The State Of The Bathroom

The state of the bathroom is good, but there are some problems.

One of the immutable laws of The Universe states that no matter how many copper joints I solder in one day one of them will have a pin hole leak. If I solder two joints, one will leak. If I solder three joints, one will leak. If I solder 500 joints, one will leak. This law is written just for me and today it played out exactly as it was written, but that wasn’t the worst part.

Before I get to the dumb mistake I made (not the leaky solder) I want to say that I really don’t care for working with copper. In my opinion the PEX method, even though I’ve never used it, is much better. It’s not available around here, so it wasn’t an option for me. Of all of the mechanical things in the house like plumbing, electrical, and gas lines, the copper joint seems the least accurate. I can attach two wires together with a wire nut and pull on them as hard as I can. If they come apart I didn’t do it right. I tighten down a pipe and you can feel it tighten. With the copper solder you prep the pipe ends, you heat it, and then put on the solder. It looks fine. You can pull on it and twist it and it seems secure, but you don’t know it’s a good solder until you turn on the water and see if there is a leak. It’s very frustrating.

To make matters worse, once there is water in the pipe it makes it even harder to repair the leak. As you heat the pipe any water, even a very small amount near the joint you are trying to fix, will boil and turn to steam from the heat of the torch. If you are soldering near an open valve the steam can escape out the valve. If not, the steam tries to escape out the joint you are trying to repair. There are a few tricks to employ, but this mostly means cutting the pipe some place to release the steam. Now you have another repair to make. It’s all very frustrating.

My leak today was, oddly enough, the very first solder I made. It was just a tiny, tiny pin-hole leak. Now though, once I’ve discovered it, I now have the pipes filled with water under pressure. It’s 5:30 at night, I’m hungry, and tired and I’m in no mood to drain the pipes and try to make the repair. Instead, I wrapped a towel around the leak, filled up the tub, shaved, brushed my teeth, and then went and shut off the water. I’ll fix it tomorrow.

Aside from the leak, the rest went well, except for the one minor mistake I mentioned earlier. The last thing I do is cap off the pipes above the floor where the valves will eventually go. I leave the pipes uncapped so as I solder pipes under the floor any steam that accumulates in the pipes from residual water will have a place to escape. The very last thing I do is cap the pipes and then turn the water back on and check for leaks. Well, I forgot to cap the pipe for the toilet. When I turned on the water I had a major geyser in the bathroom. It’s just sub floor, so it’s not the end of the world. The only real problems is that the water drained down through the floor and soaked the ground under the bathroom. This is where I have to go tomorrow to repair the pin-hole leak. Bummer.

I Miss The Nickel & Diming

Today I made a large purchase from DEA Bath for some shiny nickel plated bathroom things. It’s all the exposed plumbing and some assorted toilet parts. It’s going to come to over $1,100 once shipping and taxes are factored in. Ouch! I know it’s very un-American but I hate spending money and I hate having debt.

The debt is very minor at this point. I sort of got a little behind when I was doing the kitchen and the idea was to pay it off when I was painting the exterior, which was relatively affordable. I’m not sure what happened, but I finished painting the house and I still had the debt. Now it’s growing. It’s a home equity loan, and I’m investing it in the home, so it’s not the end of the world. I just like to complain about it. Now that I’ve done the complaining we can move on.

At the beginning of December I called DEA Bath about selling them some vintage toilets and sinks that I didn’t need. I was going to get store credit for some of the plumbing parts I wanted. The biggest item was going to be a marble vanity. Because the vanity has exposed plumbing, I needed to get that item nailed down before I could rough in plumbing and electrical. I spoke with a guy named Tim Daley and he was about as unhelpful as anyone could possibly be.

This is not run-of-the-mill, garden verity stuff I’m dealing with. I’m rebuilding a 100 year old toilet, sink and tub. I had a few questions and he was unable to answer them. At first it was fine because I know that not everybody is an expert. I would give him a few things to follow up on and I would call back in a few days and he had not followed up on them. He wasn’t able to get me pictures of the vanities I asked for, and he seemed not to know the inventory well. He would email me work orders to review and he would have part numbers and pricing wrong. It was annoying but I tried to be patient.

Finally, after about three weeks in to this I started to get very impatient with him. I told him I was going to be driving down with the vintage plumbing parts and I needed to make arrangements. I asked him when he thought he would have all the parts I ordered ready for me. The idea was that I would pick up everything I ordered at the same time, and save money on shipping. Tim’s answer was, “It’ll be ready, when it’s ready”.

That was pretty much the end of it. I told Tim I was taking my plumbing parts else where. I would buy the vanity else where, and maybe if he had time in a month or two I would call back for some of the other parts. A lot of this was done via email and after I emailed them saying I was taking my business else where I got a call from the owner. I was so disappointed at this point that I did return his call.

I’ve dealt with DEA Bath in the past and my last experience was exactly the opposite as this. I didn’t handle this well at all. The first time I felt that Tim was dropping the ball I should have asked to speak to the manager. Eventually my short fuse ran out and as a matter of principle I couldn’t go back. The trouble is, there are some things DEA Bath has that I can’t get other places. So today I called them and placed an order.

I got a guy named Jim this time. He was very knowledgeable and very helpful. He knew the inventory and what parts go with what parts. I gave him a wrong part number at one point – I transposed two numbers - and he immediately stopped me and questioned it. I told him the part name and he knew exactly what I was talking about. I asked him if all the parts were in stock and with out putting down the phone he assured me they were and it would ship tomorrow. I really wished I had gotten Jim the first time.

If you have vintage plumbing in your house and someone tells you it can’t be repaired because the parts aren’t available, call DEA Bath first. They really are good people and know their shit. However, if a guy named Tim answers the phone either ask for someone else, or hang up and call back later.

130,000 Guests Are Arriving Now

They started flying in about a week ago. They only stay a few months. They make a lot of noise, and eat everything in site. Most people don’t mind them, but the ranchers hate them. Apparently 20 of them can eat as much as a cow in a day. I like them. They are Aleutian Geese on there way north and Humboldt Bay is a major stopover and feeding ground on their way north.










I watch every morning as band after band of geese fly and cackle over head. Right now they are trickling in but soon the huge formations of geese will be backed up to the horizon like planes at Kennedy airport on Christmas Eve. It is quite a spectacle. Green fields at the south end of the bay are brown with geese every morning. At the height of the season there will be more Aleutian Geese in the county then there will be people.

A Tile Smashing Good Time

I made another trip down to smash up more salvaged tile today. I only a had a few hours, but I hit a vein of easily obtainable tiles, so I made a good haul. I may go down tomorrow one last time. We’ll see how I feel. I’ve been running crazy for the last week and a half. If it wasn’t the tile then it was the plumbing. I got a lot done but my house and my life is a chaotic mess because of it.

I’ve been able to get 15 boxes that are the same size, and then another 4 boxes of different sizes. I took one of the 15 boxes and counted 206 tiles in it. They are 2-inch hex tiles so I figured 36 tiles per sq ft. That works out to roughly 5.5 sq ft per box, times 15 boxes, means I have roughly 85 sq ft of tile. Of course, there will be some waste when I go to clean it, but I’ll assume the other 4 boxes of varying sizes will account for the waste.

I have about 70 sq ft of floor space to do. With a normal installation I would order an extra 5% to 10% to account for waste during installation. Considering the tile, I think this will be a worst case scenario when it comes to waste, so lets say I need 80 sq ft. As I estimated, I have 85 sq ft.

This all assumes I don’t do a boarder. If I do a 6-inch boarder of some other tile, then it puts me in a better position. I’m leaning away from a boarder now because the salvaged hex tile is half inch thick and the new tiles, or at least the samples I got, are only 3/16 of an inch thick. I would have to shim all of the boarder area by 5/16 of an inch. If I’m off a little bit it could look crappy.

In other news, I posted a question about cleaning grout off tile over at Urban Revivals on thier Discussion Blog. It’s not really a blog and it’s not really a forum. You ask a question using a web form and a few days later, if they answer, they post your question and an answer to their “blog”. Anyway, someone else asked the same question I did only a day before I did, so they posted their question and answer. The question was, how do you remove old grout from salvaged tile. The answer was a dermel Tool. Specifically, here was the Q&A….


Aggie of Chicago writes: How do you remove adhesive from used ceramic tile?

Urban Revivals replies: We use a dremel tool with stone grinder bits. Set the variable speed so you can grind it off the tile, without going so fast that you nick the tiles.

I think Stucco House also came up with this response, so she gets a gold star by her name. Of course, the best part of this is, it means I get to have hours and hours of fun grinding grout off tiles. I’m fortunate this is good grout grinding weather. I’ve been thinking about though, I really don’t have to get it all off. In most places the grout was only an eight of an inch think or less. In some of repaired areas it was thicker, but those make up a small minority of the tiles. All I have to do is take it down below the surface of the tile and when I regrout you’ll never see it. Either way, it’s going to be a butt-load of work. I just have to keep reminding myself that I’m saving seven or eight hundred dollars. That is a motivating factor, if there ever was one.

A Tile Smashing Good Time

I made another trip down to smash up more salvaged tile today. I only a had a few hours, but I hit a vein of easily obtainable tiles, so I made a good haul. I may go down tomorrow one last time. We’ll see how I feel. I’ve been running crazy for the last week and a half. If it wasn’t the tile then it was the plumbing. I got a lot done but my house and my life is a chaotic mess because of it.

