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.

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.

Stud Muffin

I couldn't resist. ;-)

See what I did there? A new 10' stud separating our bathroom from the soon-to-be closet, and a homemade English muffin. I crack myself up.

Okay, back to work. The bathroom framing is all done. The new wall-hung toilet will mount between a pair of 2x6s on one wall and these 2x4s will define the opposite wall. We're enlarging the room just a little bit so that the bathroom door swings more freely and it won't seem quite so claustrophobic.

The ceiling/roof is a little over 10 feet high here, so there's plenty of room for insulation while still maintaining the high ceiling. In fact, the whole bathroom is now insulated for the first time in 118 years.

The new electrical wiring is all in, too. I've abandoned the "original" ungrounded wiring, which was probably put in during a major 1930s-era remodel. I can't completely eliminate the old wiring because it feeds the entire 3rd floor, not just this bathroom. Eventually, when we redo each of the other rooms, we'll wean ourselves off the old cloth-covered wires.

The electrician never showed up, so I installed the tandem 15-amp breakers myself. We now have three separate subpanels and something like 40 independent circuit breakers, whereas the house originally had a grand total of six breakers in all. Actually, it had a fuse box before that (we've found a few blown fuses in the dirt) and, of course, no electricity at all before that. The mind boggles.

Anyway, we've ordered the plumbing fixtures and are just waiting for them to arrive. In the meantime, I'm framing up some built-in storage cabinets that will go into the knee walls under the sloped roof. They should gives us some much-needed storage in the bathroom and keep me amused for a few weeks. We'll see.