Walls, Floors, and More

We like to think of it as buried treasure. No matter what we dig up, we always find something interesting.

Here's a last look at the vinyl floor that Kathy and I pulled out of the kitchen and restrooms a few months ago. We also removed a hastily home-built storage cabinet that someone had kludged together out of scrap wood and two closet doors. You can see the paint stripes across the back wall where the shelves used to go. It was a handy storage unit for a while, but we knew it wasn't gonna stay.

In removing the cabinet, we came across a metal plate screwed to the wall. Okay... what's this for? Turns out it covers a drain clean-out. Someone had evidently cut into the wall, installed a clean-out, and then mounted this plate over the hole. (And then built a storage cabinet over the plate.)

There's evidence of a water leak here, mostly on the other side of the wall (in the men's room). My guess is that something broke and, in desperation, they cut through the wall and into the pipe to fix it. The hasty patch has held for quite awhile.

After a little detective work with a flashlight, a snake, some colored string, and a hammer (to rap on the pipes) we determined that neither of these vertical pipes is being used anymore. At least, they're not "wet." They now pass air, so to speak, not wastewater. That's good news, because it means we can remove the cleanout and cover up the hole permanently. Just for good measure, we also replaced the cast iron pipe with ABS. After our adventures in the backyard, we don't like to leave any iron pipe in place if we can help it.

The surprise came when we took a close look at the backside of the wall, just to the right of the old iron pipe. Is that... bead board paneling back there? What's that doing here?

Turns out the whole men's room is done in bead board -- we just didn't know it. The wine labels cover it up so well that you can't even tell there's any paneling there. So, one more reason we think we want to remove all those old wine labels.

Once the old storage cabinet came down, the plaster started to collapse. Clearly, more of this wall had been cut away than we realized. You can see here how we found it, with a big section missing near the floor, and a chunk gone from the back wall, too. Sigh. Time for more plaster repair.

I generally like to repair small problems by mixing up fresh plaster and troweling it on, but these were too big -- and there was no lath to hold the plaster up. Looks like a job for drywall. If you shim it just right, you can get three-eighths drywall to match the thickness of the plaster. After a bit of mudding and sanding, the patch is pretty much invisible.

Somewhere in this process we added a heating duct to the room, too. It sticks up at a funny angle because we figured it needs to blow warm air into the room, not up at the ceiling. And we're planning to put a storage closet over it, sort of like the old one (but better), and this will get hidden in the kick space. Anyway, here's the partially completed plaster/drywall patch. It still needs a lot of sanding, but there will be plenty of time for that later.