I’ve been able to get 15 boxes that are the same size, and then another 4 boxes of different sizes. I took one of the 15 boxes and counted 206 tiles in it. They are 2-inch hex tiles so I figured 36 tiles per sq ft. That works out to roughly 5.5 sq ft per box, times 15 boxes, means I have roughly 85 sq ft of tile. Of course, there will be some waste when I go to clean it, but I’ll assume the other 4 boxes of varying sizes will account for the waste.

I have about 70 sq ft of floor space to do. With a normal installation I would order an extra 5% to 10% to account for waste during installation. Considering the tile, I think this will be a worst case scenario when it comes to waste, so lets say I need 80 sq ft. As I estimated, I have 85 sq ft.

This all assumes I don’t do a boarder. If I do a 6-inch boarder of some other tile, then it puts me in a better position. I’m leaning away from a boarder now because the salvaged hex tile is half inch thick and the new tiles, or at least the samples I got, are only 3/16 of an inch thick. I would have to shim all of the boarder area by 5/16 of an inch. If I’m off a little bit it could look crappy.

In other news, I posted a question about cleaning grout off tile over at Urban Revivals on thier Discussion Blog. It’s not really a blog and it’s not really a forum. You ask a question using a web form and a few days later, if they answer, they post your question and an answer to their “blog”. Anyway, someone else asked the same question I did only a day before I did, so they posted their question and answer. The question was, how do you remove old grout from salvaged tile. The answer was a dermel Tool. Specifically, here was the Q&A….


Aggie of Chicago writes: How do you remove adhesive from used ceramic tile?

Urban Revivals replies: We use a dremel tool with stone grinder bits. Set the variable speed so you can grind it off the tile, without going so fast that you nick the tiles.

I think Stucco House also came up with this response, so she gets a gold star by her name. Of course, the best part of this is, it means I get to have hours and hours of fun grinding grout off tiles. I’m fortunate this is good grout grinding weather. I’ve been thinking about though, I really don’t have to get it all off. In most places the grout was only an eight of an inch think or less. In some of repaired areas it was thicker, but those make up a small minority of the tiles. All I have to do is take it down below the surface of the tile and when I regrout you’ll never see it. Either way, it’s going to be a butt-load of work. I just have to keep reminding myself that I’m saving seven or eight hundred dollars. That is a motivating factor, if there ever was one.

My Mind Is In The Sewer

Woo-Hoo! The sewer lines for the new bathroom are all hooked up to the main sewer line for the house. Gary came over and helped me with it, or, really I guess I should say, Gary came over and I helped him with it. I was very nervous about this. Digging up something that’s been in the ground since 1895, modifying it, and then burying it again makes me nervous. I had fears of finding a crumbling, rotted sewer line that needed to be replaced. It turned out it was in very good shape.

It switched from cast iron to clay pipe about 6 feet out in the yard so we cut in to the clay and the cast iron to put in the new fittings. Here’s some shots…



The little stretch of ABS you see at the top I put in yesterday. This is the new washing machine drain on the left, and then I finished what a started last year with the upstairs bathroom sink. That is the part that goes to the right. The piece you see on the bottom went to one of the old rental bathrooms. In the picture it has already been cut off and capped. This was all under the addition at one time.



Ta-da! The new sewer is all hooked up. We added a clean-out, which the house never had. It went pretty smooth. Gary was much more meticulous about measuring at putting everything together than I was on the parts under the house. He also used a lot more adhesive than I did. I hope I won’t have problems down the road. I don’t think I will.



And finally, here it is all buried again. Whew! When everything was hooked up and we were gathering up tools and such I made the awkward move to pay Gary for his time. He’s given me lots of plumbing supplies over the years, and bought lots of plumbing supplies for me at cost, and given me tons and tons of advice, but he’s never actually done any physical work for me. This was a first and I wanted to compensate him. In the past even when I didn’t give him actual currency, I always made it up to him in some way. What passed between us were neighborly gestures.

Yesterday I had to run over to his house for something. When I walked up he was getting in to his truck and it was all loaded up for a job. He said he was doing another bathroom for a friend. This one was much more involved than mine. It consisted of a shower, tub, toilet, bidet, and double sink. He made diagrams with pipe sizes and elevations. It was done very nice and very professional looking. He showed me everything he had drawn up for the guy and there was a parts list with prices. As I was looking at the parts list he said, “This guys not a neighbor, so I’m charging him for all of the parts and the drawing”. Gary wasn’t actually doing the work, he was just supplying all the right parts and giving advice on code and requirements. The cost for the parts for all the drains and copper came to $139.

So I went to the bank today and got 2 crisp $100 bills. My parts came to a lot less than $139 because mine was a smaller bathroom and a lot of it just came out of his garage. It’s just left over stuff. It was kind of tough to come up with an amount. I feel I might insult him if I give him too little or if I give him too much. Every time I’ve ever tried to give him money for parts or help he tries to give it back. So as we were finishing up today I said, “Well, I’m going to insult you if I give you too much or too little so take this and let me know if you need more”. I gave him the two bills folded and he said, “Oh, $100, no that’s fair”. I said, “Uh, no, there’s two of them.”

He immediately started in that it was too much money and I immediately cut him off. I ask him how much all this work would have cost if I brought in a professional to do it and he said it would have been around $2,000 for plumbing a new bathroom and tying in to the sewer. We also did the laundry room. I said, so take the $200. It’s more than fair and I feel guilty about giving you so little. He says something about taking his wife out for a nice dinner and then asked if I’m sure I can afford it. It’s a nice little dance. It’s a part of what makes society bearable. Even so, there was a part of me that feels I should have given him more. Maybe he was insulted and he was just being nice.

We gathered up the tools and extra parts and headed back over to his garage. I went on and on about how I was relieved about having that done (I really am) and I mentioned that now all I have to do is run the copper under the floor and all the plumbing will be done. Gary immediately ask if I have enough copper and fittings. I said I think I did and he pulls out 2, 10-feet pieces of half inch copper and hands them to me. He then grabs a bag of 50, half inch copper elbows and hands those to me. “You can never have enough of these. Just use what you need and bring back the rest.” I awkwardly and grudgingly excepted it.

He then asked me about the vanity and tub I’m putting in. He has a bunch of those flexible braided supply lines. He pulls open a drawer full and asks, “Do you need any of these”. I tell him how I want to do the ridged, nickel plated supply lines because the plumbing under the sink will be exposed. He pulls open another drawer and hands me 3 pairs he salvaged from some place. I said I only need one pair and he says, “Some of the plating is a little warn so use the best ones, and just bring back the rest”. I’m really starting to feel awkward now. We chat for a little while longer and I as I head back across the street with my latest cache of plumbing supplies I’m thinking to myself, if Gary was insulted and thought the $200 I gave him was not enough, he sure has a funny way of showing it.

A Neat Little Do-Hickey

I spent about 4 hours under the house today and it was sooooo much fun I think I’ll do it some more tomorrow. I’d say I got about 95% of the drains run under the house and about half the vents run above the floor. It took one more trip to Gary’s garage and one trip to the hardware store. I knocked over an almost full jar of ABS glue and was too embarrassed to go ask Gary for another one, so I went and shelled out $5.00 for a new can.

Gary stopped by to see how things were going. He said I mounted the drains too high off the ground, but this is not so much a drainage issue as it is an ease of work issue. I found out the hard way that it’s easier to hook everything together if it’s not so close to the joists. In the end it worked, so that’s what’s important. Tomorrow he’ll come over and we’ll tie it all in to the main sewer line. After that I just have to finish the copper under the house and the plumbing will be done. Wooo-Hooo!

And this brings us to the Neat Little Do-Hickey. They are called pipe insulators, I think. Before I explain them, here’s a few shots.





These things are great for running pipes under the house. You drill a one and three eights inch hole where you want the pipe to go. The little insulator as two flanges on it. You put it around the copper water pipe and press it in so only one flange is in the hole. It holds the pipe exactly where you want it, but you can still slide it up and down from under the house to fine tune the position. Once the pipe is connected to the rest of the plumbing you push the insulator in all the way and it seals the hole so no drafts or bugs can come up in the wall. Then screw it in to place and that pipe aint going no where. It is a great little invention.

Shopping At Gary’s

I thought I was going to get together with Gary on Sunday to go over the drains for the new bathroom. For those who don’t keep up, Gary is my neighbor who has been a plumber for 40+ years and has helped more than I can think of when it comes to all the new plumbing I’ve put in the house. Really, every last piece of water and gas pipe just about as been replaced in the house and Gary either gave me the parts or bought them for me at the wholesale cost, and then gave me detailed instructions on how to put in all in and meet code.

We didn’t get together on Sunday as planned so I started in on the copper supply lines myself. A lot of times this stuff isn’t rocket science but it is helpful when you have someone who can look at your work and tell you that you’re doing it right and it will pass inspection, or more importantly, tell you when you are doing it wrong. This is in addition to the tools he’s more than happy to lend me. Did you know they make a special saw just for ABS?

