trails

Recent new trails - this shows some trails not on the main maps

Texas Mountain Biking map - this little map shows a trail around the picnic area that connects the green and blue trails.  This may be useful for the boxes around the picnic area.

I'll be consolidating the maps for the event next week and marking locations of as many boxes as I can.  Check back in a few days for more details.   

Letterboxing Lake Somerville

Last month I took a short trip up to Lake Somerville to get the remaining boxes which I missed on my previous trips.  By chance I camped at Nail's Creek State Park on the southern side of the lake.  By arriving on Thrusday night, I had my pick of campsites and I got a great view of the lake.

On Friday morning, I looked for PI Joe's Calvaryman box which is a decent hike even from the closest access point.  On my way back I heard a loud hawk nearby, and realized I parked right under the nest!

 

I continued on to Birch Creek State Park and picked up a few boxes.  In the afternoon I met up with NativTxn who lives nearby and spends a lot of time at the park.  She helped me find two boxes I missed, and we planted one of her newly carved stamps.  By the time we finished I had walked about 10 miles for the day and we headed back to our campsite.   We enjoyed the evening and exchanged some stamps at our picnic table.  

Saturday morning, NativTxn had to leave so I spent the morning finishing up a stamp to plant at Nails Creek.  I've censored the image so you don't get a spoiler, but you might notice all the colored pencils below...you will want to color this one in!

One of the highlights of the trip was waking up to a glorious sunrise over the lake.  So I'll leave you with some sunrise photos.  The one picture I should have taken was on the way home...there were hundreds of people on the roadside taking pictures of bluebonnets outside of Brenham!  They caused quite a traffic slowdown.  But back to your sunrise pics...

 

Shower Remodel, Weekend 10&11

Has it really been that long?  Well this tile thing is finally getting wrapped up.  I put in some serious hours to get things moving over the last two weekends.  First we finished all the walls and the little step.  This took lots of custom cuts for the corners and bottom which kept Steve busy cutting while I measured and put them up.  I also got the inside edge of the curb.  That took us up through last Saturday.   

I'm reasonably happy with it, but of course I notice every mistake!  Here is the inside wall.

Well I guess I should say we got most of the walls.  I still have this problem corner below.  I want the tile here to meet up with the tile we will put on the wall around the bathtub.  Unfortunately we need to get that planned out better.

So the next step was the floor, and that starts with laying out the tile and installing the drain - with help of course!

One thing you may notice in the picture above is how uneven the floor is where it meets the wall.  This is due to the Quick Pitch tool we used to help set the correct slope of the mortar bed.  What we didn't think about up front is that the longer plastic strips going to the corners make the corners higher than the middle of the wall.  You can either have a constant slope OR a level floor along the walls - not both.  So now the floor and bottom edge of the tiles don't line up.  But I think a nice thick line of caulk will take care of it.  And here we have the completed floor.

I still have to clean up all the excess thinset (the white stuff you see everywhere), finish the problem corner and curb, then grout it all.  So we still have a ways to go, but at least it looks like a shower now!

Shower Remodel, Weekend 9

Weekend 9 - April 6&7.  The tiling continues.  I didn't think I realized how long all of the tiling would take.  I believe (well hope really) that it's becasue of the pattern I chose.  You can't really work upward because the large mosaics won't support the weight of the larger tiles above them.  So I finally just went against conventional wisdom and started working from the top down.  Then you need tape to hold all the tiles in place.  So here you can see the work in progress, with blue painters tape holding tile in place as it dries.

A big thanks to Angie (Wry Me) for coming over to help for a few hours. She worked mainly on the wall while I started putting on the tiles along the curb and the edge near the vanity.

Shower Remodel, Weekend 7&8

This post is all about tile!  With the problems I had completing the flood test (leak test) I decided to just start tiling and avoid the bottom of the shower.  With the recessed niches being the hardest part of the tile layout, I started there first. 

This took an incredible amount of work...over 50 of the tiles here had to be cut to fit.  And the little mosaic accent tiles had their own problems.  I spent a good part of the first Saturday just planning the layout and deciding what to do for this part.  Then there was at least 12 hours of work getting the suckers cut and put on the walls.  The mosaics are attached to a mesh backing so they don't have to be installed individually, just cut out as much as you want and put the pieces together. The problem is that they can be squished together - so they can't support the weight of tiles placed above them until they dry.  Here is a detail of the back wall on the shelves.

 

Once the detail work was finished we were able to make some better progress.  I love the accent mosaics so I used a lot of them.  Maybe too many (I think it looks a little busy), but I'm happy with it.  

