Bathroom: Before, In-between & After

There is not much to the before. It is just a couple of pictures of the room from different angles. It is a small room and tough to get pictures of it.



In the photo above, that is the bathroom at the far end, beyond the water heater. This shot is taken from the dining room, looking through the butler’s pantry, and in to the scullery. The scullery is what eventually became the bathroom. As I’ve stated many times, these three rooms went through the earliest of modifications when they became Mrs. Petch’s apartment in 1915 when she turned the house in to a boarding house. The dining room and butler’s pantry were originally separated by cabinets, and that was a solid wall between the butler’s pantry and scullery.

The two big windows were removed and the small stained glass window is now centered on that wall. You can see the tub in the picture as well. That was going to be the original location of the tub. I ended up flipping it 90 degrees and it is on the wall to the left, out of the picture. There is now a solid wall were the water heater is. The medicine cabinet is on the other side of the water heater with the toilet next to it. The door to the bathroom is on the right, just out of the picture.



Here is another shot of those two big windows. While they are original to the house, this was not their original location. I won’t go in to how know, but it was very obvious.



And here is the same shot with the stained glass window. Below are three videos. The first, a tour of the room just after the rough in plumbing was finished. Then a very short video after the tile was up but not yet grouted. And finally, a video I shot three days ago of the finished room.

A note on You Tube Videos: They basically suck. Its like you get 10 pixels that smoosh together. It seems to me that the videos play better when you reduce the size. Changing the width & height parameters dosen't seem to do much. I did notice that if you click on the "Menu" button on the You Tube window the video will get smaller. To keep it that size, hover the mouse pointer over the "Other Video" images at the bottom of the You Tube window. It seems to play better for me that way.

Not Long For This World

Ok, so the title is a bit dramatic, I'll admit, but Mortimer was diagnosed with Feline AIDS yesterday. The doctor says he could have several more good years ahead of him. Still, it's a bit sobering.

Mort has had this ongoing respiratory infection for the last 6 months or so. We've tried a few different antibiotics and the symptoms seem do go away for a little bit but they come back. He just can't shake it. This is what prompted the FAIDS test. He does not have leukemia, so that's good news.

He has a deep ear polyp and the doctor speculates that that could be the source of the infection. Then again, it may not be. There is a surgical procedure for removing the polyp, but no one around here does it. He is in no pain because of it, and we decided that given his age and condition it's not worth the trauma of putting him through a surgery that would require so much travel and time.

I often question putting cats through traumatic surgeries that require a lot of recovery. It's easy to anthropomorphize them and forget that they are not human. Even if they come out of it healthy there can be a psychological aspect that is hard to quantify.

I always think back to a cat we had when I was a kid. He was hit by a car and we opted for major surgery to save him. This required a long period of confinement for recuperation. The poor cat was just never the same after the whole ordeal. I was a kid at the time, and didn't think much about it then, but in retrospect, I don't think the heroic efforts were the right way to go with that cat.

I've already made the decision that I won't let Mort suffer and there will be no surgeries in his future. He has had a very long and difficult life, but the last 5 or 6 years have been very good for him. It doesn't seem right to put him through something that he may see as torture just so I can spend a few more months or years with him. When I feel the time has come, I'll put him to sleep.

When I first started the blog I wrote about how I met Mortimer. I wasn't really sure what to write about at the time, so Mort seemed like a good topic. I mentioned how he runs up to my truck every day when I get home from work. He still does it. Sometimes when I tell people this they say he only does it because he's hungry, but I know that's not it.

It doesn't matter how many times I pull up in a day, or how hungry or full he his, if he sees me pull up he runs out to the truck and greets me. It seemed like a good time to get this on video so I took my camera with me to work today. I wasn't worried that this might take several tries to get the shot. He does it every time rain or shine.