Anyway, today we went over the whole thing. This is a bathroom from scratch so for someone with my skill level it’s pretty involved. We started with a simple lesson on the different types of fittings and where they are used. Two parts can look similar but have two very different uses. He then came over and I showed him where everything was going to go. I try and be very well prepared when he comes over. I mark all bathroom fixtures with screws drilled in to the floor or wall where I think the center of the drain will go. I mark all places where there is a clear shot through the ceiling for vents. I also dug up the sewer line in the side yard and marked on the side of the house where the center of the toilet will be on the inside.

We spent about 10 minutes in the room and he looked around at what was going on. We then headed back over to his garage where he has crates of ABS fittings and dozens of feet of ABS ranging in size from inch and a half to 4 inches. We went over the whole thing and I started to get a little lost. It’s not really difficult, but it is something you have to think about, or at least I do. Gary can just see it in his head and parts just start flying out of crates. In no time at all I have 2 milk crates full of fittings, several lengths of pipe, a right angle drill and all the bits, saws, ABS cement, and a roof jack. I have to make 4 trips to get it all home.

There were a few parts he didn’t have so while I was laying it all out in the bathroom he ran down to the shop where he works and picked up a few more things. When he got back he checked my work and made a few changes. Tomorrow I’ll start drilling holes and gluing everything up and then sometime in the next day or two we’ll cut in to the sewer line I dug up and tie everything in.

To Gary this is nothing. I think he enjoys helping me, which is great for him. For me the benefits are incalculable. Just not having to run to the hardware store a dozen times over the next 5 days makes his help worth it. If I had to pay someone to do this it would run over a $1,000, I’m sure. Most of the stuff I could probably figure out with a book and a lot of thinking, but this just makes it so much easier. I can’t even begin to tell you.

Five Things…

I was tagged to list 5 things about myself that many of you probably don’t know. I started writing this yesterday but it was coming out way to long. I don’t know why I feel a need to explain everything in such detail, but sometimes the less detail the better, and this is one of those times.

So here it goes….

One: I’m a high school dropout. Not one of my greatest achievements, by a long shot. I almost made it through the 9th Grade, but not quite. For some reason I hate to conform and I hate being told what to do. That’s still causing me problems to this day. I was just very disruptive and eventually it was agreed that I not be allowed back on campus. My troubles started very early, and frankly, I’m amazed I made it as far as I did. If any of my teachers are out there, I would like to formally apologize now. I’m very sorry for the trouble I caused. To give you some idea of how bad it was, on the first day of my 7th grade English class my teacher called me out in to the hall and said something to the effect of, “All of the teachers have warned me about you and I want you to know I won’t put up with your antics”. I didn’t last long in her class.

Two: I had a whirlwind, 3 week romance with a Russian woman in St. Petersburg, RU. This was not one of those internet Russian bride things, either. In fact, this happened in the mid 80s when the internet was still only the domain of Universities and the military. The Wall had not yet fallen, Ronald Reagan was still rattling is saber, and it was in the early days of Perestroika. I wanted to achieve world peace one Soviet at a time and it began and ended with a beautiful 24 year old Russian woman named Elena. I was about the same age at the time. For 3 weeks we drank gallons of cognac and made love like bunnies in one of the most beautiful cites in the world.

Three: I’m a devout atheist. This was a slow, evolutionary change for me. I am a huge skeptic and I question just about everything. Something about the belief in a God didn’t sit well with me early on, but I could never really articulate it. At one time I felt guilty about not believing in God and I kept it to myself, but not anymore. The belief in God is a question of faith and I need more to go on. To me, all belief systems that are based on some spiritual higher power are like an upside down pyramid. You can pile all the evidence you want on top that a God or Gods exist, but at the end of the day, it all rests on the one tiny notion that can’t really be proven. Besides, if a God does exist, a doubt this entity that created the Universe is so petty that it cares one way or another that I believe in it.

Four: I’m the most impatient person in the world. Sometimes I wish I would hurry up and die just so I could find out if I’m right about the whole atheist thing. Of course, the Catch-22 is, if I am right I’ll never know it, because there will be no afterlife.

Five: My big fantasy is to write a book and be interviewed by Charlie Rose about the book. Writing the book would be great, but the interview by Charlie Rose would be the real achievement. In this fantasy, he finds me so fascinating that it is a rare hour long interview that gets aired. Oh, and I’ll need a very patient editor.


So now I’m supposed to tag 5 people. I’m not really sure, so I’ll just pick Chicago 2-Flat, A House Made, Stucco House, Here is the house....where it all happens, 1951 Ranch Redo.

The Big Smack Method

I got another 5 boxes of tile today. I'm trying all kinds of things to get it up as best I can. The floor has moods and variations to it so there is no one way. If one method works well in one area then it doesn’t work at all in another. It can be frustrating.

The building is mostly deserted and I work alone. I don’t mind working alone, so it’s ok. The cold is a bit of a problem, though. The building is across the alley from the building that burned down last month. When that building burned down they shut off the gas to the whole block. Since the building I’m working in was empty at the time, no one bothered to relight the pilot light on the heater. Normally that wouldn’t be too bad here in Eureka but we’re smack-dab in the middle of a freakish cold spell. Over-night lows are in the 20’s and daytime temps stay in the high 30s to low 40s. So I’m in this building sitting on a tile floor and it’s just above freezing. Not an ideal circumstance.

The couple that owns the building also run a business 2 stores down. When I go down to work on the tile I first go to the business and get the key from the woman running the store. We haven’t talked much but today she seemed curious about why I was getting the tile. She asked me how I was getting it up and at one point she asked, “So do you score it with a knife between the tiles first?” Ding! The light bulb went off over my head.

As I said, I’ve been trying all kinds of things. This scoring method made it in to my bag of tricks, but doesn’t always work to keep the edges from chipping. Nothing works every time. Some methods are slower than others but the loss percentage seems to be the same no matter what I do, so I decided to get more aggressive.

There are some tools in the store. One of them is a 6 foot long pry bar. It weighs 10 or 15 pounds and has a ball handle at one end and then a flat, 2-inch wide pry bar at the other. It is heavy and very solid. I started using it with very good results today. I slide it back and forth along the floor and smack the leading edge of the tile field in several places along a 3 or 4 foot wide face. It demolishes the tiles it hits, but it loosens large sections from the floor. I then have to deal with separating the tiles from the grout. This is where the real loss occurs.

This Big Smack method has similar loss percentages as the other methods, but it works much faster. I able to free more tile quickly, and in a frigid room, that has become very important. I think I have 13 boxes now. I’m going to go back tomorrow and try and get another 5 or 6 boxes. I’m supposed to work on the plumbing on Sunday, and Monday I may not be able to get anything done anywhere. We’ll see how much more I can get.

More Tile Salvage

If you would have asked me yesterday I would have said I was done with tile salvage. It just seemed to be too far gone to save. Even if I could save some of it, I’m not sure I could get enough. Then there’s the whole labor aspect of it. The thing seems like it’s going to be very labor intensive.

Then I got a few comments from people who think it can be saved. I went back down there last night and my friend Chuck was pulling up the boarder. I think that boarder is too big for my small bathroom anyway, so I was not planning on using it. Besides, Chuck is the one who told me about the tile in the first place, so he has first dibs on it anyway.

Then at work today I started thinking that maybe it can be cleaned up and saved. I mean, what the hell do I know about cleaning old tile. So I figured I would get as much as I can now and worry about cleaning it later. I would never stop kicking myself if I figure out a way to clean and then found out it’s all in the dump.

I spent 2 or 3 hours down there today and got 5 boxes of tile. I was less selective than I was on Tuesday when I only got 3 boxes. There will be a lot of half pieces needed to fill in along the boarders. I settled on two methods for pulling up the tile. There is The Full Pop and The Single Pop method.

With the Full Pop I hammer two 5-five inch scrappers under the tile, spaced 6 or 8 inches apart. I then hammer pry bars under the scrappers and pop up a large section all at once. This is very destructive but it results in more than a dozen tiles coming up at one time. I’m lucky if half of them are salvageable.

With the Single Pop method I use a hammer and a half inch chisel to pop up a single tile at a time. This is more time consuming but I’m able to save more tile. The Single Pop method can only be used when at least 3 sides of the hex tile are exposed. Often times a Full Pop exposes a vein of 3 sided tiles. The two methods sort of work together.

So tomorrow I’ll go down again and maybe Saturday as well. I’ll just keep popping tile until I’m sick of it or feel I have enough, which ever comes first. While I was taking a break I found an old photograph in the building of when the place was a saloon. I photoed the photograph and took some shots of the room as it is today. The big chandelier is still there, and of course, the floor.

As I think I said the other day, the tile floor extends under the front façade of the building about 2-feet out on to the sidewalk in front of the building. It ends with a marble curb and there is some tile patterns along with the word “OBERON” written in tile right in front of the door. I assume the saloon was called The Oberon. Here’s some photos. It's looks like it would have been a nice place to have a beer. I was told yesterday that Jack London stopped in once.

Electric: Done-diddely-un

I was able to finish up the wiring today in the bathroom, and took care of a few other issues in the proposed laundry room at the same time. It wasn’t too bad, but it did require a few wonderful trips under the house to crawl around in the dirt and cat poop (I think I’m feeding those cats too much). It also required 3 more trips to the hardware store. I think that makes 8 in all.

