Indoor Plumbing!

Here's the real reason we're remodeling the 3rd-floor bathroom: a new toilet.

The old toilet, you'll recall, was up on a pedestal and connected to a drain pipe that ran above the floor. That had to go. However, you can't just bury a drain pipe; they have to slope downwards and lowering the pipe would have made it slope the wrong way. We couldn't put the pipe, or the toilet, where we wanted.

Solution: a wall-mounted toilet.

This is a special Geberit model that mounts directly into the wall. It doesn't touch the floor at all. The porcelain bowl will be supported by the hefty blue steel frame you see here, which is, in turn, bolted to a pair of 2x6 studs on either side. The water tank and everything fit between the studs, so there's no visible tank, no hardware, no nothing. The flush "handle" is really two pushbuttons that will mount on the wall above the bowl. Because it's a water-saving model, it even has two buttons, with one using half as much water as the other. (I'm thinking of labeling them #1 and #2.)

The real point of all this is that the wall-mounted drain will exit above the floor, instead of down through the floor like a conventional toilet. That allows us to plumb it up to our funky raised drain pipe without doing anything weird like building a platform or hiding the pipe inside a raised box. Very neat and tidy. This arrangement has the added benefit of moving the toilet slightly further into the room and away from the sloped ceiling, which means less chance of hitting your head. I love it when a plan comes together.

Another Wall in the Brick

The first new wall is starting to come together. We've demolished the old wall that separated one side of the bathroom from a hallway closet and rebuilt the wall in a different location. There will still be a closet on the other side, but it will ultimately open into Kathy's office instead of the hallway.

Anyway, said wall is now sheeted and almost ready for the bead board finish layer. You can see it here in all its glory.

The ceiling here is quite high (10'), so the studs behind this are pretty tall. It's also trickier than I thought to keep the whole thing planar. That is, the studs have to be plumb and they all have to be aligned with each other so that the wall is both straight and flat without any wobbles in it. It sounds simple, but very few walls in this house fit that description.

The ceiling right above this is really just the underside of the roof. It gets hot up there, even in mild 62-degree spring weather. I'm hopeful the 2" of insulation will make a big difference to this room and, eventually, all the rooms on this floor.