Cutting Nevada

The walls are out, so it's time for new walls to go in.

We've stripped away all the old drywall and started to prepare the room for its new shape. In other words, the demolition is pretty much done; now it's time for construction.

Step 1 of the process is insulating. No part of this house has ever been insulated, an oversight we intend to correct one room at a time. As I mentioned earlier, it's tricky to insulate an old house because you have to be careful not to trap moisture in the walls, which were designed to "breathe" (i.e., be drafty). This is particularly tough in a bathroom. And especially so in a bathroom directly under the roof. A roof that faces south.

So we're filling the walls with two-inch thick slabs of EPS, or expanded polystyrene. It doesn't absorb moisture like pink fiberglass batting does, and it's got a skin on both sides to repel dampness. One side is shiny foil; that points outward to reflect the sun's heat. The other side is just white plastic with all sorts of certifications printed on it. After staring at the back of it for a few days I'm pleased to announce that it's Energy Star–compliant, non-corrosive, CFC-free, HCFC-free (whatever that is), contains no formaldehyde, is mold-resistant and insect-resistant, and for all I know, gluten-free and low in saturated fat.

It's also pretty easy to handle and doesn't make your arms itch like fiberglass. That's good, because I had to spend a lot of time cutting all the pieces to shape. Naturally, none of the rafters are on standard 16-inch spacing. In fact, they're not even consistent with one another. I had to cut every single piece separately to fit a specific bay between rafters. Exactly two of them were rectangular; all the rest were oddly shaped and took multiple cuts.

The next one (here in the center of the photo) is shaped like Nevada, but backwards. Lake Tahoe is about where the wires are dangling. It'll be fun.

Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits

We found more buried treasure.

Okay, maybe "treasure" oversells it, but we've found more junk, this time buried under the bathroom floor. The haul included a Play-Doh can, a bottle of nail polish, an aerosol can of shaving cream, an empty glass jar, and — typically — a whiskey bottle.

This particular brand of hooch was "Randy Ford's Reserve" 80-proof Kentucky whiskey blend, bottled by The Ames Co. of Newark, California. Newark? Really?

I did a quick search for the Ames whiskey bottling company and, not surprisingly, came up dry. (See what I did there?) There are some numbers molded into the bottom of the bottle, and across the top is the phrase, "federal law prohibits the sale or re-use of this bottle," presumably there to thwart moonshiners or tax evaders.

Whiskey is a step up for our tippling builders. Construction of the 2nd-floor kitchen was fueled almost entirely by cheap Muscatel. Maybe the economy was improving by the time they built this bathroom. Or maybe a particularly talented builder with a good arm managed to toss his bottle all the way up here. Either way, I hope he enjoyed his drink. There's nothing left in the bottle.

Bring Out Your Lead!

"I'm getting better!"
"No you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment."

One of joys of remodeling this bathroom is removing the 100 pounds of old plumbing. Seriously, this stuff is heavy. The hot and cold supplies were pretty typical galvanized pipe (not copper), which is pretty dense stuff. But the waste line was four-inch cast iron, which is right up there with depleted uranium in terms of gravitational attraction. I was glad to see this stuff go, particularly as the insides of the pipes had accumulated several decades' worth of, um, accumulation. It was like a heart patient badly in need of angioplasty. (I'm sorry, doctor, we can't save the patient. He's too far gone. We'll have to re-plumb him.)

The charming contraption you see here is the iron toilet drain, which teed off to a galvanized drain for the old bathtub on the right, and to the sink on the left (already removed in this photo). The tub drain had a clever little P-trap built into the line, which you can just see on the far right of the photo. And by "clever" I mean it was a huge pain to remove.

The iron-to-iron joints are done with oakum and lead, such as the slip joint just behind the toilet flange. The galvanized fittings are threaded. All of it is corroded. And just about bomb-proof. I spent some quality time with the angle grinder. It's sort of like reverse welding, with sparks flying and everything, but with the added attraction of lead.

The biggest problem, of course, is that all of this plumbing is raised above the floor, which gives us this charming channel cut right through the middle of the room. That's because this particular run starts at the back of the house. In order to maintain a constant slope the pipe had to angle upward slightly on its way here. (As everyone knows, stuff flows downhill.) By the time it reached the bathroom it was halfway above the floorboards. That explains why the old toilet was raised up on a pedestal. It wasn't for ADA compliance, that's for sure.

Our plan is to cut the drain pipe back as far as the wall, then install a wall-mounted toilet (as opposed to the usual floor mount). The wall mount gives us some automatic height and avoids having to run the drain under the floor at all. It'll just stop at the back wall, a good 6-10 inches above the floor. And, since the new drain will be all ABS, it'll save us, oh, about 100 pounds of crusty old pipe.

The hot and cold supply lines are both PEX, and they're just visible peeking out at the back of the photo. And — mirable dictu — all the electrical will get replaced with brand new grounded Romex, which you can also see in the photo. Gosh, we may even put in a GFCI outlet or two. Imagine: the first safe, reliable, code-compliant bathroom this house has had in 120 years.