I still haven’t found a 3-inch roof vent for the bathroom fan, but I’ve decided to wait on that until after the plumbing’s done anyway. When I talked to my neighbor Gary a few days ago about the rough-in plumbing, I mentioned that I was almost finished with the wiring. He mentioned that plumbing should be done before wiring. I’m not sure if this is just a plumber’s point of view or if that’s the way it’s normally done. I can see that if you had a lot of wires in the way it might make it more difficult to run pipes for water and drains. We’ll see if it’s an issue.

When I rewired the whole house a few years back it was about as major a rewire as you can do. The house had a total of 4 outlets in the walls. The main panel was from 1951 and all of the ceiling fixtures were still using the 1895 wiring which fed from a “panel” in the attic. I replaced EVERYTHING from the utility poll on down.

When I got to the butler’s pantry and scullery I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with these areas. I made the decision at the time that the scullery was going to be the downstairs bathroom, and that’s what I’m doing now. I went ahead and wired that room with it’s own dedicated 20-amp circuit.

The butler’s pantry was another story. As far as butler’s pantries go, this is kind of a large one. I knew I wanted a laundry room in part of it, but I couldn’t really make a decision at the time, so I wired it as a normal room. That means an electrical outlet every 6-feet along the walls. Now fast forward 2 years and I partitioned the room for a smaller butler’s pantry and a laundry room. When I did this, not only did I orphan two outlets in the “laundry room” but when I removed the beadboard they were left hanging in the air.

To make a long story short, since the lights for the bathroom are tied in to the circuit that runs the outlets in the butler’s pantry, I went ahead and got rid of those extra outlets that ended up in the some-day-to-be laundry room. When I do the laundry room I will give it a dedicated 20-amp GFCI circuit.

MAJOR SCORE….almost

Four hundred square feet of 1902 encaustic tile free for the taking. A beautiful multicolored boarder with a field of 2-inch hex tiles. All free and ready for the taking. The only problem is, someone repaired the floor with a Portland cement base grout.

The 2-inch white encaustic hex tiles were made by Cambridge tile. These are the same people who made my 1895 fireplace tiles. The boarder was made by A.E.T. (American Encaustic Tile). I think both companies are (or were) located in Ohio.

There is a building in Old Town that was recently vacated by a kitchen wares business. The new owner thought the floor was too far gone for the upscale dinner house he wants to open. I had mentioned to some friends about my bathroom and ideas for tile. They told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on…..no, wait, that’s an old commercial. Anyway, anybody who has spoken to me the last two months knows I’m working on my bathroom and when word came that an old tile floor was going to be ripped out I got a call.

I had great hopes for this tile. The floor was in bad shape, there is no denying that. Still, there was plenty of good tile to be had. I only need 100 square feet, or less, for the bathroom and mud room. There should have been plenty.

In days of old, they laid tile floors in a mortar bed of a lime based cement. The lime cement is very forgiving. It holds the tile fine, but not to the point that the tile can never be recovered. The lime based mortar moves with the building as the building settles and ages. Portland cement based mortars are not forgiving at all. They will hold on to the tile until the end of time.

At some point, someone regrouted the floor with a Portland cement based grout. As I tried to pull up the tile it flaked and chipped at the edges when it tried to separate from the grout. This first picture is of the underside of the tile.



These two tiles had some writing in pencil on the bottom so I shoved them in my pocket. I didn’t clean them at all and that is pencil writing from 1902. The tile just lifts away from the old mortar bed with a little persuasion and is left in almost ready to use condition. The writing says “Seconds Della” on one and “Seconds {unknown}” on the other. I think the Seconds refers to the quality. I acquired a single 1902 subway tile from the Vance Hotel, also in Old Town, and it is stamped “Second” on the back. I think because of the cost of shipping from the east coast (all the way around So. America) second quality was cheaper and so that’s what we ended up with.





Anyway, above is a shot of the A.E.T. boarder with the Cambridge Field. Notice the narrow grout lines and notice the dark color of the grout. This is not original. That black grout is the Portland cement based grout that was added later.



Here you can see the side of the tile. There is the black grout on top and then the lime mortar on bottom. The lime mortar cleans up easily. The black grout chips the edges of the tile when its removed. And removing it is not easy at all. It’s really too bad. Encaustic tiles costs big bucks today. If that stuff could be salvaged it would go for upwards of $20 a sq ft. Encaustic tile is the same all the way through. It’s like the linoleum of tiles.

Of course, it's possible that the Portland cement based grout is original, but I don’t think so. In some places there were major repairs made to the floor - apparently this place was a saloon for many decades - when the repairs where made and the tiles were re-laid they use a Portland cement based mortar to relay the tiles. Those tiles disintegrated when I tried to remove them. In some cases they couldn't get the tiles to all fit back the way they came out and they used nippers to reshape the tiles. Then they filled in with this black grout. It was under the tiles in places, like they "back-buttered" the reshaped tiles before putting them in.

OK, Gary, I’ll Let You Help

As part of our agreement for the HAJOCA toilet I said I would grab whatever garbage Gary had and take it with me when ever I made a dump run. Neither of us pays for city garbage service, and neither of us really enjoys going to the dump. I don’t pay for it mainly because of the work I’m doing on my house. I seem to be making dump runs anyway, so I just take the garbage cans with me. It works out well. Gary rarely has more than 2 garbage sacks, so it’s really no big deal.

In addition to taking his garbage when ever I go to the dump I slipped his wife $50 for the toilet. It’s a great deal for me because he’s saved me so much money on plumbing that the garbage and the $50 doesn’t even begin to make up for it.

I told myself this time I wasn’t going to lean on Gary so much for the bathroom. It’s sort of the general issue of me not wanting to ask for help, but it also goes back to the fact that he’s helped me so much in the past, it just feels odd to keep asking.

Today when I got off work Gary, his wife, and their little girl were all sitting on the front stoop of their house across the street. It was a pleasant afternoon and they were just sort of hanging out. I was planning to go to the dump today so I strolled over to chat and to see if he had anything that needs to go to the dump. As I walked across the street I kept repeating to myself, “Don’t ask about plumbing. Don’t ask about plumbing. Don’t ask about plumbing.”

There has been one code question that has been gnawing at me, though. I don’t know how to size the vent for the drain. If I have a 4-inch drain for the toilet, does that mean I need a 4-inch vent stack going all the way up the side of the house. I was planning to call the building department about this today because it could be an issue. There is plenty of room for a 2-inch vent. Three inch would be tight. A 4-inch vent would cause a lot of problems.

I chatted with Gary for a good 15 minutes about everything but plumbing. In the end he said he had a few sacks and he would toss them in the back of my truck. I told him I would be going to the dump in an hour or so. As I walked away he said to me, “Now, when you get to that bathroom plumbing you let me know if you need anything”. I said, “No, no, no this time I’m doing it myself, but I do have one question about code, though”. I couldn’t resists.

I asked him about the vent. I couldn’t help myself. As he explained it to me, all of the vents on the house must equal the diameter of the main sewer line, and the bathroom vent can’t be less than 2-inches. That’s beautiful because I have a 4-inch sewer line and I already have 2, 2-inch vents. I can do a 2-inch vent for the new bathroom and there will be plenty of room for it.

After we talked about the vents Gary was emphatic that I not go to the hardware store for parts. I told him I don’t feel good about getting all that stuff from him. He goes on and on about how it’s all just sitting there and it doesn’t cost him anything. It’s all just leftover parts. He’s telling me about stuff he’s given away in the past week or so and goes on and on about how he’s dieing to get some of the crap out of his garage. How could I say no? I’m practically doing him a favor.

In the end, he wore me down. We agreed that I would use stuff from his garage and he will come over next Sunday and help me lay out the drain system and the adjoining laundry room. The guy has been a plumber for 40 years and he has every tool and every part imaginable. He’s going to help me lay everything out. He’ll supplying me with all the proper tools. I’ll do all the installation, and then when it comes time, he’ll help me tie everything in to the main sewer line.

All I can say is, he had better generate a lot of garbage, because I am going to owe him big-time for this one.

Commence Nickel & Diming To Death

I’ve started that phase of the project that requires me to make one or more trips to the hardware store a day and spend anywhere from $2 to $75 per trip. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it adds up. You also have to factor in the gas money because inevitably you make pointless trips to get things you either forgot or just plain got wrong in the first place.

This nickel & diming happens when it comes to roughing in the electrical and plumbing. This weekend I did the electrical. It was pretty straight forward and required exactly 5 trips to the hardware store.

There is still one or more trips that need to be made for electrical. I bought an exhaust fan that required a 3-inch exhaust pipe and a 3-inch roof vent. They had the pipe, but not the roof vent. They had 5, 6, & 7 inch roof vents, but not 3. They had 3-inch wall vents, but I’m venting through the roof. I asked the guy why they don’t stock 3-inch roof vents and he said, “I don’t know. Most people get the 5 and then get a reducer and reduce it down to 3-inch”. That logic seems to work for him, but it seems easier to just get a 3-inch roof vent. Why cut a 5-inch hole in the roof when I only need a 3-inch hole. I’ll look else where before I succumb to “stocker-boy-logic”.

