Update on the dining room and upstairs plumbing

You may ask yourself why the dining room and upstairs plumbing share a post, but I'll bet you can figure it out from this picture - yes, the upstairs plumbing is all above the dining room ceiling.

It's spring! And besides resumption of the drainage work (more on which later), that means it's time to finish the plumbing in the big house. And that means pulling all the water-damaged ceiling down from the dining room to expose said plumbing.

Looking straight up from the ladder, we see the supply lines to both upstairs bathrooms. We're standing under the toilet in the blue room's bathroom (the one with the microtub). I'm sure you'll be seeing plenty more about both bathrooms in the year to come.

At any rate, I was pleased to discover that the plumbing appears to be in pretty good shape. I found a leak in the shower in the microtub (or it looks like it - it's been dry for a year, so we'll see, this week, when I hook up the water again). But there doesn't appear to be any freeze damage from the foreclosure period, so ... we'll see what we see. The plumbing in the kitchen, which is on the same branch of the supply, froze badly and I've had to knock out a lot of wall to find it all, so it was a pleasant surprise that I wouldn't have to fix any plumbing thirteen feet above my head.

I do need a taller stepladder, though. I won't be able to fix this ceiling with my little one.

The structure of the ceiling is horrible. You can't get a good impression of it from the picture above, but there has been a lot of sagging. The previous owner just nailed drywall to it all and it was utterly invisible (I guess a ten-foot-tall man would notice, but the rest of us are so far from that ceiling that three inches of sag are literally unnoticeable), but I'm going to try to do a more solid job of restoration than that.

More on that later. I just wanted to prove I'm not dead.

In the dining room by Thanksgiving

Here is the original picture of the dining room from this May; things haven't really changed much since then; the focus has, of course, been carriage house livability. As you'll recall, one driver for the roof project was leaks above this room; there is some damage to the late-period drywall on the ceiling and the wallpaper was basically a loss, as you can see even in this picture.

But it's a fantastic room; all the woodwork looks like this, very little of the molding is missing, and the floor, while chopped up a lot from the room's use as the kitchen of the apartment in 304 during the 70's and 80's, is still attractive.

So we've come up with the goal of making this one room usable by Thanksgiving, and having a good-sized meal there. A collateral goal will be the installation of a sink in the kitchen, which is the room to the west of the dining room which was last used as a kitchen in the big house (it was a bedroom for 304 in the 70's and 80's, and it is currently my sawing shop, because the generation of sawdust in the carriage house has been denied approval by the household environmental management commission, a body whose membership comprises my wife).

This picture, taken in August while the roof was off (hence the bit of light showing at the top of the wall) shows what we're going to have to fix up in terms of the ceiling. Actually, it doesn't show the worst of it, which is just off the top of the picture - that entire sheet of drywall there is rotten and moldy around the edge, reportedly due to an overflow in the bathtub upstairs. Which I take to mean repeated and egregious overflow; a single incident would not account for the damage I see.

So anyway, I guess I haven't posted a to-do list recently!

1. Carriage house livability


• Garage area livability
• Remove superfluous fiberglass insulation (40% complete)
• Caulk everywhere (a lot is done; more to be done)
• Some plaster patching (done on southwest, need to move everything out off the east wall to continue the process)
• More paint, aye!
• Seriously considering laying down a heating pad and hardwood veneer on the south end of the downstairs; the white walls certainly make the area look like a place you could live in


• Windows
• Kitchen window is the only one left


• Bathroom
• Attach and plumb vanity


2. Carriage house electrical work
• Replace stolen ground wire outside
• Entryway lighting
• Overhead light for washer/dryer area
• Separate circuit for bedroom to permit use of air conditioner


3. Carriage house paint and trim
• Paint walls and trim in bathroom
• All window trim


4. Dining room (target: Thanksgiving. Yes, 2009, pipe down over there.)


• Remove and scrape wallpaper (30% done, thanks to daughter)
• Remove all damaged plaster on walls
• Remove damaged drywall from ceiling
• Restore plaster on walls
• Drywall ceiling
• Paint (I'm still liking that semi-gloss ultra white)
• Clean and maintain the woodwork and buffet
• Shore up under floor (soft spot from long-standing leak in roof fixed in 90's)
• Polish floor


5. Remainder of big house


• Upstairs bathroom plumbing
• Addition of sink in kitchen
• Cleaning
• Winterization, a lengthy process
• Heat
• Electrical systems: oh the humanity!

Dining room roof Before

Boy, posting has gotten sparse, hasn't it? Sorry about that (especially to you, Mystery Seventh Follower). But it was all up to technical problems - specifically, I'd taken the Before pictures of the dining room roof with my daughter's camera, and we couldn't find the cable. Today, I found the cable! So here's the before on the dining room roof.

I've uploaded this at 1MB, twice the resolution I've been stingily using here on The House, because there's a lot of information in this picture. (Click it for the big version.) But the upshot is: this roof on the embayment on the north side was raining through the ceiling to a serious extent, and it's the first work I've paid to have done on The House. So it's a landmark decision.

The roof was covered in tar, over shingles, over tin (sigh), and the box gutters were rotted, as is the general case throughout the building. On the left point where the box gutter is flush to the brick, you can see a gray line running upwards, then to the right. That, my friends, is a live power wire, which leads out the basement window, over the dining room, and through the brick wall into the bathroom of the blue room. !! No, this is not compliant with code anywhere except possibly in Nigeria. It is dangerous. I'm pretty sure that's the power to the Blue Room, though. I don't know yet. Wiring will therefore be figuring in my life in the upcoming months.

This picture also shows the interesting vertical crack down from the second-story bathroom window (the leaded window in the upper left). That was obviously another full-sized window, probably another bedroom, that was bricked in with a smaller window when the bathtub was put in. It - like the rest of the house - is crying out for tuck pointing.

I have bought a grout bag (a $5.26 investment at Lowe's) for said tuck pointing. Way easier, I'm told, than troweling it all in. I'll update you on that when I get started.

Here's a view from the top of the left-hand end of the box gutter. Sigh. I can only feel good about the fact that all this is historical now; it's already history. But this nice little hole is responsible for a three-foot-wide strip of moldering plaster and sagging wallpaper in the dining room below it. Also, if you're into flashing, you can cringe with me looking at the upper right of this photo. If you've never considered how roofs are supposed to interface with brick, please have my assurances that this is not it.

Flabbergastingly, the underlying structure of this roof was sound. It was all original timber, dating to about 1910 when they built the embayment and presumably put in the buffet and the woodwork. We had to replace some of the 1x planks in the roof and shore up two rafters that had suffered water damage, but otherwise, this roof just got a new surface. At the edge, we replaced the old box gutter with an angled affair which I'll show you later (that camera is in the car, and not here right now). Turns out that the brick goes right up to the top corner on the roof, so we couldn't substantially change its shape.

Anyway, more later. I've nearly finished the bathroom window, and the current top item is baseboard heating (I've bought the heaters and gotten the permit - halfway done! Ha!) But as it is Labor Day, work is calling.