I can’t count how many times I’ve finished a home-improvement project with the echoes of my own profanities ringing in my ears. I could finish the job with aesthetic flourishes, but usually I hate the thing so much by then that I just sneer at it and walk away.
It’s a spite-myself strategy, I’ve realized, that is rooted in both ambition and stinginess. So last week, when I started building an outdoor shower, I tried for once to dial down those parts of my brain.
I briefly considered tackling every aspect of the plumbing, carpentry and masonry myself in a single weekend. But because I know very little about carpentry or plumbing, I figured there was a good chance that my shower would look as if it had been designed by Cubists and built by a 10-year-old with great flood insurance and no qualms about public nudity.
Still, I had budgeted only about $1,500 for the project, and I set out to beat that price with some rational do-it-yourself suggestions from professionals, including Jeffrey Dibble, owner of J. A. Dibble Plumbing in Old Saybrook, Conn.; Ben Stillwell, a contractor-turned-project-specialist for Lowe’s; and Richard Bubnowski, an architect based in Point Pleasant, N.J.
I didn’t beat my budget by much, but without their advice I would have blown far past it. More important, I ended up with a great new outdoor shower and with my sanity, and body, mostly intact.
Among the best counsel offered by my panelists was this, from Mr. Bubnowski: “The first thing you want to do is consult your local building code officials, since the last thing you want to do is build it and find out you violated the plumbing code.”
Mr. Bubnowski, whose design blog includes a much-read entry on an outdoor shower he built for himself, said municipalities regulate outdoor showers more closely than they did a decade ago, especially when it comes to drainage. “With most towns, you can’t just drain onto the grade,” he said. “They’ll make you tie the thing directly into the sanitary sewer.”
If your local building department requires such a connection, and you lack plumbing expertise, get ready to call a contractor. Mr. Bubnowski said you may also need to design a roof for the shower, because some municipalities want sewer lines clear of leaves and twigs.
If your town is O.K. with your shower draining directly into your yard, you must still control runoff, or it can damage your home’s foundation and leak into your basement or crawl space.
There is little such risk if your soil is sandy, my panelists said, but otherwise you’ll need to borrow a page from the patio-builder’s protocol and replace a fat layer of soil with densely packed gravel that is sloped away from the house. Some people then fill the shower floor with smooth river rocks and paving stones, but since I recently spent an excruciating stretch building a patio with pavers, I opted for a simple wood platform.
Unlike some towns, mine doesn’t require homeowners to pay a licensed plumber to install an outdoor shower. But I do, so I had to plan the job to account for the somewhat elastic schedules that licensed plumbers can keep.
My strategy was to excavate, fill and grade the shower floor, set posts in concrete footings for the shower walls and construct as much of the enclosure as I could with the limited skills I have. Since my home is clad in horrific-looking aluminum siding, I planned for a four-sided structure. Not only would the siding have been ugly to behold while showering, but attaching the shower’s walls directly to the house would have complicated matters.
To save on plumbing charges, I planned for the shower to share a wall with our washing machine’s water lines.
Around a month before my target date, I started pursuing an estimate from Mr. Dibble, who had been recommended by friends and who, like most sought-after plumbers, has a dance card with very little blank space.
As I waited for the return call, Mr. Stillwell, of Lowe’s, almost got me to try the plumbing myself. “All you need to do is cut into the pipe and throw a ‘T’ in there,” he said, referring to a T-fitting. “If it’s ABS piping, you just need some glue for it.”
I tried to imagine cutting into a sewer line with a hacksaw four inches from my face. Then I dialed Mr. Dibble again.
His $500 estimate was at the low end of the spectrum I had found online ($1,500 was the high end). I suddenly had a fair bit of financial flexibility.
You can spend many thousands of dollars on an enclosure, of course. I just wanted something stable and attractive and free of peepholes. I struggled to find carpentry plans that would help me do the job myself, but when I found a reasonably priced prefabricated enclosure with a fairly simple design, I figured I might hedge.
My new plan: buy three sides of an enclosure for around $1,000 and then build the fourth wall myself, to hold the shower hardware and block the view of our tin house. The big question was how well I could match the fourth wall to the others.
The three prefabricated walls, from Cape Cod Shower Kits, use cedar tongue-and-groove construction. I checked the dimensions and materials, and after spending around $100 on wood and a carpenter’s level, I set to work.
I built a rectangular frame with two cross supports and screwed the cedar planks into place, then trimmed one plank along its length to fit my allotted space. At Mr. Stillwell’s suggestion, I used decking screws for all-weather durability and drilled holes before placing the screws to prevent splitting. I also added two horizontal supports for stability. The job took me a few hours, but it was easy and it came out fairly well, with square corners and tight seams.
Next, I dug two holes 18 inches deep and one foot in diameter, and mixed a 50-pound bag of quick-setting concrete with a half-gallon of water in my wheelbarrow. I set a 10-foot-long, 4-by-4-inch post in the hole and filled the space around it with concrete. (Those who attach the enclosure directly to their house can avoid this arduous step.)
My carpenter’s level helped me keep the post straight while I secured it in place with heavy stones. I repeated the process with the second post, but with considerably more anxiety about its location, since I needed to precisely match the width of my wall with the prefabricated wall that would stand opposite. Mr. Bubnowski recommended using posts from pressure-treated lumber or cedar, to prevent rotting. I used pressure-treated posts for my homemade wall, as they’re much less expensive than cedar.
An hour after setting the first post, I drilled holes for my screws and attached my wall to the posts. Could I have done all four sides myself? Maybe, but without detailed woodworking plans, it would have come out looking more rudimentary than the prefabricated design. And I still had plenty of work to do.
After Mr. Dibble installed the plumbing, I spent a long afternoon digging three more post holes and attaching the prefabricated walls, door and hardware. You may be tempted to try going solo. If you like tormenting yourself, proceed. I had the help of my dad, Bob Sr., and we still barely got the thing straight and tight enough to elicit a high-five at day’s end.
I believe my father is available to help anyone who needs it.
Mr. Dibble said homeowners who install outdoor showers must remember to bleed the pipes of water before winter sets in, just as they must remove hoses from outdoor spigots. Otherwise, the frozen water can burst pipes inside the house and cause flooding.
“That’s how I spent my winter,” he said. “Fixing all those. It happened to everybody.”
I set up email reminders, because it would be just like me to overlook something so small.
I still have a few hours of work ahead, digging and grading the floor, and I will add shelves and hooks. But because I exited the project without turning it into my own enemy — for once — I may actually get to those amenities before it’s time to drain the water for the season.
Original article and pictures take www.nytimes.com site
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