Waiter, There's a Hole In My Wall

As part of our third-floor bathroom remodel, I decided to cut in a transom window over the bathroom door. When open, it should help ventilate the room better, and the window will let in some light. Besides, there was plenty of extra height since the ceilings are 10 feet high here.

Kathy's about done painting the transom window itself (pictures to come later), so in the meantime I've been trimming out the frame around it. I did a fairly straightforward design that looks about right for the period, with trim that leaves a 1/8-inch reveal around all four sides. The same style is repeated on the other side of the wall, in the hallway. I'm pretty happy with it.

The Doors, Garage Band

Here's an update on the garage doors we hung earlier this year. We finally got around to adding the little diamond shapes on the windows. The idea was to make the garage-door windows match the stained-glass windows on the house (below). It's not a perfect match, but I think it looks good.

Each little diamond is four separate pieces of molding, cut to fit diagonally across the window. Pretty simple in concept, but the measuring and cutting were both a bit tricky. Each piece is cut to fit its exact location (lower-left corner of window #3, for example). I tried cutting four "generic" pieces of trim, but they didn't fit quite right. A difference of even 1/16 of an inch was noticeable, so I broke down and cut each one individually.

I suppose if we wanted to go for the full house treatment we'd stain the glass, too, but I'm not sure we want to go that far. It is just a garage, after all. And it's a whole lot better than the door that was here before.

Flush With Excitement

It works!

As you can see by this lovely photo, we now have a toilet. And it even works! Hooray, we're now back to a 4-bathroom house the way it was when we moved in, and we don't have to go down a flight of stairs if we're on the top floor. Better still, our guests won't have to go down a flight of stairs.

Well, unless they want to take a bath or shower. Or brush their teeth. But one thing at a time.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a wall-mounted unit that doesn't touch the floor. This is to accommodate the strangely too-high drain pipe on this floor. Anyway, the thing is rock solid and is rated to support 800 pounds, so even the most, uh, gravitationally gifted guests will be safe.

Plumbing it in was a snap, even though it came with two sets of instructions that contradicted each other. (Reminds me of the old dictum: a man with a watch always knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure.) It turns out that both sets of instructions are correct, they just get you there in different ways.

Oh, and the instructions are all translated from German. Which would be fine if they'd just given me the German instructions. I might've be able to decipher those on my own. But no, the translated ones were just... inscrutable.

The hardest part, would you believe, was putting on the toilet seat. Plumbing? No problem. Wall supports? Piece of cake. Screwing down a stupid toilet seat? Now that's tricky. In typical German fashion, the seat is held on by an elaborately complex multi-part mechanical device that's infinitely adjustable and probably works for 12 different seats, 17 different commodes, 76 foreign countries, and five space stations. That's swell, but how do I get it to work for me? Here the instructions are oddly silent. No pictures, no metric measurements, nothing. Just a big bag of parts. I finally decided that half of the parts were unnecessary (kind of like British sports cars) and made it work. Let me know if it falls off.

I say the toilet works, but actually all I know for sure is that it doesn't leak. We've done a lot of trial flushes, but haven't actually, you know, used it used it. It's all been dry runs, so to speak. Maybe someone will come visit soon. Anybody?

The Paint Goes On

The top-floor bathroom tile is done, and I've resumed covering the rest of the walls. We're close enough to being finished that Kathy has started to paint. The plan is to paint the walls yellow and the "ceiling" (anything that's not vertical) in white. I've put a new transom window over the door, which should let in some sunlight from the nearby skylight / seagull perch, while also venting the room a little better.

Speaking of vents, I've also added a ceiling fan to the far wall, over the window. Local code requires a fan in every bathroom, and we felt like being good citizens and including one here even though it never had one before. What with all the new insulation, the room will trap moisture more than before, so we really want to make sure the room is well-ventilated.

Cutting a vent hole in the outside of the house, just under the roof peak on the third floor, was a bit tricky. There's nowhere to stand on the roof (even if I wanted to... and I don't), so I had to do it all by leaning out the window. I removed the triangular window from its frame, sat on the sill, and leaned out with my tools. Coincidentally, some new guests had just checked in to the Gosby House Inn next door, and they were trying their best to pretend not to watch. Just to mess with them, I'd "accidentally" juggle a screwdriver or say "whoops!" and listen to the conversation below come to a brief stop.

I'm pretty happy with the way the vent came out. It's almost invisible from the outside of the house. Later today I'll box in the duct so that it's not quite so ugly from the inside.

We've also put in the first of the new light fixtures, a pair of wall sconces that will shine over the vanity (if we can ever find a way to haul that thing upstairs). As an added bonus, I can now work in the bathroom at night!

