Putting up sheet rock in the guest bathroom

Wow! I went back and searched to see when the last post on the upstairs guest bathroom was and found that it was from November 2007!

I haven't done anything on the house in months as we've been out at the house in Woodbury most of the time. We're about to get a construction loan and will soon be going full tilt in the hopes of getting it livable by summer.

Anyways, we can't do anything more on Woodbury until we get the loan so I decided to do some work here.

Several months back I raised the ceiling joists up like I had done in the master bathroom, unfortunately I cant find the pictures of it.

Today I finally decided to get back in there and get the greenboard up. I was going to use the tongue & groove boards that I took down from the old second floor porch but in the end I decided against it and went with the green board.

First I put up insulation in the rafters on the sloped part of the roof and then put up the green board over that:

I can reach the flat part of the ceiling from the attic so I'll insulate that area later. Here is the completed ceiling:



Next I cut out and reframed the opening for the attic access:


The area's not very large but it will be nice to store small things and for access the plumbing and electrical.

After that I began insulating the walls and installing the green board over that:


That was as far as I got today, I'm going to need more insulation and a few more pieces of green board. Hopefully I can get this room completed soon...

Antique Toilet for sale

I've decided to sell my antique toilet I bought a few years ago. It's a really nice embossed Victorian style toilet made in 1902 by T. R. & Co. The tank is oak and finished in amber shellac. All the internals are original except for the flush valve.

I hate to sell it but with the medical issues I've been having lately I could use the cash.

I've put it up on E-bay for those of you that may be interested.

Build a clawfoot tub shower ring for under $20

We've been forced to take baths for almost a year and a half now. I finally got fed up with that and decided to put together a shower. the shower kits online at these restoration places are expensive as hell so I decided to see if I could put together the parts myself. At this point we just need to get things working, later on when we have more time and money we can go back and put in the nicer, more expensive plumbing parts.

My original intention was to get the tub in the master bath working. I bought a shower riser for around $40, a set of supply lines for $20, two cut-off valves for around $8, and a PVC drain assembly for $14. I painted the PVC drain with the same bronze paint that I painted the clawfeet.


I already had an old tub faucet that was already in the tub.


I put everything together but had a problem with the faucet. The internals were rotted away so I couldnt shut the water all the way off. I looked online for another tub faucet that has a shower flange. I found one for $30 but it was hideous.

The tub in the downstairs bathroom is the only currently running tub. I took the gooseneck faucet off and found that the shower riser would fit with an adapter.


The only thing I needed now is a shower ring. Looking online I found them to be fairly expensive, $150 to well over $400.

A few weeks before we were looking through an old house for sale that had a shower ring in one of their bathrooms. Looking at it closely I discovered that they are constructed out of common parts that you can find at any home improvement store.

I went to Lowes and began searching for the right combination of parts. 1/2 electrical conduit was perfect, light, easily bendable, paintable, and cheap. I knew I would need some type of "T" to connect the ends to the wall and ceiling. I found a 1/2 cast iron "T" in plumbing that was perfect. I could have had the ends of the conduit threaded to fit the "T" but that didnt occur to me until after I had built it, and in the end I like it better the way it turned out anyways. Instead I found a 1/2 coupling that was threaded on one end and a compression fitting on the other. the last part I found was a 1/2 galvanized floor flange, I would use this to connect the ring to the wall and ceiling.

Parts list:

• 2 - 10' lengths of 1/2" electrical conduit - $1.98 ea
  
• 2 - 1/2" cast iron "T" connectors - $.98 ea
  
• 6 - 1/2" compression connectors - $.54 ea
  
• 2 - 1/2" Floor flanges - $2.97 ea
  

From the left; 1/2" "T" - 1/2" Compression/threaded connector - 1/2" Floor flange

First I cut the both pieces of conduit down to 81"


then I put each end in the pipe bender leaving 5 5/8" overhanging the edge.



This gave me an overall length of 61" once both ends were bent to 90 degrees.


Then I screwed the compression connectors onto either side of the "T" connector.


Then I slid the ends of the conduit into the connectors and tightened them down. The front connector I pointed forward towards the wall, the back connector I pointed up to the ceiling.

I measured the shower curtain so I could find how long the bar that attaches to the ceiling needed to be, in my case 28". For this piece I went ahead and used a 28" piece of galvanized pipe threaded at both ends. One end threads into the "T" connector, the other end into the floor flange. On the front end I used the compression connectors and a very short piece of conduit.