And lastly, I was finally able to complete the flood test by plugging the drain with a water balloon!
72 hours and no leaks!

Shower Remodel, Weekend 6

I'm a little behind on the shower updates.  This picture is from the weekend after TALE - so that would be March 9th or so.  Basically this part consisted of painting on the waterproofing material.  It's really like thick paint so I was able to roll or brush it on.  I also used a reinforcing fabric in the corners along the shower pan to prevent any cracking at the joint.  The other joints all have fiberglass tape in the thinset so they should be fine. 

After everything dries, the goal is to do a flood test.  The flood test consists of plugging the drain and filling the shower pan with some water to make sure it doesn't leak...for 72 hours.  Sounds simple in principle, but I'm out of ideas on how to plug the drain.  One online article recommended using a balloon.  That worked for about 18 hours before it shifted and I lost some water.  A second attempt didn't even get that far.  The other plugs I've tried didn't seal for more than a few minutes so I'm still working on the flood test part.  At least I have a successful 18 hours test!

The Attempt

Wry Me and I went back to the Bastrop area to pick up the remaining boxes from TALE 10 and visit some other parks and boxes in the area.  We had no trouble finding the remaining boxes at Buescher State Park and the nearby cemetery on Thursday, and we even happened to be in the right place at the right time.  We visited the Lost Pines box again (Wry Me hadn't stamped in on her first visit) and discovered someone had placed a bag around the box.  While some boxers think this helps protect a box, it actually traps water as soon as the bag is punctured.  So we removed the bag right about the time someone else reported seeing a comment about the bag and asked for volunteers to check on it.  Talk about a coincidence!

On Friday we visited Lake Bastrop South Shore Park.  This is was the site of TALE 5, but not many of the boxes have survived.  I had most of the boxes from a previous trip in 2011 but I still needed a few.  One series I missed was the Texas Champion Series by SandiBox.  At this point two of the four boxes are retired and only boxes #2 and #3 are active.  We found #2 just fine, but #3 appears to be missing.  The box was supposed to be in a hollow at the base of a tree...well, it's now a very deep hole!  And if that box is in there it's way beyond the reach of anyone without a shovel.  See for yourself...

and yes we did poke it thoroughly with sticks before Wry Me tried to get to dive in after it!

We had better luck on Saturday when we visited the McKinney Roughs Nature Park while looking for Silver Eagle's Rough Racerunner box.  It was supposed to be in a dead tree about 3 feet off the ground.  We found the tree fallen over and buried in branches and sticks.  Fortunately Wry Me's persistence paid off and we were able to find this one and move it to a new home nearby.  One of Boot's Tex boxes here also lost it's home (another fallen tree) but it was easier to replant safely.

All in all we did have a great time.  I even slept well in the Smithville Riverside park despite the invasion of hundreds of bikers for a biker rally over the weekend!  Here is a shot of the tree above our tent with the beautiful new spring leaves.  I just love that color :-)

   

Bastrop After the Fire

The Friday before TALE I visited Bastrop State Park to see what the park looked like after the 2011 fire.  My last visit was in 2010 so this is my first return trip.

What's surprising are the number of dead trees still standing.  In some ways it looks like a forest in winter...until you remember these are supposed to be pine trees.  Most of the trunks are blackened so it looks very spooky.

However the undergrowth is returning and locals are making a big effort to cut down the dead trees and replant.  The dead trees are falling over and pose a serious safety hazard in the park and surrounding areas.  We drove by many areas with recently cut trees, and the open land was sometimes covered with little red flags.  We later learned that the flags mark the newly planted saplings. 

First Texas Letterbox

Well TALE 10 has come and I've finally logged all my boxes from the event. I've also gotten to sorting the handful of pictures I remembered to take. This rather blurry shot from my phone is special.

Beuscher State Park is the home of the first letterbox in Texas which was planted in 2000. This is Eoghan's Lost Pines box and you can only get the WOM clues through the Texas letterboxing yahoo group. Given the pile of rocks this sucker is buried in, I can see why it has lasted as long as it has.

Most of Eoghan's boxes have been lost over the years, but several Texas boxers are working on replacing them or in some cases planting tribute boxes which duplicate them as closely as possible.  One of these is the the O-Knots series originally planted in Bastrop State Park.  This series required you to find orienteering markers from a topographical map, and then use compass headings to find the box from the marker.  Sadly, these boxes and the markers were destroyed in the fire which devastated the park.  I was fortunate to have found 2 of the 4 boxes before the fire.

