Shower :  Re-invisioned.
Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle

With a considerably Reduced bank balance, and materials available for Re-use, Ruby's family has decided to Re-cylce their thinking process on how to provide a shower for the family during the Re-novation.

Saturday Morning, early:
Step one in the right direction.  DH goes To Town for provisions.  Chips, soda, milk, cereal, sandwich meat, bacon.  A few additional building supplies available at The Farm Store.
Step two:  DH cheerfully wakes up the family and assigns jobs. 
    Aspiring Chef DD#2 will be in charge of cooking breakfast and providing food, snacks and drinks for the day. 
   DS#2 will be in search of the sub-crawl space access point.  More on this later.
   Ruby will be in charge of trying to contain the mess, and remembering what order the work should be done in.
   DH is in Charge.

DS#2 isn't even aware that there is a secret access panel to the sub-crawl space in the bottom of the old coat closet.  The closet is soon to be demolished for the Master Bath anyway, and so has been cleared of the first layer of useful stuff.  What remains is the useless stuff, and the unsure stuff.  His mission is to empty the closet to find a small plywood panel in the floor that will allow him access.  Most people have probably never heard of a sub-crawl space.  They may have heard of a sub-basement, which is a basement under a basement.  It's not to be confused with a pub-crawl, where the drinkers walk, or otherwise make their way, from one pub to another without the aid of  automobiles.  Well, a sub-crawl space is more of a sub-set of a crawl space.  It's more of a math or geometry term than the other terms.  It would take a long time to explain clearly, but just so you understand that the area under the shower and the closet is a tiny, short, spidery, dank, damp, dirt bottomed, cracked-up-stone walled, hole below progressibly rotted floor joists and the hole in the closet floor is a short cut (a worm hole, if you will) to getting to the shower plumbing.

A lot of the past night was spent with head scratching and trying to remember IF there is a shut off valve for the shower and where it might be.  This involved an opportunity for Ruby to tell stories about the plumbing woes experienced by the house over the last 40 documented years.  Sure that there were shut off valves installed the last time the pipes froze and burst under the floor, Ruby continues to encourage DS#2 to follow the pipes.  All the while DH was trying his best to remember any of this, and not finding those memories.

Keep in mind that some of the family's favorite movies recently have been Hugo and City of Ember....

If the family can't find the shut off valves, the whole house water supply will have to be shut off for hours while new shut-offs are installed.....

oooh-weeee-ooooo

Auction Shower:  Fail continued .....

The saga of remodeling the Down Stairs Bathroom into a Master Bath, during which time the Second Bathroom (aka Kid's Bath) needed to be upgraded just enough to have an operational shower so that the Household would not be totally showerless for weeks during what is predicted to be one of the hottest summers on record.

We sought solutions at Big Box Supply House.  Roamed the miles of aisles and acres of displays.  All the chrome and porcelain and shiney stuff a person could imagine has been collected in this one place. 
DS#2 abandoned us to go look at Outlet Covers and Light Switches.
DS#2 hung close to find out what he and Big Brother were doomed to do the next day.

Armed with the correct measurements and the experimental statistics from our mock-ups and backed by all the knowledge of Geometry we had combined, we read every sign and box in the Plumbing Fixtures / Tub, Bath and Spa section.  The first conclusion we came to was that we could not afford to invest in a shiney new tub.  Realization of just what a great deal that auction tub was.  If only it had worked!

DS#2, being one of the primary users of this New Shower, became very interested and involved in this decision.  And the fact that if we blew the budget, his car would Not be getting that new clutch that it needed.  So, we decided to go for the lowest priced, largest sized TWO PIECE shower they had, that would ALSO go up the stairs.  Did you know that some of the showeres manufactured and sold at Big Box don't meed the minimum code requirements for shower size?  DS#2 pointed out that DD#2 would not care if the shower was the size of a shool locker, but he needed adequate space in a shower, and Height.  Did he mention Height?  Tall...

Turned out that for the price we could afford, and the size limit we had to work with, we could get:
Exactly the same shower that we had in the soon to be demolished bathroom that we've been using for the last 20 years.  And, we could only buy that for the same estimated cost as a New Clutch.

So, the plan was seeded.  If everything worked out just right, and we started Early Saturday Morning we could:
Take out the existing Downstairs Shower, haul it outside to scrape off the grunge and existing caulk and tile grout.
Install the drain: some extra materials required because now it's a Shower instead of a Tub.
Carry the cleaned and refurbished shower upstairs.
Install the shower, with proper Caulking this time:  3 tubes of caulk purchased.
Figure out how to use the Tub/Shower combo fixture on a Shower only and plumb the shower.
Totally rehabilitate the Sliding Shower Doors that have been known to Trap small people and try to Kill tall people.
Let all the solvent, sealant, caulk set up overnight.
What could go wrong? 
Failure, while not a option, would mean not having a shower at all.  For Sunday Morning!
duh da dun....