Back connector

Front connector

The above pictures were taken as I was test fitting everything into place. Once I knew everything fit I took it all down to paint the ring. I used the same bronze paint since this ring will eventually go in the upstairs master bathroom. I'm not going to have a shower in the main bathroom, only in the master and guest baths.



You may have noticed that this ring is a bit big for the tub. This is a 5' tub, both tubs upstairs are 5 1/2' so it should fit perfectly. Once I get a tub faucet for upstairs I will move the ring and shower riser upstairs. For now it's nice to have a shower again.

Progress on the upstairs guest bathroom

I've finally been able to make some progress on the house. I've done a few other small projects here and there but they haven't really been worth taking pictures of.

I decided that I needed to get back in the guest bathroom. You may remember how it was left last June.


I've been dreading the thought of getting back in there.

A few weeks ago I finally got all the plaster bagged up and removed and yesterday I removed all the lathe off the walls and vacuumed up the rest of the plaster.





With all the debris out of the way I was able to get into the kitchen ceiling crawl space and insulate most of it with R30. I'll be finishing that up this morning.

Today I'll be taking the ceiling beams down so I can raise them up a foot like I did in the Master bathroom this past spring. You can see how the ceiling turned out in this post. I'll also be removing the knob & tube wiring and rewiring with romex.

I'm still debating on what to use for the ceiling. I was going to just use greenboard since I dont have enough wood, but I'm probably going to be removing the second floor porch roof which would give me plenty of tongue & groove boards.

FINALLY! An old picture of the house!

Work has been progressing very slowly here. A lot of other things have been going on and it's hard to get back into that work mode in the little bit of free time I've had.

I've been working in the upstairs guest bathroom, check here if you don't remember how it looked when I left it last June. It doesn't look much different now except that I cleaned up all the plaster and I've removed almost all the lathe off the walls. The next step is going to be to remove the ceiling joists and rebuild them a foot higher like I did in the Master Bathroom.

With that out of the way, the only real news I've got is that I FINALLY got an old picture of the house!! It only took a year and a half of constant searching. One of the relatives that came to visit last week mailed me a picture of the house.

The picture appears to be from the 40's or early 50's. It says Aunt Helen's house on the back so it would have to be sometime between 1945-1955. What surprised me the most was that the house was apartments even back then. In the picture you can see the second floor deck and just barely make out the stairs on the left side of the porch. I believe at this point it was only two apartments, Helen and Kitty-Clyde lived downstairs and rented out the upstairs.



I took a picture of the house now in the exact same spot as the old picture:

Another thing I was surprised to see is that you cant see the huge oaks in the backyard above the roof of the house. I guess they've grown a lot in the last 60 years. The tree in front of the house is long gone, I believe it was an Elm. The large branch in the upper right of th picture was from the huge old Pecan tree next to the house, the tree is still there but the branch was removed at some point because it was too close to the house.

I was happy to see that I came pretty close on the porch railings. My railings are a little higher than the originals but otherwise look very similar. I will probably lower them later on to match the originals.

I'm also going to remove the second floor porch soon. For now I will remove the roof of the porch and cut the 4x4 columns off at the top of the railings. This should make it look very close to the old picture. Eventually I'm going to remove the it entirely and rebuild a much smaller deck in between the two upper windows. It will be just wide enough for a rocking chair on either side of the door. I'll also make it less deep, that way I can restore the original pitch of the porch roof without it looking like it was hacked into place like it does now. I may add some type of columns and small hip roof to it eventually.

Study bookcase finished

I have not completed near as much on the house as I had hoped in the last few weeks. Most of the delay being from a hospital stay and a week of forced recuperation time. I have managed to accomplish a few things however.

I finished the built in book cases in the Study last week. I might add one more coat of amber shellac though.




It's very hard to get a good clear shot of the entire bookcase and to also get the lighting adjusted properly to show the true color of the bookcase. These images will have to do though. The one thing left to do on them is build the doors for the bottom shelf on either side.

I've been working on the master bathroom but I dont have any pictures of that yet. So far we've sanded and painted the clawfoot tub, painted the walls, and I've begun installing the beadboard wainscoting on the walls. Once the beadboard is done I need to paint it then finish building the double sink vanity. Hopefully I'll have some pictures of it soon.

Study built in bookcases and main bath vanity

Even though I havent posted any updates in a few weeks I've been pretty busy on the house. We also had to get the house ready for the big cookout on the 4th. It's hard to entertain guests in a construction zone. It turned out great though.