I’ve also noticed that if there is more than one selection for what is essentially the same thing, the one I need is always the more expensive one. Those marketing guys get you every time. This is not a case where one item is a better quality than the other and so it cost more. This is just what I need to do the job and do it too code. They know this and they get that extra buck off me every time.

Next I’ll start the plumbing. I’ve known for quite some time that this room was going to be a bathroom, so 3 years ago when I re-plumbed the rest of the house I stubbed out hot and cold water lines just under the floor. I’m really glad I did this now because from what I’ve been told copper prices have gone through the roof the last few years. I think I’ll be able to do the whole room with one 10-foot piece of half inch copper. I also still have a lot of short sections of copper, elbows, couplings, and Ts left over. There will be many trips to the hardware store, but hopefully a lot of money won’t be involved. Famous last words, right.

I want to do the drains before I do the water lines, though. I’ve never done drains before, so I’m a little nervous about it. Everybody tells me drains are easy, so I should be able to do it. I’m going to try and not get my neighbor Gary involved until I have to tie everything in to the existing sewer line. He always wants to give me a bunch of parts for free and I just don’t feel good about it. Running over there in a pinch for the occasional fitting I need is fine, but when I did the kitchen island drain he gave me the whole damn thing for free. It just feels odd.



Finally, I acquired the last piece of hardware for the bathroom today. I bought the TP Holder from someone local. It looks good as it is, but I might get the nickel plating redone when I have a few other items replated next month.

Close, But No Cigar

I finished up the framing in the bathroom and there is not enough room for the laundry bin I dumpster dove for a few weeks back. There is a chance I can use it in a cabinet that can go behind the door, but it won’t be a built-in like the one in front of the door. I’ll have to wait and see how much room there is behind the door once everything is built.

Today as I was banging around in the room there was a knock at the door. It was a woman from the building department. She had a clipboard and a little name badge. She introduced herself and then asked if I was all done with the construction. Huh? I haven’t gotten a building permit since 2004.

The first 2 years I was in the house I got 5 permits from the building department for all new plumbing, electrical, natural gas, and water heater, along with 3 demolition permits for removing the rental kitchens and baths, removing the asbestos siding, and
removing the 2 story addition. As far as I knew everything was signed off by the inspectors.

I grabbed all my permits and showed the woman that everything was signed off by the inspector. To be honest, I’m still not really sure what permit or construction she was asking about. I wish I had pried a little more and asked specifically what construction she was referring to.

In the end, she asked if she could take a few pictures of the exterior. I said sure and then I asked why. She said they wanted to keep their records up to date. When we were flipping through here clipboard of the permits and other paperwork for my house I noticed she had a very detailed hand drawn outline of the house. It was on graph paper and was pretty specific. I didn’t realize they had something like that.

Oh, and if anyone from the city is reading this, this blog is purely fictitious. I don’t really live in Eureka or own The Petch House. This whole thing is all an elaborate hoax and a figment of my imagination.

That should fool the little SOBs down at City Hall.

Duuuuu, My Name Is Greg

You need to picture me saying that while I’m slightly hunched over with a glazed look on my face, one finger up my nose, and the other hand scratching my butt. That’s about how I feel right now.

Two days ago I mentioned how I must put the toilet first, because the vanity would stick out to far and might block the door. I said that I was within and inch or two of the door on paper and I didn’t feel comfortable with those tolerances.

Well, it turns out it was more like 5-inches away. I was basing my calculations on a 30-inch wide vanity. I looked at so many vanities on-line and at other places and most of them seemed to be about 30-inches wide. When I actually got my vanity in my hot little hands I never bothered to measure it. Duh! It’s only 27-inches wide.

Yesterday I spent a good 30 minutes trying to squeeze a few more inches here and there and at the very end I actually measure the vanity. It was all a big waste of time. The bathroom set-up now goes vanity, toilet, tub.

The set-up is now officially chiseled in stone, or wood, I guess. I finished framing the wall, for the most part, and framed the built-in medicine cabinet, so there’s no turning back. The last thing to do is figure out how wide the cabinet in the corner will be.

A Place For Everything

So this is what the placement of the vanity, tub, and toilet looks like.



This shot is taken standing in the door. Ideally it would be vanity, toilet, tub, but I put the toilet first for a few reasons. First, with the vanity first, the outside corner comes dangerously close to the door. The door opens in to the bathroom and swings right in front of what ever is first. When I placed the vanity first, and left enough room for the toilet to meet code, I was left with about a 2-inch clearance, and that was on paper. In real life, 2-inches can evaporate quickly. I have this vision of the last thing I do is hang the door and then find out it slams in to the vanity.

The other issue with having the toilet in between the tub and vanity is there is really no place to hang the TP holder. The wall opposite the toilet is too far of a reach, so it would have to go on the wall behind the toilet. That seems odd, or does it. I can't decide.

If I could overcome the TP issue I think I can steal a few inches from the tub area and move everything down 2 or 3 inches. That would leave me enough room to feel comfortable about having the vanity first. I have 24 hours to come up with a plan, because tomorrow I finish the framing and that means I will be framing for the in-wall medicine cabinet.

Oh, and a free standing TP holder is out of the question. I’m not a big fan of them.

The Last Piece of the Puzzle

Round and round he goes, where he stops nobody knows.

I got the bathroom vanity today and this is the very first one I looked at a few months ago. I then looked on Ebay for a vanity. I tried to negotiate with DEA Bath for a vanity, but that fell through. I drove to Upper Lake and was insulted by Sheldon to try and buy a vanity. And after all of that I got the one I first looked at, but not before the store that had it almost burned to the ground and the vanity ended up in two different storage units, until it was delivered to my door today.

Whew!

The reason I didn’t like it the first time I saw it was because of the color of the vanity. Anybody’s who has read my blog over the past month or so knows I got my hands on a very, very nice pair of 1890s sink legs. I then had the matching wall brackets made. The wall brackets and sink legs need a marble apron to go with the vanity. I thought I would have a hard time matching the color of that first vanity and so I decided against it.

I then drove all over hell and half of Georgia and came up empty handed and so I went back to the start. In hind sight, it turns out that not being able to match the marble is not such a bad thing. First off, any 100+ year old vanity I get is going to be in less than pristine shape. I accept that, and in fact I relish it. If I got a white marble vanity it would be a few shades darker than it’s original white after so many years in service. If I went and bought new marble skirting, the new skirting would be brilliant white in comparison. Not good.

By getting the darker marble I can get new marble skirting and then stain it to match. I already played around with water colors on a scrap piece of marble and it should work fine. So really, no matter which antique marble vanity I get, getting marble skirting to match would be difficult. The problem with the first vanity – the one I ended up getting – was going to be a problem with any vanity I got. So it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the marble vanity for the bathroom….

Ta-Da (bowl not in picture)


It’s actually very dirty and desperately needs to be cleaned, but you get the idea. The best part is, now that I have it, I can finish up the framing in the bathroom and seriously think about rough-in plumbing and going in to debt up to my eyebrows buying tile.

Happy New Year!

Even if 2006 was a good year, I hope 2007 is even better. Happy New Year Everyone!

Fear of Commitment

I’m having some serious relationship issues with the new bathroom. I’ve been having cold feet about committing to the design. I don’t really think there is anything seriously wrong with the design, it’s just, you know, once it’s done, it’s done, and what if there is a better design out there I haven’t seen or thought of yet.

Fear of commitment is not something men usually deal with {cough}, especially not me {cough}, so I just had to muscle through these strange and terrifying emotions, and I did. Today I built the new wall in the bathroom. This is to hide the plumbing, electrical, and telecom chase to the upper floors. It will also house all the new plumbing. The wall is only about 6-inches from the existing wall but it solves a lot of problems.

I realized one flaw in my design just as I started to build the wall. I originally wanted to have floor to ceiling cabinets in the corner near the door. This turned out to be a bad idea because the wall is so narrow the light switches would have ended up being inside the cabinet. Oops. So now I have two options. One, I could make a single 36-inch high cabinet with a small counter on top. The switches would then be on the wall above the counter. The other options is to have an open compartment in the middle of the cabinet. The switches would be in this open space. I’m leaning towards option one.

I actually didn’t finish the wall because I ran out of nails and apparently there is some stupid holiday today and all the hardware stores closed early. Grrrr! To further delay the wall being completed, they will most likely be closed tomorrow as well, so that means I’m in bathroom-wall-limbo until Tuesday.

Of course, I know it’s New Year’s Eve tonight, but I’ve decided not to do anything this year. Last year I went to a martini party and got so shit-faced drunk I regretted it for days. There was an over-eager bartender pouring Lemon Drops and Appletinis and my glass was never empty. The drinks were so sweat and delicious I didn’t really notice I was getting drunk, and by the time I did notice, I was so drunk I didn’t really care, so I kept drinking. It was unbelievable. I haven’t been that drunk since my early 20s.

The party was only a few blocks from my house and was barley able to walk home. I woke up the next day around 1:00 still in my clothes with both cats staring at me with worried looks on their faces. I think they were just hungry, but they’ve both seen plenty of dead things before, so I can imagine what might have been going through their furry little minds.

Mort: The gravy train’s over, Sadie. It looks like we’re back out on the street.
Sadie: Yep. It was good while it lasted. Let's get out of here before he starts to stink.