The Naked Dining Room

We're back from vacation and hard at work again.

Kathy has completely stripped all the wallpaper from our ground-floor dining room. To our surprise, the room had never been painted. Once the wallpaper was off we were looking at bare plaster. And it was in pretty good shape, too, with only a few small cracks and imperfections. By far the worst damage was from the nail holes and screw fittings that people had added afterwards. The plaster itself is remarkably smooth and even. Whoever did that work 120 years ago, you have my compliments.

The one exception is a round spot about waist-high on one wall that happens to sit behind our liquor cabinet. It's oddly colored, like it was maybe patched at one time, and it's got a few cracks radiating out from it. After taking this photo, I realized it creates kind of a tacky, faux Mediterranean still life, like something you'd see for sale in the thrift shop next to pictures of crying clowns.

Now that the walls are all bare, the room is a lot lighter. Much better than the red color that used to be there. We haven't decided yet whether to paint the walls or paper them. If we paint, it would be the first time for this room. If we paper, at least now we've got a clean and well-prepared surface to work with.

847 Years of Bad Luck

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

...Who's going to rescue us if you fall?

We have two gigantic mirrors in the downstairs dining room. We never liked them much, but they were so big and awkward we didn't know how to remove them. That all changed on Saturday.

Kathy had stripped all the wallpaper from this room -- all except for the space behind the two mirrors. We'd arrived at the moment of truth: it's either us or the mirrors.

These aren't just any little vanity mirrors, either. They're each more than 7 feet high and almost 4 feet wide. Bigger than a big person. They reach to well above your head and they're fixed to the wall with no obvious brackets or holders, which means they're probably glued directly to the wall. We'll have no idea how to get them off until we start prying on them.

I'll be honest; I'm afraid of them. Getting my fingers behind a giant mirror and pulling? That's just begging for a Faces of Death-style grisly demise. Imagine 7 feet of jagged mirror shards raining down on your head, under foot, in your eyes... Just thinking about it gave me the willies.

Fortunately, Kathy is made of sterner stuff. We covered the mirrors in plastic sheets in case the glass exploded outward. Here's Kathy taping up one sheet. Note that she's standing on a ladder in this photo. I told you the mirrors were tall. Then we put on goggles, heavy gloves, long sweaters, and heavy shoes. And then... pulled.

Lucky for us, the adhesive on the first mirror was pretty old and came away easily from the wall. (Which begs the question: if we hadn't removed the mirror when we did, how much longer would it have stayed there on its own?) Once it was loose, we had to set it down -- gently -- without scratching the floor. Kathy had wadded up more plastic sheeting, so this went pretty much as planned.

Okay, now to get it out of the room and out of the house. We opened up all the back doors and carefully, gently, slowly tipped the mirror over on one side so that we're carrying it horizontally instead of vertically. (That is, it's now 7 feet long and only 4 feet high.) The thing must weigh 50-70 pounds. It's surprisingly heavy. As we pass through each door I imagine accidentally banging it against the door frame, or catching a piece of furniture, or losing my grip and -- BAM! -- the mirror grenades into a million pieces, throwing reflective shrapnel throughout the house.

Out in the backyard, we lay it flat on the ground, where we've placed a big tarp. Another tarp goes on top of it, and then we get to the fun part: breaking the mirror. Kathy grabs a brick, stands back to what we hope is a safe distance, and lobs the brick directly at the mirror.

It bounces. No lie, a freakin' brick bounced off that stupid mirror. Hmm. Now what? I take my turn, and this time we put a few cracks in it. Several bricks later, and we've finally shattered the thing into poodle-sized pieces. I'm sure the neighbors were horrified by the noise. It sounded like the worst restaurant accident imaginable. We're bulls in a china shop.

The second mirror didn't come off the wall as easily. We had to really wrench at this one, which made me wince and squirm a little bit. Finally it pops loose, drops to the floor, and gets taken outside like its twin. We're getting good at lobbing bricks so it comes apart pretty swiftly.

So... what do you do with 150 pounds of fatally jagged broken mirror? By no coincidence, tomorrow is "super garbage" day, where the local waste-management company will take up to seven bins of anything you've got. We doled out the shards among three garbage cans and filled the rest with Styrofoam, newspapers, and other light items. They go to the curb tonight.

I hope we don't see any bloody, mangled garbageman corpses in the morning.

17,119 Tiles

In case you're wondering, there are exactly 17,119 tiles on the new bathroom floor. We've filled in all the little edges and corners, usually by gluing in tiles one by one. It's surprisingly hard to keep those little guys straight. Good thing most of them came on 12x12 sheets.