After finishing the deck last week I turned my attention to building the bookshelves in the Study. In this post I mentioned how I was going to use some of the front porch columns from the old Anderson house in the design. Unfortunately I didn't have enough salvaged 1x12 stock for the rest of the bookcase so I've had to use some new wood, worse yet it's not even Southern yellow pine, it's white pine. Lowes and Home Depot dont carry 1x12's in Southern yellow pine except for a few special pieces. I hate white pine but in the end I really dont think it will matter all that much. The bookcase is going to be stained dark walnut and very little of the white pine boards will be exposed once the books are in. The two main columns in the center are what will show the most and they are the old columns from the Anderson house, the two outside columns are a mix of older and new white pine but only 2" of their face shows, I'll probably do a faux grain on the face of them. Most of the shelves are white pine with the exception of the shelves that are directly above where the doors will be, those are Southern yellow pine.




I still need to build the top portion that will connect the two bookcases.

The other main project I worked on was the main bathroom vanity. We found this vanity totally by accident. We found some free old doors on Craigslist over a year ago. When we went and picked them from the couple that was giving them away their neighbor just happened to stop by. We got into a conversation about how we loved antique furniture and how we were in the process of searching for an old house that we could restore. He mentioned that he had some old furniture in his shop that he had intended to restore but had never gotten around to it and offered to give the pieces to us. He ended up giving us the vanity (an oak dresser), an old gas stove from the early 20's, and a very old, ornate victorian love seat (just the frame actually). He found the dresser on the curb years back about to be picked up by the trash truck.


Not much to look at but I knew that it could be fixed up very nicely. Once we got this house I knew it would be perfect for a bathroom vanity.

I stripped all the ugly brown paint off of it and stained it with a combination of mostly english chestnut and a little red mahogany and then polyed it.





We found the mirror frame in an antique store in Alabama, I have an old mirror that I need to get cut down to fit it. The sink is hand painted in Mexico and the faucet is brushed copper from Nottingham brass. I've already rebuilt the two top drawers to fit around the sink. The brace between the second and third drawers go will be removed. Then I'll biscuit join the drawer fronts together and cut them in half vertically to make two swing open doors. I still have to find some nice brass hardware for them.

Foyer update and guest bathroom demo

The second guest bedroom and the foyer have both been scraped, sanded and primered.



None of the trim has been primered in the foyer because it will all be stripped and stained instead of painted. We had been thinking of wallpapering the foyer with some type of Victorian pattern but I may just paint it for now.

Next on my list was the guest bathroom. When we moved in it was being used as a kitchen for the upstairs apartment, here is what it looked like:

and this is what it looked like once I removed the kitchen:


As you can see in the above picture the plaster was in terrible shape and couldn't be saved. I wanted to tear the walls down months ago but I had to wait until I put the kitchen ceiling up so I didnt have a huge mess in the kitchen below. so yesterday I finally got around to tearing the walls down.



This was as far as I got because I had to get ready to go out of town in the morning. I'll be out of town for work for the next few days so unfortunately noting will get done on the house. Hopefully I'll be ready to tackle the rest of the house when I get back.

I'll leave you with a picture of me after demoing the bathroom:

Progress report

Well it's been another few weeks since I've updated the blog. I've gotten a few things accomplished but not nearly as much as I had hoped. I've got less than 2 months to get the major projects finished so I can get a conventional mortgage. I've taken this Thursday and Friday off and Monday is a holiday. That will give me 5 straight days to hopefully get a lot done to the house.

Last week I painted the Study walls, I took down all the picture rails and started stripping them but there are so many layers of paint and so many little grooves that I gave up after a while. I'll decide later if I'm going to buy new picture rail or finish stripping the old ones.



I painted the wall above where the picture rail will go a light olive color. I wasn't sure about it at first but after I put it on the wall I think it came out nice. The dark stain of the picture rail should give it a nice contrast.

The next project I worked on was the breakfast room floors, I pulled up the old floors and laid a new subfloor over the winter. I finally got tired of looking at the subfloor so I finished leveling the back half of the sub floor then laid the flooring.




Now I'm scraping and sanding the beadboard walls. Hopefully I'll have that done in a day or two so I can primer and paint.

I also temporarily installed the toilet upstairs in the master bathroom. A few of the gaskets are old and dryrotted so they'll have to be replaced before it can be used.



Last week we built the driveway circle in the backyard. I planted Azaleas in the circle that came from the ones along the front porch. The statue in the center is temporary, it will be replaced with a 3 tier fountain eventually. I still need to add about 40 more bags of top soil before I can plant anything else.