The big adventure in our basement bathroom remodel was installing a new faucet.  Everything else for the room was pretty self-explanatory.  We had installed a kitchen faucet before, but the pop up drain made the bathroom one much more daunting.  We decided to get the Peerless Bright Chrome Lever 4″ faucet because we liked the Peerless we had in the kitchen.  It is a little more than we had planned on spending for a basement, guest, extra bathroom, but I did not want clear plastic handles.

Pop up drain instructions are confusing by nature, I think.  I read through them a couple times and laid everything out before starting to assemble everything.  As long as you do not jump into installation without going through the how-to, even the pop up drain assembly will go quickly.  It may take more time, but do not be afraid to dry fit both the drain and the pop up to see if it opens enough for your water flow – we needed to adjust ours after installation.  And it is really just not that easy when everything is already in place.  But once past that, dropping the faucet in and hooking up the supply hoses only takes a few minutes.  The faucet works and looks great, which was important since it is the first thing you see in our new bathroom.

When we were converting our basement bathroom from dingy and unusable to pretty and functional we left the corner shower in place.  It just needed a good cleaning and a new showerhead and knobs.  We really like the rain showerhead we have in our bathroom and we wanted to find something similar.  The showerhead that was there previously actually put out too much water for the drain to handle, so we also needed something that would not overflow the shallow shower basin.  Aesthetically, we wanted something that hung out into the shower a bit to prevent the possibility of leakage through the shower doors.

We decided to go with the Mini Aquafall from WaterPik.  It is adjustable several different ways, which is handy since this is our “guest” bathroom and guests are always different heights. The showerhead meets all of our quirky needs.  It installed directly on the pipe coming out of the wall with just a bit of Teflon tape.  I would not recommend using any sort of wrench on the showerhead without a rag or even painting tape as a barrier.  The finish is chrome, but the showerhead and arm are made of plastic.  This may not work for a high-traffic shower, but for this application the combination of looks and other features outweighed the material.

We have a three-quarters bathroom in our basement that has never been functional.  The walls were a dingy white and there was a 1980’s fish border.  The floor was a green and white vinyl tile.  The shower was OK, the sink was fine (even though it was not pretty), but the toilet did not work – the water would drain out of the bowl allowing sewer gas into the room.  As the opening salvo in our Operation: Basement 2009 we took everything, except the shower, out.

After removing the offending toilet the next order of business was getting rid of the old, worn glued-down tile.  We started by using a 5-in-1 tool and hammer, but it wasn’t very sturdy and didn’t get up very much tile.  We started using the Hard Cap Floor Chisel after just one frustrating evening.  The polymer cap reduced the vibrations we felt dramatically.  Since we were scraping the tile directly off concrete, there wasn’t any give and that cushioning was very important.  It was very easy to get under the tile with the chisel point.  The three-inch width got up much more tile in one go than we expected.  Of course, some times the glue prevented a larger path of destruction, but quite often we were able to get a good four to five inch wide and six inch long area up before the tile broke off.

This was quite possibly the hardest part of the entire process, but it was made so much easier by using the Hard Cap Floor Chisel.  You’ve got to work smarter, not harder!

Occasionally my wife enjoys to write reviews of products she uses - this is one of those posts. Enjoy!

I have never been a fan of the bulky leather gardening gloves that most home improvement stores sell.  They grip well, when you can find something big enough to grab.  But you can forget about pulling tiny weeds or planting delicate seeds and seedlings.

Since I tend to be somewhat unorganized when gardening – jumping from weeding to raking to pruning, etc. – I need gloves that can run the gamut.  I decided to try the Bionic X-Wear Gardening/Work Gloves.  I believe they were originally designed for gardeners with arthritis, so they have silicone padding in the fingers and thumbs.  Even with the padding, you do not lose any dexterity or “feel.” The wrists fasten securely to keep dirt out (a big problem with traditional garden gloves, I found).

Casual gardeners who do not want to wait for the leather to stretch should order a size larger than you normally would, as these gloves run small.  Even with the snug fit, or perhaps because of it, my hands do not tire out as easily as they did with other gloves.  And I had no problem using an old, wood handled de-thatching rake, something that would have given me terrible blisters in plain leather gloves.