House Mending

Bathroom and Adjacent Bedroom

vapalla — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:11:59 +0000

This blog was started over a year ago, but working on the house and on a website kept me from coming back to it. Lots has been done to the house. It has acquired a lot of mosaics and several rooms are more-or-less finished, but there is still a lot of work to do. Here’s one of the first projects, the upstairs’ bathroom and the most recently completed, the adjoining bedroom.

The bedroom is tiny and we removed the water-damaged plywood to reveal the original floor. It is painted dark brown. The tiles in the bedroom and bathroom are complementary but are not the same. the grout is the same color for both.

The bedroom once had a knocked-together wall built in it to create a hallway from the room next door. The room then only had space for a twin bed and a tiny desk. The closet was never finished. The room was covered in badly installed 1970′s paneling. The plywood originally on the floor had badly applied vinyl tile squares.

The wall between the bedroom and bathroom had to be replaced due to water and termite damage. The bathroom originally was poorly laid out with pipes snaking around the wall to reach the sink. When re-doing the room, the tub area was bumped into the room next door. (That room will eventually be made into a walk-in closet.)

Mosaic detail in bedroom

Bed mosaic; window to left, lamp and cabinet to right

Looking from bathroom into bedroom

Bathroom sink

Tub surround detail

Surround detail 2

Surround detail 3

Some idea of what I have been up against…

vapalla — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 23:22:17 +0000

Frances grew up in the Depression. She was the kind of person that saved everything in hope that it would prove useful in the future. The problem was, she usually didn’t know where she put it, and possibly useful stuff accumulated until the rooms were positively jammed with boxes and boxes of things like old string and old novels from writers long forgotten. She had kept all bills and reciepts from the 1970′s on. She also had the bills and receipts from both her mother Ellen and her friend Pat who had also lived here with her. (Both her mother and Pat died in this house.) It took months and months before we cleared everything out. I actually still have boxes of bills to shred…

Here’s an idea of what the place looked like as we started working.

front parlor summer 2007

dining room summer 2007

And some of the damage we faced:

water damage dining room

wall in future family room with water/termite damage

Some background…

vapalla — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:55:54 +0000

This house is old… really old. We don’t know how old because the deed says ’1951′ while the house is clearly 19th century. The houses flanking ours are from the 1830′s and based on stylistic similarities to those, it is possible that this one is the same.

This house was owned by a lovely old lady named Francis. She died unexpectedly in a car accident over 2 years ago. She loved this house, but didn’t really have the funds to work on it, nor did she know where to begin to fix it up. She wasn’t handy, so anything that needed work required hiring someone and hoping they would do a good job. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they took the money and then took off. The house was inherited by her son, and now I live here with him and our teenage daughter. I am the main fixer-upper. We took out a loan to cover repairs to the roof and foundation, replace the windows, and create a kitchen with new functioning cabinets. (the ones there were less than 8″ deep.) The extravagance was the dishwasher. The house furnace ate gas and really didn’t heat the rooms. We ripped out all the giant radiators and put in a huge pellet stove. It doesn’t heat every space, but it actually is warmer than when there was only the furnace! Most of our money went into basics. It doesn’t leak, and the windows can be open and shut and have screens. It’s my job now to turn the spaces into something more than cracked and broken plaster, peeling paint, and old termite holes.

My daughter took some pictures of the house as it was being worked on, but then broke the camera. I am going to have to use a video camera to make still images as well as video footage to show the changes that have been done and the work still to do. When looking at the pictures from a little over a year ago, I was shocked at all I had done in that time. Until I looked at them again recently, I actually thought I hadn’t accomplished much at all. There is still so much to do.

A warning; this house is being placed in the hands of a person who doesn’t care about resale value or trends. This place is not going to get the conventional treatment. I think that will suit this house just fine.