Out With the Old

The other day I indicated I’d write a further entry regarding our weekend.

This story starts in about 2000. Yes, it’s that old. And no, I don’t recall exactly which year. We had been living in our home about a year when we noticed that the bathtub was draining slowly. I used the plunger on it, to no avail. I then purchased, and used, Liquid Plumber or Drano… still no luck. So, then we bought the really caustic stuff. The bottle comes wrapped in a plastic bag and warns that gloves and goggles and breathing apparatus should all be used. Pure sulfuric acid, if I recall correctly. But no luck. I merely succeeded in making the house stink!

So, we did what one does, and called a plumber, who summoned me home from work one day to demonstrate quite graphically that the pipes of my house, which were iron pipes, had become so brittle they could be crushed in one hand. And, so we began the process of completely replumbing the house.

That, of course led to the realization that we needed to completely renovate our kitchen, as the kitchen sink could no longer remain where it was and remain in code, unless of course we added an additional $5,000 to the replumbing cost.

And in the process of all this, a hole was knocked in the ceiling of our main bathroom. We shall have to renovate THIS room, too, some day, we said.

And 10+ years have gone by. So, this year, we decided to actually DO the renovation! We originally planned to completely remove the bathtub, and replace it with a luxury shower. However, that was when we honestly thought we’d grow old together in this house, someday dying in it. Now, we plan on moving inside of 12 months. We knew we’d not sell without a tub.

So we ordered a new tub. The tub took 7 weeks getting here, and so, this past weekend, we began the task.

First we had to rip out the plaster and lathe walls. Then tear out the toilet, vanity and old cast-iron tub. Next to be removed was the tile floor. And finally, the gosh-awful ceiling had to be torn down!

At this point, soon after we started, it dawned on me we should get some sort of “Before” pictures:

If you look at the third photo, you see our ceiling. The paint is flaking off, and down in the lower left you see the hole in the ceiling from which “attic dirt” would periodically fall down upon us.

We began the job quite certain that we could manage this in 1 day.

Well, that was not to be. On Saturday, we got the fixtures out of the room and most of the walls down.