How Do You Trap a Zoid?

How well do you remember your high school geometry? Remember the difference between a rectangle, a rhombus, a parallelogram, and a trapezoid?

I do. Well, now I do. Cutting the bead board for the ceiling and walls in this room is an exercise in geometry. I mean, literally, an exercise: Problem 12: If the two long sides of a quadrilateral measure 28.25 inches and 29.75 inches, and the short sides are 14 inches and 14.75 inches, what is the area of the trapezoid?

Extra credit: Correctly identify all four angles. 

Real-world implementation: Now cut a piece of bead board to exactly those dimensions, haul it up three flights of stairs, and nail the sucker between the studs which are -- of course -- not parallel. The new nail gun helps with that last step and paid for itself in no time, but it still doesn't cut the material for you.

Here's the kicker: because bead board has vertical lines in it, I have to cut each piece to make the lines appear vertical when it's installed. In other words, you can't just leave one edge straight and cut the other edge to fit the space. No, indeedy. Odds are, the lines will tilt slightly to one side when you install it. No, friends, you have to cut all four sides of every single piece at a funny angle so that the bead board looks like it's installed straight upright. Not as easy as it sounds, lemme tell you. Kathy must have wondered why it was taking me so freakin' long to measure a simple rectangle. Make that trapezoid.

Pooowwwer Toools!!!

You know the old saying, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail?"

I've got a new one: When you buy a brand new power nail gun, absolutely everything around you needs 7000 nails in it. 

Can I get an amen? Kathy and I tried installing the first piece of bead board today and it was miserable. It's tough holding an 8-foot sheet of bendy board over your head at a 45-degree angle and trying to nail it into place with medieval tools like a hammer. We hadn't even finished the first piece when Kathy said, "I think there's a trip to Home Depot in our very near future."

Guys, when your wife gives you permission -- nay, encourages you -- to buy new power tools you don't complain. This is just one reason I love my wife.

An hour later, we were back in business, up in the bathroom, air compressor humming, and shiny new nail gun spitting #18 brads like a machine pistol. Lord Almighty, this thing is wonderful. Got any floorboards coming loose at your house? Call me, 'cause I'd really like to drive some #18 nails into it. Leaky water heater? I got just the nail gun for that. Cat needs to be fixed? I'm your man.

Hey, you know that weird news story about the guy who shot a nail into his head and lived? I wonder if that would work...

Goodbye, Redwood. Hello, Hardie-Backer

I almost feel guilty. Almost.

We cleaned, scraped, stripped, washed, and dusted this floor to get it down to the bare wood. It's 19th-century virgin redwood, tongue-and-groove, about 3/4 of an inch thick. There aren't even any knotholes in it; it's all top-quality stuff. And we're about to bury it.

Partly that's punishment for all the $#@&! splinters this floor has given me. But mostly it's because we want to tile the floor. This one time we're not sanding and sealing the redwood like we did downstairs. A wood floor in a bathroom just seems out of place, and there would be no way to waterproof it. (There are sizable gaps between some of the boards.) Finally, this floor was tiled before, so there's old adhesive smeared all over it anyway. We're not doing anything that wasn't done before. The floor's just too far gone to try to leave it in its natural state. I'm sure the next homeowners will forgive us.

So the next step in our tiling process is to put down cement backer board. This will give the tile a smooth, flat surface to adhere to. It also evens out dips and marginally waterproofs the floor in case of a bad spill. Hardie Backer is amazing stuff. It's basically a cement sidewalk sawed into thin 1/4-inch panels that you then glue-and-screw to the floor. As weird as it sounds, the stuff is actually very easy to work with. Unlike drywall, you can snap off pieces in a straight line, so you don't have to do a lot of messy sawing to fit around corners. (This is important, because you really don't want to inhale the dust this stuff makes. It's extremely abrasive -- it's cement, after all -- so use a mask and eye protection.)

I got all the Hardie Backer down in a few hours, and with only a couple of irregular cuts. Naturally, it was the hottest day of the year so far, but Kathy was standing by with beer, so it all came out okay.

