After a long hiatus, I’m back to work on the Victorianna’s master bathroom. The problem with getting distracted mid-project is that it takes a while to remember what I was doing and what I planned to do next. The last time I worked on this, I had made good progress on the vanity and linen closet, then needed to pause until I could make a trip to Tap Plastics — which is ~40 minutes away, across the Golden Gate Bridge — to get plastic for the shower. I bought that last fall and it’s been sitting in the unfinished bathroom ever since.

To refresh your memory, here’s the bare bones bathroom. The wallpaper only goes halfway down because there will be beadboard wainscoting at the bottom. The door on the left leads to the nursery, and the one at the back to the master bedroom.

Here’s the layout of the bathroom. The corner tub is cast in resin from a Marx bathtub, purchased from Atomic Kiki on Etsy.

The bathroom is large but the sloped ceiling limits what I can do along the right wall, so I decided to do a separate tub and shower with the tub in the short corner and the shower in the tall corner.

Here’s the shower mock-up. The bottom pieces are porch railing base. The surround pieces are the same beadboard I’m using on the walls, but with the scribed part turned toward the wall. I used this rather than regular basswood because the scribed lines make it easy to cut straight. Thin basswood is so soft that when I cut with a utility knife along the grain, I usually end up with a horribly wavy cut.

I put off building the shower for so long after buying the plastic because I needed to drill holes for the handle, and the idea of drilling those holes scared me. (As you may recall from the Blackbird Bar’s optics, drilling holes is not my forte.) I ended up getting Geoff to do it for me. I also needed to bevel the edges so the pieces would meet at an angle, which I did with the belt sander.

I “painted” the base pieces with a silver Sharpie, then glued them together.

Next I checked the edges and sanded a bit more to make them fit together as snugly as possible.

The door handle is made from soft metal wire that can be bent easily with needlenose pliers. I made several handles before I got the size and the curves right.

To glue in the handle, I put a piece of Scotch tape on the back (to cover up the holes where the drill had gone through the paper backing), and then dotted Super Glue on the handle ends and stuck the ends in the holes. The tape was there to keep glue from spooging out the back. After a few minutes I peeled off the paper backing (with the tape attached). A little glue did spooge out, but acetone cleaned it up without damaging the plexiglass.

WARNING: I later tried acetone on a different piece of plexiglass, for a different project, and it made the plastic foggy. I spoke to the people at Tap Plastics about this and they said you should NEVER use acetone on plexiglass, it will usually fog it up and ruin it. I don’t know why it didn’t fog up my shower but they convinced me to never try it again! Windex and Goo Gone are also bad. To clean glue residue off plexiglass, they recommended plain old soap and water or a product named De-Solv-It. Now back to your regularly scheduled blog post…

I used an Xacto knife to add score lines to the door piece, to create the illusion that this is a door set into a larger piece of glass — you can sort of see them in the photo below. To assemble the shower, I glued the bottoms of the panels into the base pieces with tacky glue. While that was still wet, I ran a bead of super glue along each of the seams and pressed the panels together. That glue bonded within a few seconds to hold the panels in place while the tacky glue dried.

Once again, glue smears got cleaned up, and then I used a microfiber cloth (the kind you clean eyeglasses with) to get rid of dust and fingerprints.

Continue reading