The next day one of my friends from the party was forced by his wife to call and apologize to me. Neither of us knew what he was apologizing for, so I graciously excepted his apology, and we both agreed never to mention that night again.

You Can Thank Goth Girl of the Week

That’s where I got that annoying piece of code that scrolled the title of my blog. A few weeks back I was looking at the referring URLs to see how people stumbled on to my site and one of them was http://gothgirlweek.blogspot.com. Being that I’ve always secretly liked woman that dress in the Goth Style, naturally, I had to take a look. I imagined that dozens of beautiful Goth Girls were fascinated by the work I was doing on my house, and were hanging on my every written word. I mean, an 1895 Victorian does sort of go a long with the whole Goth Thing. It could happen. It could.

As it turns out The Goth Girl of the Week site does not link to my site. There aren’t dozens of Goth Girls out there reading my blog. Sigh! I think someone was ogling the Goth Girls and clicked on the “Next Blog” link that appears at the top of all Blogger blogs and that lead them to my blog.

Any way, Goth Girl of the Week scrolls their blog title and for a few brief minutes I thought it was cool, so I cut the code out and tried it. It is very annoying, but here’s the code if anyone wants to be annoying. Just change where it says “The Petch House” to the name of your blog and then past the code in to your template.

Remove the 2 asterisks before the words "script"

<*script language="javascript">
// (c) Premshree Pillai
// http://www.qiksearch.com
// premshree@hotmail.com
// Use freely as long as this message is intact.
var msg = " The Petch House ";
var pos = 0;
var spacer = " ... ";
var time_length = 100;
function ScrollTitle()
{
document.title = msg.substring(pos, msg.length) + spacer + msg.substring(0, pos);
pos++;
if (pos > msg.length) pos=0;
window.setTimeout("ScrollTitle()",time_length);
}
ScrollTitle();
<*/script>

Another annoying thing you can do on your blog is to have blinking text. I mean look at this sentence. Is this annoying or what? Adding blinking color text is even more annoying. If you really want to piss people off have an entire paragraph blink. Oh man, who could stand to look at it.

Both of these things – the blinking text and the scrolling title bar - fall under the category, “Just Because You Can Do Something, Doesn’t Mean You Should”. If you really want to annoy people with blinking text then use the <*blink> and <*/blink> tags on your blog. From Blogger you would use these while you were writing under "Edit Html" while creating a new post.


Man, that makes my eyes hurt trying to read that.

Warming Up To Motivation

Here I sit broken hearted
The house is so cold
I can hardly get started

Now admit it, after reading the limerick above, everyone is thinking about another little limerick they learned in grade school. It’s ok, you can admit it. Well, you’ll be happy to know, the other little limerick doesn’t apply here. No, I’m as regular as a $10,000 Patek Philippe pocket watch. I’m sure that’s more information than you wanted to know, so let’s move on.

My house is a meat locker. I don’t run the heat during the day because I’m at work, and I don’t turn it on immediately when I get home, because the goal is to get started working on a project. Once I start working on a project I warm up a bit and I don’t notice the cold as much. The problem is getting started. It’s just so damn cold. Even on relatively warm days this house is cold during the winter.

I’ve sort of stalled on the bathroom for now. The damn holidays have something to do with. I think we need to get rid of one of them. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years all bunched up together is a real pain. I don’t like being that sociable, but I don’t want to seem like a scrooge if I don’t attend every single gathering, so I go and I eventually get sick and tired of the whole thing. That’s where I’m at now.

I think Christmas and Easter should be combined in to one holiday. From what I understand, December 25th is not really the official birth of Christ. As legend has it, the date was co-opted from a Pagan Winter Solstice holiday. There are now rumblings that that isn’t so, but I think that is just the religious right trying to validate the holiday. So I say, move Christmas to Easter and Christians, and people who like to shop, can celebrate Christ’s birth and Resurrection at the same time. Or celebrate it on the Thursday before Good Friday. It’s a nice, neat little package of holidays to celebrate Christ. You have the Birth, Crucifixion, and then a few days later, the Resurrection. It would make for a nice 4 day weekend. I think I’m on to something here.

Anyway, there’s my holiday rant. But back to the meat locker issue. What I do is try and warm myself up without turning on the heater. I start by filling up the tub with the hottest water I can stand. It’s so hot I have to ease myself in to it. The skin under the water line reddens within seconds of coming in to contact with the water. The water is so hot, it takes a minute or so before I can fully recline in the tub. The tub is long enough that I can get everything but my head under the water. I lay there with the steam rising off the water’s surface and beads of sweat trickling down my face. It feels sooooo good.

While I’m being parboiled in the tub I lay my work clothes in front of the space heater and thaw them out a bit. After 5 or 10 minutes the water has cooled slightly and I take a regular bath and then get out of the tub a new man ready for some serious work. The trouble is, as I said earlier, I’ve stalled on the bathroom for now. So instead of vegging out in front of the computer I’ve decided to hang doors.

There are a total of 10 door ways upstairs, but only the bathroom has a proper door on it. One of the bedrooms has a door, but it’s wrong and needs to be replaced, and one of the closets has a correct door, but it hangs funny and needs some help. I’ve been hoarding doors for a few years now and I have more than I need. These are all the Eastlake style doors. Some are in much better shape than others. The plan has always been to buy any Eastlake door I could find, use the best, and then sell the rest.

So I’m going to get started on doors. I can’t say how far I’ll get before work on the bathroom resumes, but it will be something to keep me busy, and hopefully warm!

Zeroing In

When I was driving back from The Society last week – oh, and when you say “The Society” you should say it with a haughty accent, while sipping a cup of tea, with your pinky finger sticking out. Anyway, as I was driving back, I was not in a good mood at all. I had begun to think I had exhausted all my resources for a marble vanity for the bathroom. I had ruled out the 2 that were available locally. The guys at DEA Bath, who said they had 20 to chose from, had pissed me off and I couldn’t go crawling back to them. And now my last hope, The Society (accent/pinky), was a wash. What to do? What to do?

I started to think that I needed to expand my search area. There was Portland to the north and The Bay Area to the south. As I’m thinking about all this, I’m driving home empty handed from Upper Lake, so another road trip does not seem all that inviting at the moment. Not only that, but I’m sure I would pay more in both of those areas. I don’t know how prices are in Portland, but I can plan on adding a minimum of 30% to the cost of the vanity in The Bay Area, and that doesn’t even take in to account the gas money for a round trip. That’s another $75, easy. So if the vanity is $300 here, then I’m looking at $500 or more in The Bay Area. Ugh!

There is always Ebay. As I’ve said before, I don’t relish the thought of buying something like this on Ebay. I would need to get it for a $100 or so, because shipping would be expensive. I also have to worry about it arriving broken. A real possibility. Once I had to deal with UPS insurance on a broken Ebay item. The process took more than 6 weeks start to finish. It was a huge waste of time.

So I started thinking again about the two that are available locally. The first one I tried to use had some issues with the faucet. That and the staining proved to be insurmountable. The other one was the right size and in good condition, but the problem with it was the color of the marble. It was sort of gray in color. It’s not that it was unattractive, or anything. Quite the contrary. I thought it was unique looking and I liked the way the darker veining and the gray color worked together. The problem was, I have the sink legs that I’m going to use.

The sink legs require a 5-inch marble apron under the vanity. The plan has always been to find a white carrara vanity and then get the marble apron locally that will match the vanity. I know I can get it from the same place I got the slab for the kitchen. With the gray color vanity though, I don’t think I can get marble to match it. Even if the guys locally could get it from their supplier I’d probably have to buy a huge piece of it just so I can cut out some 5-inch strips for the vanity. It would be absurdly expensive, and it’s just such a ridiculous idea that I never considered it for a second.

Then on the long drive home I came up with two plans that might enable me to use the gray vanity. First, I could get the 5-inch high strips of the white marble and stain them to match the gray marble. The apron is only viewed on one face. It basically wraps around the vanity underneath. I have a few scraps of marble left over from the slab in the kitchen and I played around with it a little. I think this is doable. The other option is to do away with the sink legs and go to sink brackets or a wooden base. If I did that, I wouldn’t need the apron, and so I wouldn’t need to worry about matching marble.

I like the second option the least, mainly because I really, really like the sink legs I got. They are just really very nice and I really want to use them. If I don’t use them I would need to sell them because they were far too expensive to just tuck away some place. Not only that, but I would then need to find a pair of sink brackets. I’m not interested in a wooden base at all. A pair of cast iron sink brackets are pretty easy to come by, but I would want cast brass. I’m trying to do something nice here, and while painted cast iron can be nice, it’s just not the look I’m going for. I used painted cast iron sink brackets on my kitchen island, which you can see here. They’re nice, just not what I want. And that is really what it’s all about at this point: Getting what I want. It's all about Me, Me, Me.

The huge potential problem with the gray marble vanity is that it is a corner vanity. If that’s the case, the whole idea is sunk. The reason I don't know if it's a corner vanity or not is because the building next door to the antique store where the vanities were for sale burned down. Because of water damage to the antique store in question, the vanities are now in storage. I working with the owners to get it out of storage so I can look at it. The suspense of whether it’s a corner vanity or not is killing me.

Isn’t restoration fun!

