Adding a Door to Our Bathroom Archway: Part II

Continued from Part One of my post about adding a door to an arched bathroom entrance. In Part One, a friend from church used his nail gun to place a frame inside our archway (pictures of frame in Part One.)

Dad Fix Tip #7: How to Frame in an Archway - Part Two

Our drywall installer came over yesterday to drywall the arched doorway frame. We've been waiting about a month for this particular installer because he comes highly recommended AND he only charged us $50! I could have nailed the drywall to the frame myself but if I had attempted the taping, applying putty and texturizing, it would NOT have looked nearly as nice. Plus, I figure, for $50 I get a one-on-one lesson from a professional on how to do this stuff :-)

Cutting the top arch semi-circle crescent out of drywall. Tool: razor knife.

Cutting strips to use along sides of door frame

Nailing strips onto sides of door frame

Drywall is completed on the frame. Nail heads are visible.

Joint compound used to seal seams and cracks. Mix with water until mud-like texture.

He mixed a second type of mud in for the final coat (lessened the drying time?)

All the putty is smoothed with a trough (trow?) In the foreground, you can see two types of tape that he used. One looks like wide masking tape, the other a green "mesh" or net-looking tape. The first tape was creased long-ways (vertically) and placed down the 90 degree seams (where "old" wall met new drywall). Putty went on before and after this tape and smoothed. The mesh tape was used over joints or seams that were flat. I think it was to prevent cracking after the putty dried.

Masking tape in the 90 degree corner (yellow-ish color), mesh tape over the seam where two pieces of drywall came together. Putty easily covers all tape, nail heads and any other cracks or holes. Blue paint on the far left is our bedroom wall (before the 90 degree curve to the archway).

This is the view from inside the bathroom. Archway fades into a square door top.

He used real masking tape to tape off an area around the doorway to prep for spraying the texture. That's our collection of Disneyland neck lanyards hanging inside the bathroom. They are not hanging from the top of the doorway, it just looks like they are. After laying a base layer of masking tape (as a boundary), he taped on a series of draping plastic sheets to keep the texture spray from overspraying onto other parts of our room. He kinda of created his own little paint booth by taping and draping so that only his work area was exposed.

Final product from inside bathroom. Texture complete. Its evening now and a little darker in the picture. It took him about 4 hours, working by himself to do this part of the project (and he was very quick in his motions, he was definitely a seasoned veteran.) I think he said it would take about 4-5 hours for the whole thing to dry. He said we could "lightly sand it" and then paint.

This is the finished view from outside our bathroom. The inner door (door gives privacy to the toilet) is opened in the background showing pictures inside the toilet room (we kinda had a bathroom inside a bathroom or more accurately, a toilet room inside a bathroom). Does that make sense?

I didn't take a picture of his texture sprayer and couldn't find one on google images. It reminded me of an old bug sprayer kinda like this one but NOT red and no canister at the end. It was a long tube but had a much bigger diameter. I'm guessing he stuck the tube down inside his bucket of texture and used the handled piston to draw-up the texture. Then sprayed the texture out by pushing the piston inward. It gave a sort of splattered effect which matched the texture on our walls near perfectly.

Now all we need is to have the door hanged (or is it hung?) I don't do drywall...or grammar well. LOL. We're one step closer to having a completely private bathroom (remember, we have six daughters!) As mentioned in my first post about this project, this room could also be used as a saferoom with a little help from Door Jamb Armor.

Framing A Bathroom Archway to Add A Door

View from outside bathroom (door inside is toilet)

[Update: Part Two of Adding a Door to a Bathroom Archway is posted.  All drywall and texture completed.]

Dad Fix Tip #7: How to Frame in an Archway

Part One

As I was working on my living room niche last week, a buddy from church stopped by to borrow a razor knife. He was a carpenter by trade and was working on adding a walk-in pantry inside a neighbor's house across the street (neighbor's solution to MORE food storage space.) Somehow in the conversation between him and Wifey, they discussed how he added a door to his master bathroom which was originally only designed as an archway (read: shower without privacy door + 6 daughters = no privacy for Dad.)

Next thing I know, he's offering to add a doorway for us for around $150. Seriously? How can I turn THAT down! He came over a few days later and framed in the archway. I'll show the pictures of the framework and update the progress of this structure as it happens (see Part Two.)

No pun intended but this project opens up a ton of doors for us! Not only will we be able to LOCK our bathroom now (think six daughters!) but we could also potentially turn this room into a safe room. I've blogged about using Armor Concepts and their amazing door jamb armor (police battering ram video) and could use it to create a safe room.



View from inside the bathroom.



The drywall should be done this coming Saturday and the door will be hung after the drywall is finished. We might have a hard time finding a matching door since our house was built back in 2001. Nevertheless, we are excited about our soon-to-be bathroom privacy and security. A large part of Wifey cleaning and re-cleaning our bedroom is due to the toddlers pulling out all the scrunchies, hair clips, bobby pins, etc from the bathroom and littering them everywhere else.

I'd like to replace the over-sized bathtub in this bathroom with something more practical since we mostly use the stand-alone shower. The toddlers get to use our tub on occasion as their play pool. But until we find some pictures/ideas of something to actually replace the tub with, we'll just leave it.