The Bathroom Rushes

Under the category “One thing lead to another...”, I give you my latest video. I thought it would be nice to set up the marble vanity to show family members that are arriving next week for a visit. Well, then I thought it would be nice to show the toilet….and I might as well get the cabinets in there, and the lights, and the towel rack, tp holder, medicine cabinet, faucets, heater, etc. etc

The next the you know, the room is pretty much set up, although nothings really hooked up. Not every thing is in it’s proper place at this point either. It took a lot of time, but I’m glad I did it though, because there are a few things I noticed. One, I think the medicine cabinet is too low. I made it lower than I would want it on purpose, because I’m a tall person, and the upstairs bathroom will still be my domain even after this bathroom is finished. Still, it may be too low. I’m going to need a second opinion.

The other thing I noticed is that I’m just not thrilled with that marble vanity top. I love the skirting, and the legs are to-die-for, but the top is just not what I had in mind when I was looking. In fact, I did pass on that one early on and then went back to it when I had trouble finding anything else. I’m not sure what to do, but if another one that was more to my liking, and a similar size, came along, I would buy it and worry about getting rid of this one later.

The room is tight, but not cramped. At least I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be a very nice bathroom, if I ever finish it, that is.

1895 Bathroom: The Movie

I sort of finished the tile today, and I wasn’t ready to start anything else, so instead I started cleaning. I have family coming for a visit in one week and I really need to get the place cleaned up. They’ve been here before, and they know it’s a real work-in-progress, so it doesn’t need to be prefect.

Anyway, I polished the bathroom today so I thought I’d shoot a video of it. This was the first room I did in the house, and as you can see, it’s not really finished. There is the window that needs help, but I’m saving all of the windows to do as one project over the course of a year or so. The other issue, that I sort of talk about in the video, is the missing piece of trim.

The missing trim is a wainscot cap that they used in every room of the house that had wainscoting. It’s the same profile of trim in 5 rooms and the back stairs. I was missing a piece for the bathroom, and missing some for the kitchen. I thought I might have some made for the kitchen, so I figured I’d just wait and get enough made to replace missing pieces in both rooms. I ended up using something different in the kitchen, so now I can use some of the original pieces I salvaged from the kitchen to complete the bathroom. The trouble is, it’s not going to get done unless I do it.

It dawned on me as I was shooting the video that I haven’t really finished any rooms in the house yet. I did the bathroom and the kitchen, but the bathroom needs the trim piece, and the kitchen still needs the edges of the marble on the island finished. I really need to do these things as soon as I finish the bathroom. This assumes I do someday finish the bathroom.

I also talk about stripping the shellac off some of the beadboard. I used salvaged wood from the addition to have the missing beadboard made. When I oiled and shellacked it, it came out lighter than the original wood. I need to strip off the shellac and then re-oil it and tint the oil with red mahogany stain. A friend of mine turned me on to this trick and it works very good to match the old color of the wood. The new wood, because it was salvage from the 20s, was milled at about the same time, and is also old-growth wood, but it just hasn’t had the same exposure as the original beadboard, so it comes out lighter in color. So I’ll do that before I put on the wainscot cap. Then, aside from the window, the room will be done…..except for the tub and sink faucets, but that’s another story.

So now I give you, 1895 Bathroom: The Movie. Do I hear Oscar buzz already?

Kitchen After: The Movie

After being blown away by my directorial debut, Kathy asked to see footage of the finished kitchen and upstairs bathroom. I had to shoot this one several times. There were script problems from day-one. The caterer never showed up and so the Best Boy and Key Grip walked off the set. Everyone knows you can’t shoot a film without a topnotch Best Boy and Key Grip. Bunch of prima donnas.

I did shoot this one three times because it was coming out too long. The first one was 6-minuets long, which makes for a huge upload. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed this about me, but I can be long-winded at times. I thought about just shooting 6-minutes and then cleaning it up in post-production, but I don’t have a post-production department, so that wasn’t going to happen. I was aiming for 2 minuets, but I settled on 3. It still seems rushed to me.

