Saturday, February 25, 2012

Stud Muffin

I couldn't resist. ;-)

See what I did there? A new 10' stud separating our bathroom from the soon-to-be closet, and a homemade English muffin. I crack myself up.

Okay, back to work. The bathroom framing is all done. The new wall-hung toilet will mount between a pair of 2x6s on one wall and these 2x4s will define the opposite wall. We're enlarging the room just a little bit so that the bathroom door swings more freely and it won't seem quite so claustrophobic.

The ceiling/roof is a little over 10 feet high here, so there's plenty of room for insulation while still maintaining the high ceiling. In fact, the whole bathroom is now insulated for the first time in 118 years.

The new electrical wiring is all in, too. I've abandoned the "original" ungrounded wiring, which was probably put in during a major 1930s-era remodel. I can't completely eliminate the old wiring because it feeds the entire 3rd floor, not just this bathroom. Eventually, when we redo each of the other rooms, we'll wean ourselves off the old cloth-covered wires.

The electrician never showed up, so I installed the tandem 15-amp breakers myself. We now have three separate subpanels and something like 40 independent circuit breakers, whereas the house originally had a grand total of six breakers in all. Actually, it had a fuse box before that (we've found a few blown fuses in the dirt) and, of course, no electricity at all before that. The mind boggles.

Anyway, we've ordered the plumbing fixtures and are just waiting for them to arrive. In the meantime, I'm framing up some built-in storage cabinets that will go into the knee walls under the sloped roof. They should gives us some much-needed storage in the bathroom and keep me amused for a few weeks. We'll see.