A Little Something for the Ladies

Indoor plumbing: It's a good thing.

We decommissioned both of the downstairs restrooms a long time ago when we started replacing the under-floor plumbing. It wasn't long before they both became storage rooms, filled with tools, wood, miscellaneous bolts and doorknobs, and so on. That worked pretty well for a while, but we missed having a downstairs bathroom (or two), and for legal reasons we needed to get them working eventually.

(Background: Our region has chronic water shortages, and so each property is assigned a certain number of "water credits," which determine how many toilets, showerheads, and faucets you're allowed to have. You can't add -- or even significantly change -- any water fixture without additional credits, which can't be bought or sold. Consequently, the number of water fixtures per house has been fixed for many years. Because our house was used as a 58-seat restaurant for 30+ years, it has a *lot* of water credits, but we risk losing them if we don't maintain all the existing fixtures. Hence the motivation to reinstate the bathrooms.)

We started with the ladies' room because it's larger and nicer. Kathy stripped off the old wallpaper, exposing those mysterious catalog pages. (We've photographed them all just in case someone figures it out.) We mixed our own plaster and patched some of the bad spots where the original plaster had come away from the wooden lath behind it. And we sanded down some of the bigger bumps and wobbles in the walls.

We also took advantage of the naked walls to bury some of the electrical wiring that had been added long ago. When these rooms were first electrified, someone had run metal conduit up and down the walls and across the ceiling, which wasn't very charming. So by cutting a few strategic holes in the walls and fishing the wires through, we managed to hide all the wiring in the walls. A few quick plaster patches, and voila! You'd never know it wasn't all there from the beginning.

New wallpaper went on, and we added some gold-painted picture-rail molding around the top. Naturally, all of these walls are uneven, so running straight wooden molding only serves to highlight the gaps and wows in the walls. We had to get a bit creative in masking some of the discontinuities.

The old bathroom fixtures got thrown out and shiny new fixtures went in, including an ecologically correct low-flow toilet. (For which the aforementioned water bureau is sending us a $100 rebate.)

Kathy found a couple of small tables at the local shops, and we're just about all done. The window needs a bit of work (new glass, and molding touch-up), but now the ladies' room is up and running.