Tag: House Tour

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Upstairs Bathroom Details: Structural Support

Christine

You may have noticed that the new bathroom looks a lot bigger. That’s because it is.

We bumped the wall where the door is out into the hallway. This gave us another 16″ or so in the bathroom, and we didn’t really loose anything but dead space in the hall. We considered it carefully, too. We didn’t want to find that we’d made it impossible to get furniture in. This didn’t impact that at all, mostly because the chimney stack was already there. That’s another plus. The bathroom doesn’t have heating, so by moving the door wall, we’ve now got two sides of the chimney in the bathroom. And when the hot water is running, like when you’re in the shower, the chimney gets hot enough to warm your towel! That nice structural beam had to stay, but I don’t think it looks out of place. Or, maybe I’m just telling myself that so I feel better.

Another place we gained space was the ceiling. Bill started to level the old ceiling when we had the bathroom gutted, and he realized that it was going to be a lot of tedious work. He asked me if it would be okay to take the framework down and start from scratch. I’ll bet Bill got nervous when he saw the gleam in my eye. I had an idea. Since we had to tear it down anyway, could we raise the ceiling? Pretty please? At only 7′, it always felt claustrophobic, and Lewis’ hair grazed the light fixture. So Bill agreed that would be best all around, and I couldn’t be happier.

One last place we expanded was the knee wall. As it turns out, there was over a foot of dead space between the bathroom and the back bedroom’s cubby. Just dead space, not being used for anything. Of course, you can’t actually stand there, because of the slope of the roof, but I got my longed-for shampoo shelf and plenty of extra elbow room in the shower. It really makes all the difference. The whole bathroom feels so spacious, even considering its size.
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House Tour: Upstairs Bathroom After

Christine

I think I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves.
Compare to the before photos posted yesterday. Details to follow.





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House Tour: Upstairs Bathroom Before

Christine

I can remember the first time mom and I walked through this house. The owners were showing it themselves, because it was up for auction. I stepped into this bathroom, turned and said to mom, “we’re going to have to factor a bathroom remodel right into the budget for this house.” She agreed. We both knew it couldn’t stay like that for long.

Once the paperwork was finalized and the P.O.s moved out (five weeks of me renting to them), I finally got the house all to myself. Little did I know then… But I always knew this bathroom had to go. I’ve even thought it could have made a good entry for American Standard’s Ugliest Bathroom Contest. But they don’t seem to do that anymore.

These photos were taken in September 2003. Once upon a time, there was a claw foot tub in here, but it was long gone by the time I arrived. I’d guess 1970s?
The ceiling was low, the lighting was ugly, the floor was squishy, the tub was shorter than normal at 4-1/2′, its faucet leaky, any natural daylight was almost completely blocked by the weird shower wall addition, daddy couldn’t even get to the plumbing access panel…

…that’s about 10″ there, people.
If your eyes can get past the nasty, teal with gold veins …laminate?… wall panels, you can see they butchered the poor header on the medicine cabinet with that hideous 80s lighting.
The toilet also leaked. Alot. We woke up one morning to water dripping from the ceiling right onto the kitchen counter! I would have been a whole lot more disgusted if we had actually been using the kitchen at the time. Anyway, the downstairs bathroom wasn’t yet completed, so my dad’s solution was to turn the water off to the toilet (luckily it was the ingoing water that was leaking, not the, erm, outgoing). This did not render the bathroom unusable, however, because all we had to do was collect water dripping from the tub faucet into a bucket, and voila! Instant use of wasted water. The tub faucet was leaking about a gallon of water every two hours. Daddy intended to fix it, but he said the whole thing had to be replaced, he couldn’t reach the plumbing, and we were going to gut this room in less than a year, so…

Check out the gold vein on that counter surface. Not matching, but coordinating.Just wait till you see all we did to this room. You may not recognise it. Once we realized how bad the water damage was, this room had to be torn down to the studs. And then some of those even had to be sistered. We bumped two walls out, raised the ceiling, leveled the floor, well, you’ll see…

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House Tour: Back Bedroom After

Christine

Oh, boy. I am embarrassed to show you all this room. It is baaaaad. But everyone has a junk room, right? Right? Someday I’ll get this organized. Really, I will. If you can believe it, there was twice as much stuff in here about a year ago, so that’s progress. And there is a wide path from the door to the closet on the left, both dressers are accessible, as well as the window on the left. Can’t quite get to the window on the right just now, even though there is a large empty space in front of it. You just can’t get there.

And if you can imagine it, three years ago, pretty much the whole house was in this state. Or worse. So if you look at it like that, we’ve made progress. We’ve just stalled here. This was the landing spot for everything we didn’t know what to do with.