The Boat, the Basement, and the Bathtub

We've all heard the story about the man who spends years building a sailboat in his basement, only to find out that it doesn't fit through the door. Well, we kind of feel that way about this bathtub.

We're ready to start working on the new floor, but that's kinda hard to do with this bathtub sitting here. The thing is cast iron and gravitationally gifted. Kathy and I working together can move it only about 6 inches at a time before we need to set it down and take a break. So we scooted it across the room to to the doorway and... it didn't fit. Even when I took off all the door trim, the tub is just a wee bit too large to go through the opening.

So how did they get it in?

Aha! Brainstorm. Kathy thought, "Let's turn it on its side. It should fit that way."

Easier said than done. We laid an old piece of carpet across the floor so the tub would slide, and used that to ease it out the door and around the corner. And there it sits. At least it's out of the way now, and it only blocks the hallway to the guest room. Visitors: stay away for another week or so.

Calling Mario & Luigi

The word "plumbing" comes from Latin plumbium, the Romans' word for lead. That's because Rome used lead-lined pipes in its famous aqueducts, which may explain the high incidence of mental illness among later Roman emperors.

I'm happy to say we have no lead pipes here. The mental illness, however, is still very much in evidence.

I'd gotten the plumbing in the 3rd-floor bathroom about as far as I could take it, so we called in the professionals to finish the job. It wasn't a big job; it only took one guy just over a day. He connected the three fixtures (toilet, vanity, bathtub) to the existing drain pipe and extended the new PEX for the hot/cold supply. What you see here is the three-way split where everything branches out to its destination.

Venting presented a problem. All drain pipes need a vent pipe so that you don't create a vacuum every time you let the water out. Vents let in air and prevent the "gurgling soda bottle" effect. Normally, vent pipes go straight up through the roof, but we didn't really want to do that (read: the plumber didn't really want to do that), because our roof is pitched at 45 degrees (i.e., 12 in 12) and nobody was eager to climb out on that. So we used air-admittance valves (also called Durgo valves), and these work great. You can just see a white one peeking out of the center of the upper photo, and another one for the vanity to the right. The bathtub gets its own. too.

All of the exposed plumbing is copper, which should look fairly nice and period-correct, while all the hidden stuff is either PEX or ABS. We've now entirely eliminated the old pipes from the upper two floors. The only remaining iron pipes with lead seals are under the ground floor. A project for another day.

Dodgy Door

This little bit of carpentry is really just a hole in the wall. We're looking from inside the laundry room to the outside, where there's some scrap wood and a big tarp. Not terribly exciting, really.

The hole is about 9x15 inches and it's for the dryer vent. Modern front-loading washing machines and dryers are too low to the ground, so I built a little platform for them to sit on. In the process, I also moved the dryer vent so that it didn't have to make a pair of 90-degree bends. And finally, we scooted the washer and dryer closer to the wall and lined them up better.

But of course, there was a wall stud directly behind the dryer, exactly in the path of the vent. To get around that, I cut away the stud and put in the cripple stud you see here. I had to rip and plane a modern 2x6 to make it fit the size of an old-style 2x4. You can see the fresh, pale wood next to the older, seasoned wood.

A little insulation, a new vent pipe, some drywall patch, and we're all set.

Just a heads-up: washing machines are a lot heavier than dryers. Kathy and I struggled to move the washer from its original position, and struggled even more to get it back into its new place. Then you have to adjust the little leveling feet, which are underneath the beast. Tip it up; adjust one foot; let it down; measure the wobble; repeat several times; administer beer. It's even less fun than it sounds.

Soft White Underbelly

This is the underside of a seagull.

You see, there's a small skylight in our third-floor ceiling. It's obviously not original, but it's nice and it brings light to a much-needed area. It's also flat, which makes it a nice perch for the local seagulls. You can probably tell from the condition of the glass that it's a well-used hangout.

The seagulls perch here all the time. And they squawk. It's a little weird at first, because you don't always know where the sound is coming from, and it's no one's first impulse to look straight up. After awhile you get used to it, and we and the the gulls have learned to accommodate each other. I don't eat their garbage and they don't eat mine.