Insulation Installation

Hooray! Today we got insulation installed in the kitchen and bathroom. We're actually putting stuff together instead of taking stuff apart. It's a good sign.

Oddly, we got mixed opinions on the seemingly uncontroversial subject of insulation. Some apparently knowledgeable people said not to insulate the house at all; that old Victorian houses like to "breathe" and weren't designed to be insulated. Insulation traps moisture and accelerates rot, the thinking goes.

Other experts told us it's perfectly okay to insulate as long as it's done properly.

The definition of "properly" changed depending on who we talked to, though. One experienced installer said to use Fiberglas bats with no facing paper. Another said bats with the paper facing inwards (toward the room). In the end, that's what we did.

Everyone agreed that insulating the walls doesn't do much good, no matter how you do it. Most heat is lost through the roof, floor, and windows. Walls are the most obvious, but least effective, target. But hey, that's what we've got open right now so that's what we're insulating. The attic and subfloor can wait.

A Fine Mess

All this came out of one little bathroom.

Remember all the twisted plumbing in the second-floor bathroom? This isn't even all of it. This is just the shower; it doesn't even include the pipes from the two sinks, the toilet, or the overhead waste pipe from the third-floor bathroom. Man, all that recyclable metal has got to be worth something.

Bathroom Trolls

Some things you just never want to see.

Oops, too late. This is the under-floor of the second-floor bathroom. This used to be our main/favorite bathroom, largely because it was next to the kitchen and on the same floor as our bedroom. The former is what doomed it: it was adjacent to the kitchen and therefore got caught in the plumbing-and-electrical overhaul.

We're happy to be redoing this bathroom because it was such a mess before. Cramped and crowded, with a funny layout, we knew its time with us would be short. Once the builders removed the vanity and shower, they found a bit of dry rot, so the floor came out as well. This is a view of where the bathroom floor was, looking down onto the first-floor ceiling.

I gotta say, those are some beefy 2x12's. That's also some ludicrous plumbing, if you ask me. We found unused gas and water lines in here, plus the now-familiar rusted iron waste pipes. It's hard to tell what this room used to be, but it probably wasn't always a bathroom, and it certainly didn't always have the plumbing routed the way it is now.

I'm particularly amused/horrified by the twisted drain pipes under the sinks and shower. You can see it here in the upper-right corner. The proverbial plumber's nightmare. What a tangle.

That will all get simplified as we move the shower to the opposite end of the room (away from the door, thank you) and swap the two sinks to the opposite wall, while the toilet moves a few feet to under the window. We should end up with the same number of fixtures (that's important) but better organized. And with plumbing that's not all rusted out.

Chef de Cuisine

Behold, the kitchen nerve center of Chez Turley!

I'm so ashamed: this used to be a four-star restaurant, the kind of place you booked six months in advance, and we've reduced it to a toaster oven and a microwave.

This house had two kitchens when we started, and now we can't even boil water. The upstairs kitchen is entirely gutted, of course, and even the downstairs kitchen is mostly out of commission. There's no commercial gas stove any more, and the big under-counter fridge never worked. We're making do with a 60s-era fridge (in harvest gold), some shelves, and these deluxe appliances. (We didn't even have the toaster oven until this week.)

On the plus side: we get to eat out a lot.

Shedding a Shed

This little bit of architectural heaven was fun to take down.

Although it wasn't strictly part of the kitchen remodel, or even necessary to remove, I hated it. It's a shed, an outhouse, that covered the downstairs water heater. When the water heater went, the shed went with it. And with it, the ugly white three-story chimney pipe you see here. Good riddance.

Now, of course, I'll just have to build a new shed in its place to cover the new water heater, plus the water softener. With my luck, the new shed will be the same as the old one. But at least that nasty chimney is gone. So there.

What Am I?

Any clues what this thing is?

We found this lurking in the wall above a first-floor bathroom. It appears to be some sort of vent pipe. It's a 90-degree elbow, way up near the ceiling, and is double-walled, as if it needed to be thermally protected. That's it: just the elblow. No pipes connected to either end.

It's been boxed in and invisible for who knows how many years. My theory is that it was a vent from a boiler or furnace that used to sit in what is now the ladies' room. Anybody got any better ideas?

Daniel Was Here

Yesterday Kathy and I cleaned some upstairs windows, and lookie what we found.

Scratched into the putty on the outside of the uppermost window was this: "Daniel Bergerac 73"

I'm assuming here that Daniel was Lucie Bergerac's brother, and that this was his room. (Lucie's childhood bedroom was across the hall, in what is now my home office.) We do know that the Bergerac family lived here in the 1970s, and that father Raymond Bergerac was the first to operate a restaurant in the house.

I'll ask Lucie. She still lives in the area and we really need to have her over for lunch.

Proof of Water

These are not pretty pictures. They're here for legal purposes.

The workers demolished our 2nd-floor bathroom the other day, and in order to ensure that we can rebuilt it, we photographed all the fixtures.


Specifically, we'll need to prove to the local "water police" that we had one shower, one toilet, and two sinks. Otherwise, they may not let us replace those fixtures one-for-one.

So here they are... uh, were.