For the tribute series, Mosaic Butterfly and I recarved the stamps from images in PI Joe's logbook from  2003.  We planted them in Beuscher State Park and you can find them here.  While the clues are not quite as challenging as the original, we hope  you enjoy them. 

Ready for TALE

Everything is packed and ready to go for TALE 10 - the tenth year of Texas Annual Letterboxing event!  I've got 3 boxes ready to plant and some new logbooks made.  The green book and the one in the middle will be raffle donations.  The cover on the green one is hand made paper from an artisan at Scarborough Fair.  The middle book is covered with a Tim Holtz paper, and the red one is covered with some random scrapbook paper from my stash.  Each one is either painted or sprayed with Mod Podge to make it more water and dirt resistant on the trails.  The ends of the fibers are also glued to keep them from fraying. If my first attempt is anything to go by they hold up pretty well too.  I hope someone enjoys these. 

We also have some new self inflating camping pads.  One of these is for Steve, and the other is a gift for Wry Me since her old pad bit the big one on our last trip.  They beat sleeping on an air mattress for warmth so you can actually sleep on cold nights.  I got one for Christmas and found these two here on Amazon.  I'm very impressed with the quality for the price.  Like my original pad, it takes a little work to inflate them fully for the first time, but afterward they really do self inflate most of the way

Path Tags and Velcro

After several attempts Iv'e finally found a good way of securing path tags to my letterboxing event bag by using Velcro. I used the little circles that you can find pretty much anywhere (Walmart, craft stores etc).

Position one side on your bag where you want it. The adhesive won't hold well so you can move it until you get to the right spot. Now you need to sew the velcro on to make it stay put - this is very important. Make sure you use a heavy needle because the adhesive style velcro is tough. Now just stick the other half of the Velcro onto the path tag and you are set. I am also sewing through the hole in the tag as a backup, but the Velcro lets me position the tag correctly regardless of the hole position.

Shower Remodel, Weekend 5

Weekend 5 is officially over as of tonight!  I plan to spend tomorrow preparing for TALE 10 (Texas Annual Letterboxing Event).  Friday night I was touching up the thinset, and decided I wanted to add a ledge to put my foot when shaving.  Thankfully we had some bricks left over from the sidewalk project long long ago...

And now I have a ledge!

 Here we are preparing to put in the drain.  We filled in the hole around the waste pipe with sand and cut the pipe to the correct height.

Notice the black plastic in the hole - it looks like it was originally made with a flower pot! 

Next we added tar paper on the concrete and installed the drain.  The drain is another Hydro Ban product made by Laticrete.  It's specifically designed to work with their paint on waterproof membrane.  It's much easier to install than conventional drains for this type of shower construction.  The black plastic parts under the drain are Quick Pitch guides which make it easier to fill in the dry pack mud at the right slope.  Basically help angle the slope so water drains rather than puddle on the shower floor.  You are supposed to use them on a nice flat level base, but our slab was far from level around the hole for the pipe.  So instead of putting in another layer, we shimmed them (using some old carving material!) and made sure we had the right slope afterward.  A little hot glue helped hold everything in place - and you won't find that in any advice from the contractors!

And here is the final picture...the mortar bed installed!  You can't see it here but the outer edges of the mortar is slightly higher than the drain.  I owe a big thank you to Steve on this for mixing and hauling all that mortar. You wouldn't think there is over 150 lbs of it in there!

Here is a video that explains the shower construction method we are using and how it gets waterproofed.  I like this method because the seal goes above the mortar and there is less material in the shower that can absorb water.  Conventional shower construction puts the seal below the mortar.  So if the shower is used several times a day there is no way the mortar can dry out. 

Shower Remodel, Weekend 4

This weekend was the most work so far, as we spent most of the day Saturday and Sunday afternoon working.  

 Here we have all the cement hardi-backer up on the walls.  You can't tell from the picture, but the wall niches stick out from the backer board about 1/4 inch.  We smoothed this out by using lots of thinset to make a smooth transition in the depths.  I think the preformed niches weren't worth the cost.  Given the work to support them and then even out the front face, it would have been just as much work to make our own and save the money.

Here you can see all the thinset on the walls.  All the joints and corners have fiberglass mesh tape to prevent cracking and the screw heads are covered.  The dark sections are still wet in the picture and will turn light gray once they dry.  The bricks in the front are the "curb". This is the water barrier for the sides which will have glass on them.  The tile will cover the bricks when it's finished.  The next step is installing the drain and making the shower pan out of dry pack mortar.  All of the hours of watching YouTube videos and reading DIY forums is finally paying off!