Our New Old House

Hi all,

I haven’t written here in a very long time and I’m so sorry to have left you hangin’. We rushed up on a deadline to have the house appraised last month and so we did TONS of work but I haven’t had time to blog about it until now.  But don’t worry, I took pictures!  I have no idea what order anything happened in now, so I’ll just go room by room and get you up to speed.  Let’s start with the bathroom today.

When last I blogged, the bathroom looked like…  this!

There was still some wallpaper residue on the walls so Brandon scraped it off.

Then he scrubbed the walls to make them ready to prime.

With this latest push to get work done on the house, we’ve had to cut some corners in the short term so we could have it appraised. We haven’t abandoned all our long term plans yet, but in the interest of time and sanity, we had to just give many things a quick going over to make it look clean and finished for the bean counters. Hence, everything got painted white and we had to come up with some quick fixes for some problems with the walls.

For example, in the bathroom we want to put beadboard paneling on the wall below the wood trim that splits the top and the bottom half of the wall. We didn’t have time to do that so my friend Tiff (who’s a GENIUS!) suggested that we put contact paper on the walls as a kind of temporary wallpaper. So that’s what we did.

I guess it’s time for a before and after look, huh?

Before:

…and AFTER:

Oh, I just noticed that the spot under the sink where the pipes go into the wall looks a lot better now in real life than it did in this picture.  This was before we did a little more work to clean it up.

But anyway, that’s the bathroom, getting close to being done!

And here’s a bonus photo of Brandon scraping the hallway wall (coz I don’t know where else to put it.)

[tags] bathroom, wallpaper, ceramic tile, paint, paneling, photos, future plans, flooring [/tags]

Our new bathroom floor is in!  But before I show you pictures of that, let me tell you about the drain on our clawfoot tub.

We suspect the plumbing on it was original.  Whether it was or not, it was old enough to be nothing but a pain in the drain. 

First of all, when Brandon went to take the drain apart so he could remove the tub, it came apart in all the wrong places and some of the pipe broke.  He resigned himself to having to replace the whole drain.  Not too big a deal, right?

Everything was peachy except the pieces in the drain hole itself would not come apart.  Brandon spent most of the weekend in this position, trying to get the drain to loosen:

Here’s what he had to work with:

When he tried to use a drain plug wrench, which looked like this:

The pieces inside the drain disintigrated to look like this:

Having nothing left to hold onto to turn the drain pieces, he resorted to cutting the whole thing off and hoping the threads would come apart in the process:

With a few taps of a screwdriver…

out it came!

Brandon said all that gross caked on yellow stuff is bits of hundreds of people’s skin who have bathed in this tub. I said, “Ew gross!!!” and told him it was more likely the old rubber seal that had hardened over time. Boys are so gross.

To see the finished drain he put in, you’ll have to come back next time because I forgot to take photos of it in time for this blog post.

 [tags]clawfoot tub, flooring, photos, bathroom, ceramic tile, plumbing [/tags]

Our kitchen floor is finished! Doesn’t it look great?

The contractor didn’t bring enough tile to completely finish the bathroom, but he did the areas under the tub and toilet. The rest will go in on Monday.

Things are finally coming back together.

[tags]clawfoot tub, contractors, photos, flooring, bathroom, kitchen[/tags]

 These are pictures from the day I wrote the two “S.N.A.F.U.” posts about. Once Brandon got the kinks worked out with the flooring contractor they got to work.

(These pictures aren’t of the same quality as my usual pictures because Brandon took them with his phone’s camera, but I think it gives the whole thing a certain romantic antique look.)

The bathroom, sans toilet and sink pedestal:

The bathroom, sans bath tub:

The bath tub plumbing:

The toilet base:

Installing the subfloor in the kitchen:

Installing the subfloor in the bathroom:

Check back soon for pictures of the finished floors and some adventures with the bath tub!

[tags]ceramic tile, plumbing, contractors, kitchen, clawfoot tub, bathroom, photos, shower, flooring[/tags]

Here are some photos of what we — actually, Brandon – did to prep the bathroom to have tile put down:

First Brandon turned off the main water line and unhooked the faucet from the tub.

Then he put the faucet back together on the pipes so we could turn the main back on to the house.

A minor accident occured when he tried to push the tub away from the pipes. The feet came off! Turns out they were never really attached to the bottom, the tub just rested heavily on them and they hadn’t moved in a hundred years!

The feet nearest the back wall were never painted. Here’s also a look at the disgusting mess that had built up behind the tub under the carpet!

Here’s a close-up of one of the feet. These things are heavy! They must weigh almost 10 lbs. apiece!

And the back of the foot where it attaches to the tub.

Brandon disconnected the drain pipe at the bottom, hoping the part where it branches up and over would stay together. When he pulled on the tub, however, the two branches came apart. Mission accomplished… sort of. Looks like we’ll need new drain pipes.

 Come back soon for part two: More prep work!

[tags]bathroom, clawfoot tub, flooring, photos, plumbing[/tags]