You may notice that this room is slightly less peach than before, but it was supposed to be a lovely light mushroom color. But our less-than-fab painter, who shall go unnamed, decided he’s a one-coat-Joe. So, some day we’ll need to paint in here again. The color isn’t as deep as I had wanted, and because walls are not perfectly smooth, peach paint shows through where the roller skipped over the concave spots. Idiot.

Also, the this is the only room in the house with painted trim. I’m happy with it, I think it looks nice painted a nice white. Really, it was the only way to go here because both windows were later additions, as well as most of the baseboard, so they weren’t chestnut, and it was all already painted, so… I don’t feel bad.

Carpet is another only-in-this-room. Some stupid P.O. had glued carpet down to the floor at some point, and while, maybe, maybe the glue may have come up, it would have cost a fortune and been very labor intensive. Besides, only half of the room had hardwood floor, the other half now has new plywood that replaced the rotten sleeping porch floor.

Another someday we’ll get the walls painted to match the carpet. It’ll look nice with the white trim. The doors themselves were refinished, though, in keeping with the rest of the house.

The closet is reasonably organized……do I at least get points for that?

Okay, so, remember that space behind the door I told you to make note of in the before pictures? Well, here is the final result:That second “cubby” door was built by Bill, and it leads to the plumbing access. That bump out? Well, that is just small space lost in a large room, a small price to pay for much gained elbow room in the bathroom…

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House Tour: Back Bedroom Before

Christine

Oh, my, folks. Here we are, nearly at the end of our house tour, and we find ourselves in the room where it all began. This is the back bedroom. It fills the back dormer of the bungalow. Once upon a time this was a rather small bedroom, with a sleeping porch. Somewhere along the line, a P.O. (a stupid P.O.) enclosed the sleeping porch to make a larger bedroom. Okay idea in theory. In practice, however…

Porch floors are meant to be sloped away from the house, so that rainwater will drain off the floor, much like a roof. Well, this particularly lazy P.O. couldn’t even be bothered to level the floor, or replace what were most likely already rotten floor boards. Nah, let’s just glue cheap office carpet over the whole shebang. And never mind the drop in ceiling height. Doesn’t that look ridiculous? Unfortunately, at this juncture, there is nothing reasonable that I can do to fix this. It would cost an arm and a leg to do what I’d really like to do: recreate the roof over this section so that it blends seamlessly with the rest of the house. Oh, well. Maybe if I win the lottery.

So this section of roof and ceiling is more problematic than just aesthetically displeasing. It had also been leaking for a very, very long time when I got the house. In fact, before Jeff the electrician had put one tiny hole in the wall, this ceiling came a-tumblin‘ down.

I wasn’t even living at the bungalow yet, but stopped in daily to check on progress. One evening, late, I popped in just to see if Jeff had gotten started yet. As I was looking around the upstairs bathroom, I kept hearing this dripping sound. I followed it to the back bedroom, where a great sheet of drywall from the ceiling had come down from the center, almost like it was on a hinge. I couldn’t even comprehend what had happened at first.

As it turns out, my P.O.’s P.O.s had known the roof over this section was bad more than a decade before. My dad and grandfather actually submitted a bid to do the repairs, but when the owners saw the price tag, the balked. Apparently they decided no action was the route to take.

Fast forward to November of 2003. So I see this huge section of drywall hanging onto the ceiling by nothing more than drywall tape at one end, and I hear the sound of dripping water, the carpet is saturated. Then I look up. The insulation is all wet, dripping. And dark. Really dark. Oh my God. Black with mold. Panic. Frantic call to mom, cutting up large trash bags to cover the floor, as if that would protect it. Little did I know, that floor was way beyond saving.

Over the following few weeks, all the rotten and moldy stuff was torn out by Bill, who then replaced the rotten floor with one that is solid and mostly level. It is an old house after all, and while Bill is great, there is only so much one can do in some situations. Bill also tore out all the wet drywall and moldy insulation, swabbed the remaining structure down with Clorox, allowed it to dry, then replaced the insulation and installed blueboard. Many months later the plaster guys gave that blueboard a nice skim coat.

Notice that little door there? Well that leads to a storage cubby under the eaves. The other three eaves are utilized by bedroom closets, but this one is next to the bathroom. It is a pretty cool feature, kids seem to think it is cool, and Oli always insists on following me in there, even though it is a small space.Take note of that dead space behind the door. When we get to the after pictures, you’ll notice a change. And of course, another giant closet, complete with loose, real linoleum.