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.

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.