The Search Continues

Last week I drove down to Upper lake to see a man about a vanity. The guy’s name is Sheldon, and he's the owner of The Antique Plumbing Society of America. The name should have warned me as to who I was dealing with. Without question the guy had the biggest selection of antique plumbing supplies I have ever seen in my life. And this wasn’t the everyday stuff either. He just had a stunning array of super high-end Victorian plumbing parts from the 1880s and 1890s.

Ever seen a Victorian cast iron Bathroom Pool? Picture a super fancy cast iron tub that is 4-feet square and stands about 3 feet tall with huge furry paw feet. I didn’t even know such a thing existed, yet there it was sitting in his showroom. Most of his stuff is mansion quality and is so far out of my price range, it’s not even funny. I called him asking about marble vanities and he said he had a few, so I made the drive down anyway.

He is only open Friday through Monday, but I told him I could only make it down on Thursday so he opened up special for me. I thought that was very nice and I had high hopes of finding a vanity. It started out well enough. He seemed a bit talkative, but I was so star struck by his inventory that I didn’t notice at first. After about 10 minutes of talking to him I noticed he interrupted me almost constantly. There is nothing more irritating than to be constantly interrupted by someone who talks like they’ve had 2 too many cappuccinos. On top of that, the vanities he had wouldn’t do, so my mood turned sour quickly.

He was really a high pressure salesman. When I started to mention the problems with his vanities he would cut me off with some ridiculous ways to change them or fix them. He would pepper his comments with expressions like, “What’s the matter, you don’t want to spend the big bucks to do it right?”. To which I would snap back that I didn’t care about the money I just wanted what I wanted and what he had wasn’t it.

The type of vanity I’m looking for is rather common place and would not have been in the mansions that most of his stuff came out of. The simple marble vanities he showed me first may sound high-end, but they were middle class for the day. We moved over to the expensive stuff and he showed be a stunning 4 foot long, 2-inch thick marble vanity and again gave me the, “Uh, you want to do it right and spend the big bucks? How about this?”. The vanity was leaning up against the wall. It was in pristine shape. I had seen one of these before and I knew it should have 3-inch thick glass legs with nickel/brass feet. I asked if he had the legs for it. He said, “Oh, I can get them”. To which I replied, “Yea, well, when you get them, give me a call”, and I walked over to the next one.

The next one was another monster marble vanity only this one was pink marble with the original hand painted sink and all the hardware. It was beautiful and I asked how much. He said $4,500, to which I said, “I don’t like the color. What else you got.” At this point I knew I wasn’t going to be buying anything from him, but I was enjoying strolling through his collection, while at the same time giving him a hard time about his stuff. The guy was unbelievably annoying.

Again, he started egging me on about not willing to shell out the big bucks for a proper bathroom. He showed me a very nice faucet, but badly in need of replating. He wanted $750 for it. I didn’t flinch at the price, but just waved it off as if I was unimpressed. His most ludicrous statement was when he told me I should be willing to spend $20,000 on my bathroom, and if I do, I can expect to get an additional $100,000 for my house when I sell it. I told him he was nuts and I asked him to show me some embossed toilets.

He had about 30 antique toilets in the shop but only 4 of them were the really nice embossed toilets. Of those, 3 of them were the wash-out variety (old technology) and one was the wash-down variety. The wash-down works like a modern toilet. He again started in with the, “So, what do you think? Are you going to spend real money on a proper toilet, and do it right?” I was really getting sick of this by now. I looked in to the bowls and asked, “Is this all you’ve got? I don’t want a wash-out bowl”. He pointed to the last one and said it was a wash-down. It had a bad break around one of the bolt holes with an absolutely horrible repair job with silicone adhesive. All of the pieces where there but it looked like a 2 year old made the repairs. I looked at him with a disgusted look and asked him if that was one of his repair jobs. He told me he didn’t do it, but he could repair it good as new and I could have it for $1,700. Again, I didn’t even blink at the price and just said, with an air of irritation, “Yea, well, I wanted something today. What else you got?”

I don’t think he listened to half of what I said , but finally he was starting to show a little irritation of his own. He started to get a little animated and said, “Ok, ok, you want to see the good stuff now. Uh, you want to see the museum. These are my private pieces. Come one, I show you the good stuff”. His shop was in a huge red barn and there were stairs that led up to a loft. As we walked up the stairs he kept muttering about how this was his private collection and none of it was for sale.

We got up to the top of the stairs and there were about 12 of the most stunning toilets I’ve ever seen in my life. Each one was made from fine china, hand painted, and over-the-top with a capital T. This is the stuff that the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies crapped in. A lot of them had their original toilet seats and some of the plumbing was still there. It was just an amazing collection. I walked down the row and back and all the while he was saying stuff like, “Uh, come on, you ever see stuff like this before?” I tried to tell him about an 1880s HAJOCA toilet that sold on EBay 2 weeks ago for $2,200, but he kept interrupting me. Finally, I looked down the row once more and then back at him and said, “Yea, these are pretty good, but you should see the one my friend Chuck just got. Now that’s a toilet!”. He went on with more of his blustering about how his was the finest collection on the west coast. He’s probably right, but I would never give him the satisfaction of hearing me say that.

As I was about to go downstairs, I pointed to one of the least ornate toilets in the group and asked if it was for sale. It was something I’d never seen before, but it could almost be considered common when grouped with the others. It was made by JL Mott and was just stunning. He looked at me with a big smile and said once again, “These aren’t for sale. I told you, this is my museum”. I said, “Don’t tell me that. Everything’s for sale”. He said, “Nope, not these.” I said, “You mean to tell me, if I offered you $4,000 for that bowl, you wouldn’t sell it to me?”. He blanched and almost choked. His eyes bugged out and he asked, “Are you offering me $4,000 for that bowl!?”. I said, “No, of course, not. I just saying, everything has a price”, and with that I turned and headed down stairs.

At the base of the stairs was a small room with shelves, soap dishes, and toilet paper dispenser. As a parting shot I went in a picked up a very nice nickel plated toilet paper dispenser and asked how much it was. He couldn’t just give me a price, he had to sell it to me. “Well, that one’s only $40 because it’s missing the wooden roller. If it had the roller I’d want a lot more for it”. While I was looking at it he grabbed another one out of a box and once again started giving me shit about “not willing to spend the big bucks”. He holds it up to me. It looked brand new and he says, “How about this one? New old-stock: $150”. It was stunning. I looked at it and said, “I don’t really care for that style”, and then I held up the $40 one and said, “But I’ll give you $20 for this one”. That was the last straw. He started saying stuff like, “All right! What do you think this is a garage sale? This isn’t a flea market here”. I headed towards the door. When we both got to the door I politely thanked him for his time and thanked him for opening up for me. We had our moments, but I think he kind of enjoyed it. I know I did.

Present From The Neighbors

While it’s true I’ve made some powerful enemies in this town, and some of those enemies are very immature, I do not think this is their work. No, this looks more like the alcohol fueled mayhem of local teens.



I have a corner lot with no fence and these two tire marks go across the front quarter of the lawn. Fortunately I haven’t mowed the lawn in 6 months, or this could have been much worse. The photo was taken after I did my version of a comb over. Mostly the tires just flattened the grass and forced it down in to the dirt.

I used a small, 3 pronged pick to try and bring the grass back up and aerate it to promote growth. The worst part was right at the sidewalk. The tires really dug in and there was a trench a few inches deep for about 3 feet in to the lawn. Most of the dirt that was excavated ended up in the form of a rooster tail going across the street.

But enough of this, let’s enjoy some more Snow Art…

More Vintage Bath Pics

This is 2 views of the same bathroom. If you look in the mirror over the sink you can see the towel hung over the marble wall that separates the toilet from the tub in the other photo. I assume the walls are all solid marble was well. It’s interesting, what ever stone it is. The shower enclosure is definitely marble, but the walls look a little different. Maybe the shower enclosure came with the shower and that’s why it looks different.





The photos were taken in 1907 from a house in Utah. It looks a lot like a real bathroom that was displayed in the 1904 Standard catalog I showed pictures of the other day. In fact, except for the toilet, it looks a lot like all the items in the first bathroom drawing. In the drawing it is a low tank toilet, but in the house it is a high tank. Another interesting thing is that the toilet in the photos looks a lot like my high-tank.

I think I may steal that tile boarder. I really like it, and that way I won’t be stealing from anyone I know. It’s practically a victimless crime. Also, now I’m thinking I should do away with the subway tile idea and go with marble walls. What do you think, too much?

Oops! Almost Forgot the Snow Art

I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

I’m No Longer a Virgin

I went in to my first Big Box store today. Actually, I just went there to use the rest room, and I didn’t buy anything, so maybe that only counts as foreplay, and on some level I am still a virgin. I drove to a town called Upper Lake to look at marble vanities and passed through Ukiah, CA on the way. I really needed to use the bathroom and I saw a Home Depot just off the highway so I pulled in.

The store was big, but really, not as big as I thought it would be. Ukiah is a mid sized town, so I’m sure there are bigger Home Depots. The selection was very nice. I spent some time in the plumbing area since I have bathroom on the brain right now. I was impressed with the display of Kohler toilets. Very nice designs, but they have the stupid exposed trap. I really, really, really don’t understand why most modern toilets have this. The rental bathroom I used for the first few years I lived in this house had a new Elger toilet with the exposed trap. It was my first experience with that and the damn thing was almost impossible to clean.