Some things about the kitchen: First, it’s still not complete. I mention how I’m moving the fridge eventually. This whole back of the house is like one big puzzle and some items are not in their proper place at this point. The fridge is one of them. I also want to put towel racks on either side of the island but after looking and looking I couldn’t find anything I liked and then sort of forgot about it altogether. Shooting the video made me think of this again, so the hunt is on once more. Also, the cast iron stove is about a foot too close to the wall. It needs to come out, and insulated metal panels, like tin ceiling panels, will go behind it in front of the beadboard. This is low priority since the chimneys are chopped off in the attic at this point.

The one thing I would call a design flaw with the kitchen is the space between the stove and the wall where you would pass to go in to the alcove where the fridge will eventually be. On paper this seemed bigger, but in reality it is tighter than I would like it to be. It’s not a serious issue, though. If someone is standing in front of the stove cooking and someone needs to get to the fridge, someone might need to step aside a little. So long as it doesn’t come to blows, it shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s not like 3 people are racing to the fridge at one time.

Others might think the lack of cabinets and counters are a big design flaw. Well, I won’t make excuses for the kitchen. I love it the way it is. I just didn’t see a point in putting in acres of cabinets and counters that seemed unnecessary to me. In my last house the POs put in crappy cabinets and counters but they put in a ton of them. Every wall in what was a moderately sized kitchen was lined with cabinets and counters. I lived in the house for 3 years and never had anything in more than half of them. I swore I wouldn’t do that in this house.

So, here’s the kitchen. For newer readers of the blog, the kitchen was what I worked on and blogged about for the first year or so of the blog. It wasn’t exactly a gut-remodel, but it was very, very extensive.

Screen Test

Ok, so this is the first official Petch House video. I shot a “before” video of the bathroom today and uploaded it to YouTube.Com. The quality is not great. I shot it on my little HP Photosmart 735 camera. The video is only 19 frames per second, as opposed to 30 frames per second for TV quality video.

Aside from poor quality, another draw back to it is the file size. The total running time is 2:13 and the file size is 31MB. It takes quite a long time to upload it and to have YouTube make it available. My camera shoots in AVI format, so other formats might have better compression, but I have no utilities for conversion, so this is something I’ll need to look in to if I plan on doing more of this.

For those of you not familiar with some of the things I’m referring to in the video, you can use the search box at the bottom of this page and search The Petch House for keywords: Frankenstein Hutch, Kitchen Island, Queen Anne Door, and Mortimer

Anyway, with out further ado, here is my directorial debut. I think this could be an Oscar contender, but I’ll let my peers decide.




Directors Notes: In the brief scene where the camera is aiming out the window you see Marcus walking by. He owns the property next door to me and is just a heck of a nice guy. He’s working with a group to try and bring back a historic railroad to the Humboldt Bay. The group has acquired an original 1890s round house and work shop with all of it’s tools and machinery, and a locomotive that used to haul logs around the bay 100 years ago. I’ve agreed to help him this summer to do some restoration work on the round house. Should be fun.

Also, I was trying to get Mort to express a sense of anguish one gets living in a house that is undergoing constant change and disruption, but that the cat just won’t take direction.

A Video Interlude

I thought about playing around with You Tube to post videos of projects on the blog. I’ve signed up for an account but I haven’t posted anything yet. Mainly because I don’t have anything to post at this point. Still, it’s an interesting idea. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much would a 2 minute video of a completed bathroom be worth?

The only video camera I have is on my digital still-shot camera. I’ve never really used it but it will shoot about 8 minuets of video with sound. The quality is not great but it should be good enough. Last night I rented the Will Ferrell movie Stranger Than Fiction. It was a pretty good movie. In one scene he is riding on the bus reading a book and in the background they are playing “That’s Entertainment” by The Jam. I had forgotten all about this song and so I searched it out on You Tube this morning. Enjoy!