Bathroom Update with Pictures!

I finished the grouting today and attached all the shower heads. I also hooked up the toilet so now I can pee properly and not have to look at the cesspit of a bowl on the third floor! I just have to apply grout sealer and wait until we have a couple of grand to spare on glass for the shower enclosure. Here are two pictures. You can click on them for a better image. I left the 4' long level in place to give an idea of scale.






What is left to do? Well, I am going to make a polished concrete sink counter to sit on an 1880s set of drawers. I am also going to put a polished concrete surround and mantle to the fireplace. One more pass with the top coat, a lined chimney and this room will be ready to paint! Maybe by September.....
Now I have to get back to stripping paint in the master bedroom

"Scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape,
Sand, sand, sand, sand........"

Therapy

I was supposed to try to fix my van this past weekend. I was also supposed to grout the shower pan and marble tile wall AND cut up that tree limb that fell in the back yard. What did I really do? I put shellac on three doors. One brand spanking new one and two that I had previously stained and urethaned. It is kind of therapeutic. Remember this door from my post in early June?



Well, here it is now.



Subtle difference eh? I just put three coats of shellac over the polyurethane and "voila!" Instant patina. Here is the new door for the 2nd floor passage between the main house and the "cottage".



I don't have to look at those untouched rooms any more. So after my shellac therapy on Saturday and Sunday morning I proceeded to cut the limb until the chainsaw acted up. I started to remove the steering wheel on the van but would have to go and buy a puller in order to get the thing off AND at 9:00 PM Sunday evening I started to grout the shower until I ran out of grout. By the time I got done with the clean up and left it was 5:37 AM! I guess this week I will be doing much the same, except I don't have any doors to shellac, though I do have 6 to strip paint off! I'll save those for when we are actually living here!

When I finish grouting the bathroom, I will post pictures. The tile looks much better with grout!

History Lesson

I took this rim lock off of a closet door in our bedroom. The closet was re arranged when the house was re-modeled back in 1887. I certainly didn't expect to find this though.




See those four screws on the right. They have flat tips. Flat tipped screws were manufactured before 1846 when the machinery became available to put points on them like the two on the left.Based on the fact that there was bare wood exposed on the door when this lock was removed and how difficult it was to get the screws to turn, I would venture to say that this lock has never been removed. I could also speculate that this was the door to the original closet. It would appear that it was moved and re-hung. I would have done the same thing so I shouldn' t think it unusual. I'm just surprised that this particular door was of 1840s vintage seeing that it has five panels whereas most of the other older doors have two panels. Oh well, just another bit of quirkiness when this was the Big House on the Prairie.
Time to put that hardware in "ye olde coffee can o' paint stripper" for a day.

"You are so Lucky!"

Have you ever had anyone say this to you?

"You are soooooo lucky to have such a nice house."
"You are soooooo lucky that you know how to do all this work."
"You are soooooo lucky that you can spend as much time as you can fixing up this place."
"Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...."

You know, if I were lucky, I'd win the lottery and pay someone to do all this crap! But, you know something else? The harder I work, the luckier I get! Maybe I should actually BUY a lottery ticket........

Never a dull moment

There are always things happening around here that just suck up my time. You already know about my plumbing extravaganza. Well, last weekend a huge limb fell off of one of our trees in the back yard. This wasn't a small branch. I was about a full third of the tree (which is slated to come down anyway). It pulled the main electric line down to about 5 feet from the ground. I was amazed that it didn't pull it off our house. I cut the line free but this weekend I am going to have to cut up the rest of the limb. Time to sharpen the chain saw blade.

Then, yesterday I was trying to reverse my piece-o-crap 1975 Ford van and the gears shifted in the steering column locking it in reverse. So now I get to see if I can fix that. Fortunately it is still on our lot although a little skewed parking wise. I don't care if I fix the van or not. I bought it 4 years ago for $300 and have only $87 in repairs tied up in it. I think I got my moneys worth considering all the drywall, wood and cement that it has hauled in the last few years. I'm surprised it has lasted this long!

I guess I should look on the bright side, I could be stripping paint off of woodwork!

It wasn't me!

Now that the plumbing leak is fixed I can honestly say that it wasn't my plumbing skills (or lack of them) that caused the leak in the first place. You can see by this picture that the cap has a split in the end. Right where it has a manufacturers stamp. I can write this one off as a design flaw.



This certainly has added some excitement to the hum-drum task of stripping paint from wood and the really good news is that we have running water once again! Until the winter.......

My Contractor Story

We hired a plumber once. He was a neighbor who lived down the street, too. Never again. He said that the job could be done in 16 hours at $25 an hour. I had to buy all the materials for our DWV system including the rubber balloons to plug the ends of the pipe so that it could be tested for leaks. Those cost me a small fortune. He couldn't do the work himself in the end. He got a buddy to do it for him. His wife had left him for another woman leaving the illiterate 9 year old daughter in his hands so he couldn't find time to do the work.His buddy boasted about how good a plumber he was and how fast he could work. Since I didn't know any better we took them on. After 26 hours and the job still not finished I was getting frustrated with the guy. When he was almost done he demanded payment. I guess he was seeing that he might not get paid at all. So, being idiots we paid him. Then it was a chore to get him to show up to finish the work. When he did show up and finish, he was drunk. As a result he managed to not glue three seams and put 1 1/2" pipe where he should have used 2" pipe. The original guy was supposed to install the spigot into the cast iron basement drain and lead it in but never showed up. My plumbing failed the rough inspection. Neither one of the plumbers would come back to fix the problem so I fixed it. Then the drain was plugged up and Roto Rooter was called to clean out the scale that had fallen down the cast iron main stack when Mr. Moron smacked it with a hammer to bust it out. If he had put a rag in the cleanout drain to catch the scale he would have saved me the $98 Roto Rooter bill.Well, his work is still haunting me. I went to put the toilet back in on the 2nd floor main bathroom only to find that it won't fit! It needs to be 2 inches shorter. Fortunately there is a distance of 10 inches between the wall and the center of the closet flange and you can buy toilets with a 10 inch rough in. So a new toilet cost us $135.00. Putting a perfectly good 12 inch rough in toilet out of commission.

My plumbing has come back to haunt me, too. As it always does. Somewhere behind my marble shower wall the hot water line has popped. Now I have to knock out tile and put holes in the backer board to find the leak so that I can fix it. This just goes to prove that draining the lines and shutting off the water for winter doesn't always prevent the pipes from popping. It's the copper pipe once again. I never have this problem with the plastic. I think I'll go and cry now.....