Of course, selection is important, but being the worlds biggest cheapskate, what I wanted know about was pricing. The problem was, even though I’ve been buying a lot for the bathroom lately, it’s all been used and salvage. I haven’t started rough-in plumbing yet, so I haven’t been buying copper and ABS. For the kitchen I bought the faucets new and the copper sink, but that was about it. I bought those on-line, so it’s not a fair comparison to our local stores. I didn’t see the exact same make and model, so I couldn’t make a comparison anyway. They didn’t have my fridge, either.

I looked for subway tile, and I was amazed that I couldn’t find any. I thought that stuff was oh-so trendy right now. I walked down the tile isle twice looking for it. I would have asked, but there was no one around. Later, when I saw a clerk, I was too lazy to want to go all the way back over to the tile isle to be shown where it is.

I did buy 3-feet of 1X6 oak for the high-tank a few weeks back. I paid $2.20 a foot locally and HD had it for $1.95 a foot. I think that’s 13% less. Of course, I had to drive 300 miles round trip to get that price, but I can see saving a lot over the cost of a whole project if we had one local and I bought everything there. This assumes that those savings are across the board on most items.

I wanted to see if they had the 3M 5200 Marine Adhesive Caulk I want to use in the bathroom. Once I found the caulk isle, though, it was blocked off! They had these stupid orange gates blocking the entrance at both ends. It said something about cleaning the isle, but I didn’t see a mess. I saw several other isles blocked off with the same gates. I’m not sure what was going on. I never saw anything on the floor, and it seems there was never anyone close enough to ask about it when ever I encountered one. It was about 8 AM on a rainy morning and the store was deserted. I saw only one other customer and about 5 clerks the whole time I was in the store. The real challange was getting out the place. I couldn't find the exit. {blush}

As for the marble vanities, the whole trip was a bust. They guy had 3 to chose from, but for one reason or another none of them would work. On the drive home I was really getting bummed out about the whole thing, but it gave me time to think, and I think I may have come up with a plan. More on that later.

Some may recall how I had a plan to trade a bunch of old toilets and sinks to DEA Bath for store credit. The credit would then go towards an antique marble vanity and other plumbing supplies they offer. We had a tentative deal for about $600 in store credit, but the whole thing fell apart last week. I’ve had good dealings with them in the past, but this time it was one delay after another. I was dealing with a guy named Mat and it was terrible trying to get questions answered and to get him to follow up on things. After about 6 weeks I told them to go to hell. Well, not in so many words, but the deals is off, all the same.

After I fired off an angry email and told them to forget the whole thing, John, the owner or manager, I’m not sure which, called me but I wasn’t home. I never called him back. There are still some things I’m going be buying from them, because I just can’t get it any place else. When I do call in an order I’m going to ask for John and he is going to get an earful.

Just to give you some idea of what I was dealing with. About 3-weeks in I asked Mat if he could give me some idea when the order could be put together. I explained that I needed to arrange a day off work to drive down. Mat’s reply: “It’ll get done, when it’s done”. I should have asked for the manager right there and then.

More Thoughts on Tile

Just when you thought I’d made up my mind, I’m pulling the old switch-a-roo. When I last spoke about tile, I had just received the tile samples from Subwaytile.com. There was a selection from Iron Gate and a selection from Subway Ceramics. At first, I thought Subwaytile.com made the Iron Gate tile, and that they only distributed Subway Ceramics. Now it seems that it’s the other way around, but this is still not entirely clear.

Originally, I liked the Subwaytile.com tile better because it offered the cool Victorian Profile of the base tile. The more I looked at period pictures of Victorian bathrooms, though, the more I realized that the fluted Victorian base was not all that authentic. I fell victim to this perceived notion that all things Victorian were always very, very, fancy. It’s true, they did go over the top on a lot of things, but before I really saw a lot of period interior shots of Victorian homes, the picture I had in my head of Victorian style was more that of the Rococo style of the 18th Century, and not so much of, say, for instance, the Aesthetics Movement or Art Nuevo styles that have their roots in the last 2 decades of the 19th Century.

At any rate, the point I’m trying to make, in a very long winded fashion, is that the Victorian base that I liked so much is not really all that Victorian. They might have gone Ga-Ga over it if someone had massed produced it in the 1890s, but from what I can tell they didn’t, because it wasn’t. The 6X6 tile with a cove at the bottom is what appears in most of the bathroom pictures I’ve seen.

Secondly, there is the quality of the tile. I originally said the quality was similar between the two. Having spent more time with the samples (I take them to bed with me) I’ve come to the conclusion that the Subway Ceramics tile is superior in quality. There is a roughness along the edge of the Iron Gate tile that I think comes from the way the glaze drizzles over the edge a bit. The edges have subtle bumps on them that might be hidden under a thick grout line, but I won’t be doing that. I also recently got my hands on a real live 1902, 3X6, salvaged subway tile. When comparing all three, the Subway Ceramics tile is a closer match. The only real difference between the two, is the original tile has the natural crazing that comes with age.

Furthermore, I have discovered that the Subway Ceramics ships out of Los Angles instead of some desolate location East of the Rockies. This means, I will pay less on shipping for the Subway Ceramics than I would for the Iron Gate tile. Oh, and finally, I’m in negotiations with Subway Ceramics to advertise on my site. More on that later. In the mean time, enjoy some more Snow Art.

Vintage Bath Photos & Snow Art

I found some vintage bath photos on-line. These are a little late for my house, but not so late that I can’t use some of them for ideas. The top 6 are from the 1904 Standard catalog, and the bottom 4 are from the 1925 Kohler catalog.

First, notice the size of the rooms from the first 4 from 1904. Obviously, these bathrooms were not designed for small houses. They even put the toilet in a separate little room. In the last one from 1925, notice how the sink faucet and levers are attached to the wall. Put a vessel sink under it and it would look a lot like a very modern design. I also like the way all of the plumbing seems to be contained in the large bump-out with the sink, tub, and toilet on opposing walls. Just think how easy it would be to fix plumbing problems if you had access to the bump-out from the other side.

Finally, there is the snow art. What can I say, these are timeless classics and I’m a bit of a sentimentalist for the season. {sigh}












Snow Art



More Snow Art to come over the next few days.

It Would Seem, Mine’s Bigger Than I Thought

Well, isn’t my face red. Here I thought I was going to perform some engineering marvel by cramming a full bath into what I thought was a small space, and it seems a lot of you have already done that (or have had it done) in an even smaller space.



This little exercise in reality was not all for nothing, though. It proved that a full bath can easily exist in 63 sq ft or less. Well, OK, easily may be a bit of a stretch for some of you, but it can be done. That’s the important thing. Also, the fact that it can exist in less space is really important, because my bathroom is about to get smaller.

In the back corner of the room there is a chase that takes plumbing, electrical, and telecom to the second and third floors. I could box this in to space a of about a half of a square foot. The problem with that is, I would have a little box in the corner of the room. It would just look odd. My plan is to build a new wall 6-inches out from the existing wall to hide the chase and everything else. Basically, all plumbing for the bathroom, along with all plumbing, electrical, and telecom for the above floors will run in this little 6-inch wall space.

By doing this, I will be reducing the room by about 5 sq ft, but it will really make things much easier. First off, the toilet would have ended up being right over a joist. By adding this wall, it pushes the flange out past the joist. Second, the original wall space was a load baring wall for the second and third floor. I’m embarrassed to say that I already damaged the joist when I ran the new gas line and had to sister another one to it. This means I essentially have a 4X6 beam just under the wall that I was going to have to run all the drains and supply lines for the bathroom. It was just going to be a nightmare.

So, by building a new wall 6-inches in to the bathroom space, I won’t have the odd little box in the corner of the room, and I can simply come up through the sub floor for all supply and drain lines, and bypass the 4X6 beam. Thank you all for living with small bathrooms and making me feel secure in creating what may be considered a mid-sized bathroom.

Assume the Position

The temperature dropped a bit this weekend.

This is where he spends the daylight hours.


This is where he spends the evening hours.


I hope he doesn’t singe anything.

Is Yours Smaller Than Mine?

That’s not too subtle of a question, is it? Well, regardless of what you’re thinking right now, this a Poll Question about the size of your bathroom. In this instance, I’m willing to bet the answer is “No”, yours is not smaller than mine.

I pushed the claw foot tub in to the room over a year ago and it occupied most of the floor space ever since. On paper, the bathroom appeared to have enough space, but with the center of the room being taken up by 300 pounds of cast iron, it has been difficult to judge whether that is true or not. Yesterday, I finally pulled up the rest of the flooring and was able to shove the tub up against the back wall and in to the space it will eventually occupy. Suddenly, the space doesn’t seem so cramped. Still, by any measurement, this can not be considered a large bathroom.

So, I’m wondering how this measures up against other bathrooms out there in the Blogosphere. For the sake of this discussion, only full bathrooms will count. Powder rooms need not apply. Also, if you have more than one full bathroom use your smallest bathroom when answering this question. For instance, my upstairs bathroom measures in at a luxurious 106 sq ft, while the new downstairs bath will have a finished floor space of only a paltry 63 sq ft.

So the question is….

Is your smallest full bathroom smaller than 63 sq ft?
	Yes
	No
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