I wonder how much money the scrapyard will give me for all the old metal pipe?

The "Money Pit" Moment

When we bought this old house a lot of friends called it "the money pit" and rolled their eyes and wrung their hands, certain we'd made a horrible mistake. Everyone recalled scenes from the old Tom Hanks / Shelley Long movie, where the wiring sparks, the plumbing leaks, and people fall through the floor.

So far, it hasn't been like that at all. Two years on, we're still happy with the way things are going.

But then this happens.

In demolishing the 3rd-floor bathroom, we removed all the old plumbing fixtures and threw them out. (Really, who wants to reuse an old toilet, even if it is in good condition?) We turned off the water, obviously, plugged up the open drain pipes, and tied-off the electrical wires. No worries.

Until you wake up the next morning and find the ceiling in the room below looks like this. Uh, whoops. The dining room ceiling is wallpapered (ceiling papered?) and the paper had all started to peel away and sag, as you can see. Clearly, the water in the bathroom hadn't really been shut off.

Turns out there was a pre-existing leak in the bathroom pipes, and closing the shutoff valves had reopened the old wound, so to speak. A slow drip had run back along the pipes to a low spot, then dripped through the floor/ceiling into the dining room below. This had all happened before, in precisely the same spot. The same wallpaper had peeled away from the same spot and been re-pasted, and the same pipes had an old patch clamped over them. Someone had even cut an access hole into the back wall of an adjoining closet just to get at this section of plumbing. All of which should have been a red flag to me, but I naively assumed the old fix had worked. Uh, that's a negative, Houston.

Seeing the damp wallpaper hanging limply from the ceiling I couldn't help but think of Tom and Shelley. Well, at least the wiring doesn't spark.

A Case of Shingles

Gosh, old houses are so charming.

The outside of the house is covered in shingles, as seen here. But the singles don't cover the outside of the house. They are the outside of the house.

There is no exterior wall surface behind the shingles. They're it. They're nailed directly to narrow horizontal laths that are, in turn, nailed to the studs. On the other side of the stud is the interior wall, generally lath and plaster.

There's no insulation in the walls, either. Just shingles on the outside and plaster on the inside, with a few inches of air in between. This really came home to me, as it were, when I was demolishing the walls in the bathroom. Once you take down the drywall you're looking at the back side of the shingles, and if there are any tiny gaps you see daylight.

So... the bathroom is getting insulated. The problem is that old houses like this are designed to "breathe" by allowing moisture to pass through the walls. Insulate incorrectly and you'll trap all that moisture inside the walls, where it will rot the timber. The trick is to prevent hot/cold airflow while still allowing moisture to pass through.

Pink fiberglass insulation is exactly the wrong stuff to use. It acts like a giant sponge, trapping moisture inside the walls. Instead, we'll be using expanded polystyrene (EPS), which looks like big chunks of white styrofoam with shiny foil on one side. If we install it with the foil side facing out it should reflect a lot of the sun's heat. And in this room, with the sloped roof/ceiling, that should help a lot.

4BR, 3BA Fixer-Upper

Welcome to our 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom house. It's only got two bathrooms now 'cause this one is gone!

The 3rd-floor bathroom was always kind of... strange. It wasn't as bad as the old 2nd-floor bath (which bordered on creepy) but it was never our favorite. For one, it was carpeted. Who carpets a bathroom? For another, the fixtures were tucked under the gable with a steeply sloped ceiling, so headroom was always a problem. Finally, the plumbing was a bit odd, with the toilet raised up on a four-inch platform to accommodate the drain pipe. A throne, indeed.

All of that is no more. We've stripped out the room to the studs, removing all the wiring and fixtures, except for the heavy claw-foot bathtub, which stays. I've cut away most of the galvanized supply lines, although there's still some more to go. The heavy cast-iron drain pipe is joined with oakum and lead, which should give you some idea of the task.

You can tell this bathroom was an afterthought because the hot and cold pipes were run on the outside of the house. You could see the twin copper pipes running all the way from ground level up to the 3rd-floor roof. Very ugly, and the pipes got pretty cold in the winter. Plus, the pipes were narrow: just 1/2-inch copper, so there wasn't much pressure, either. A kludge from start to finish.

The carpet came out first (we wore masks and gloves, because, well, ick). Underneath that was linoleum tile. I think it's real Linoleum, too, because it's thick and heavy and brittle, kind of like Bakelite. And under that is the now-familiar redwood tongue-and-groove floor.

Unlike previous rooms, we're not going to polish and preserve the redwood floor here. A hardwood floor in a bathroom strikes us as almost a weird as carpet (though probably more sanitary). Instead, we're going to try our hands at tile. We've got little black and white hexagonal tiles all picked out, which should give the room a bright, clean, and period-correct look. The claw foot tub stays, of course, but we're moving it to the other side of the room, and we'll relocate the new vanity and new toilet. The room won't get any bigger or have any additional fixtures but we're hopeful it'll be a lot more inviting.