Waiter, There's a Hole In My Wall

As part of our third-floor bathroom remodel, I decided to cut in a transom window over the bathroom door. When open, it should help ventilate the room better, and the window will let in some light. Besides, there was plenty of extra height since the ceilings are 10 feet high here.

Kathy's about done painting the transom window itself (pictures to come later), so in the meantime I've been trimming out the frame around it. I did a fairly straightforward design that looks about right for the period, with trim that leaves a 1/8-inch reveal around all four sides. The same style is repeated on the other side of the wall, in the hallway. I'm pretty happy with it.

The Doors, Garage Band

Here's an update on the garage doors we hung earlier this year. We finally got around to adding the little diamond shapes on the windows. The idea was to make the garage-door windows match the stained-glass windows on the house (below). It's not a perfect match, but I think it looks good.

Each little diamond is four separate pieces of molding, cut to fit diagonally across the window. Pretty simple in concept, but the measuring and cutting were both a bit tricky. Each piece is cut to fit its exact location (lower-left corner of window #3, for example). I tried cutting four "generic" pieces of trim, but they didn't fit quite right. A difference of even 1/16 of an inch was noticeable, so I broke down and cut each one individually.

I suppose if we wanted to go for the full house treatment we'd stain the glass, too, but I'm not sure we want to go that far. It is just a garage, after all. And it's a whole lot better than the door that was here before.

Flush With Excitement

It works!

As you can see by this lovely photo, we now have a toilet. And it even works! Hooray, we're now back to a 4-bathroom house the way it was when we moved in, and we don't have to go down a flight of stairs if we're on the top floor. Better still, our guests won't have to go down a flight of stairs.

Well, unless they want to take a bath or shower. Or brush their teeth. But one thing at a time.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a wall-mounted unit that doesn't touch the floor. This is to accommodate the strangely too-high drain pipe on this floor. Anyway, the thing is rock solid and is rated to support 800 pounds, so even the most, uh, gravitationally gifted guests will be safe.

Plumbing it in was a snap, even though it came with two sets of instructions that contradicted each other. (Reminds me of the old dictum: a man with a watch always knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure.) It turns out that both sets of instructions are correct, they just get you there in different ways.

Oh, and the instructions are all translated from German. Which would be fine if they'd just given me the German instructions. I might've be able to decipher those on my own. But no, the translated ones were just... inscrutable.

The hardest part, would you believe, was putting on the toilet seat. Plumbing? No problem. Wall supports? Piece of cake. Screwing down a stupid toilet seat? Now that's tricky. In typical German fashion, the seat is held on by an elaborately complex multi-part mechanical device that's infinitely adjustable and probably works for 12 different seats, 17 different commodes, 76 foreign countries, and five space stations. That's swell, but how do I get it to work for me? Here the instructions are oddly silent. No pictures, no metric measurements, nothing. Just a big bag of parts. I finally decided that half of the parts were unnecessary (kind of like British sports cars) and made it work. Let me know if it falls off.

I say the toilet works, but actually all I know for sure is that it doesn't leak. We've done a lot of trial flushes, but haven't actually, you know, used it used it. It's all been dry runs, so to speak. Maybe someone will come visit soon. Anybody?

The Paint Goes On

The top-floor bathroom tile is done, and I've resumed covering the rest of the walls. We're close enough to being finished that Kathy has started to paint. The plan is to paint the walls yellow and the "ceiling" (anything that's not vertical) in white. I've put a new transom window over the door, which should let in some sunlight from the nearby skylight / seagull perch, while also venting the room a little better.

Speaking of vents, I've also added a ceiling fan to the far wall, over the window. Local code requires a fan in every bathroom, and we felt like being good citizens and including one here even though it never had one before. What with all the new insulation, the room will trap moisture more than before, so we really want to make sure the room is well-ventilated.

Cutting a vent hole in the outside of the house, just under the roof peak on the third floor, was a bit tricky. There's nowhere to stand on the roof (even if I wanted to... and I don't), so I had to do it all by leaning out the window. I removed the triangular window from its frame, sat on the sill, and leaned out with my tools. Coincidentally, some new guests had just checked in to the Gosby House Inn next door, and they were trying their best to pretend not to watch. Just to mess with them, I'd "accidentally" juggle a screwdriver or say "whoops!" and listen to the conversation below come to a brief stop.

I'm pretty happy with the way the vent came out. It's almost invisible from the outside of the house. Later today I'll box in the duct so that it's not quite so ugly from the inside.

We've also put in the first of the new light fixtures, a pair of wall sconces that will shine over the vanity (if we can ever find a way to haul that thing upstairs). As an added bonus, I can now work in the bathroom at night!

The Naked Dining Room

We're back from vacation and hard at work again.

Kathy has completely stripped all the wallpaper from our ground-floor dining room. To our surprise, the room had never been painted. Once the wallpaper was off we were looking at bare plaster. And it was in pretty good shape, too, with only a few small cracks and imperfections. By far the worst damage was from the nail holes and screw fittings that people had added afterwards. The plaster itself is remarkably smooth and even. Whoever did that work 120 years ago, you have my compliments.

The one exception is a round spot about waist-high on one wall that happens to sit behind our liquor cabinet. It's oddly colored, like it was maybe patched at one time, and it's got a few cracks radiating out from it. After taking this photo, I realized it creates kind of a tacky, faux Mediterranean still life, like something you'd see for sale in the thrift shop next to pictures of crying clowns.

Now that the walls are all bare, the room is a lot lighter. Much better than the red color that used to be there. We haven't decided yet whether to paint the walls or paper them. If we paint, it would be the first time for this room. If we paper, at least now we've got a clean and well-prepared surface to work with.