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.

Christmas Tree

Here is our Christmas tree in the Parlor, it's a ten footer. We decorated it with silver, gold and white ornaments, though it's hard to see that in the picture.


Some of the previous owners relatives are coming by again this weekend, so I'll be doing a bit more work in preparation for that.

A few odd jobs

We've managed to get a few things done over the weekend. I started stripping the paint off the Dining room mantle. Here is what it looked like when I started:

And here it is after over 2 hours with a heat gun and a scraper:


Once I'm finished scraping I'll remove all the old shellac the put 2 coats of amber shellac on it then a coat of poly to seal it.

We also started on the stairs. They were too dark completely stained so we decided to paint the risers and baulisters white. First I sanded the risers to give the paint a good surface to adhere to, then I painted the risers.

Here it is with half the risers done, you can really see what a difference it makes:

And here it is with the risers finished:

Next we'll paint the baulisters.

We also went outside and started decorating the house:


You can see the Christmas tree in our Parlor window. I was going to post pics of it but I forgot to upload them to my server so it will have to wait for the next post.

There are a few other things I have in the works for the house, one is what to do with the floors that need refinishing. Another will drastically change the exterior appearance of the house if I decide to do it. I'll be posting more about these things later.

Lots of painting

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. We've been really busy Working on the house. We decided to bite the bullet and go ahead with converting to a standard mortgage. All the work we've been doing was in preparation for the appraisal.

We did not finish the main guest bedroom or the guest bathroom but were told not to worry about it as the house should appraise for well over what we have in it even without finishing those rooms.

We've already been approved for the loan and the appraisal was yesterday. They are wanting to close by the end of the week. We haven't heard back about the appraisal yet though.

Here are some pictures of the work we've been doing on the house, it's mostly painting but it has really helped to give the house that "finished" look. A large part of the painting was going around and painting all the trim on the first floor. I had not painted the trim before now because my original intention was to strip it all and stain it dark. Then we painted the walls above the picture rail in the Parlor and the Formal Dining room. We also painted the kitchen cabinets, that made a huge difference in the kitchen.

Back hall taken from the Foyer looking back to the Breakfast room

Back hall taken from the Breakfast room looking forward to the Foyer

Back hall from the stairs

Back hall Dining room door

Parlor

Parlor

Parlor

Formal Dining room

Formal Dining room

Kitchen

Kitchen

Kitchen

Kitchen

Kitchen

There's still quite a bit left to do on the house but I will be doing it at a slower pace now. It will be nice to finally take a little time off.

One of the reasons for getting our standard mortgage now is that we might possibly be taking on a new project soon. Nothing's definite yet but if it works out I'll write a post about it soon.

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.

Side yard fence gate

Not much work has been done on the house lately. We went on a camping trip to Northeast Alabama over the weekend. We really need to get the house finished already but my schedule keeps getting more and more busy.

One thing I did accomplish this past Sunday was to build the gate for the fence in the side yard. I still have to devise some way to lock it from the inside and outside. I'm thinking of using a deadbolt of some kind. The first two pictures are from the front, I have not yet removed the bush in front of the gate. The last picture is from the back yard.



The only other thing I accomplished was to hang our new mailbox we found in Alabama, it's a nice cast iron one.


Maybe later on in the week I'll have a post with some real work in it.

More work on the fence

Once again I've had to go back to work on the fence. You may remember last January when I finished the left side of the fence. I tied it in with the chicken wire fence at the back of the property. Then in February I had to add 5 fence panels because our Great Dane realized a chicken wire fence was no match for her. At that time I tied the fence in with the 6' chain link fence.

Well now we've had a few problems with our "lovely" neighbors behind us. Yes, I say that with the most sarcasm possible. The place is some type of shelter or facility. I've never had a problem with them and the dogs pretty much ignored them until someone started bringing kids over. They started antagonizing our dogs though the chain link fence. They would yell and lunge at them, poke sticks through the fence and even throw things at them. My girlfriend and I have both seen this from a window but by the time I get out there they are long gone.

Now of course the dogs wont put up with this type of abuse any more than I will, they've started barking at anything that moves back there. One day the woman that runs the facility has the nerve to yell at me to "get my dogs out of here" and that "I better control my dogs". First of all, my dogs are inside dogs, they are like family to us. They only get to go outside for short periods to play and do their business, and now this woman's going to tell me to control my dogs and get them out of here when they're the ones that antagonized them to begin with??? Second, my dogs are in MY YARD, not hers.

We went back and forth for a few minutes, she said she was going to call animal control, I said be my guest my animals have done nothing wrong. I told her that if I catch anyone provoking my dogs again I would call the police.

I decided to go ahead and finish off the back part of the fence not because I was worried about her or animal control, they can go to hell for all I care, I finished it because I was worried about the safety of our dogs. As nasty as that woman was, I would not put it past her to try to hurt the dogs in some way.

Anyways, now that I've had a chance to vent... here are some fence pictures.

First, here is a picture from last winter showing where I left off last February. On the right you can see the 6' chain link and the neighboring lot beyond:

The next two shots are yesterday after I put the new sections of fence up:



this last picture shows how much of a jungle the back yard has become again. We're going to try to get out there today and cut down the bamboo and clear the area.

Marion Apartments placed on the National Register

The Marion Apartments, across the triangle from my house, has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Here is an old picture of the place from the 1940's(it looks exactly the same today):


Here is the floor plan of the building from the National Register paperwork:


and here is an article from the Atlanta Constitution dated 20AUG1919:


It's nice to see a local historic structure being placed on the National Register instead of being torn down for once.

The true age of my house

This post has been a long time in the making, and it's not one that I'm at all happy about.

The house was sold to me as being built in 1870. I didn't know as much then as I do now about houses so I didn't question it. Once I bought the house and started restoring it a lot of little things didn't add up.

The first thing I noticed in researching the deeds to the property was one from 1899 when Mattie Darnall sold the remainder of their land with the house to E. C. Boag. The description of the house was a "Seven room house". well, the original part of this house was eight rooms, not seven.

Then I began noticing lots of little things in the construction of the house that didn't add up. Most of the door hardware is early 1900's, not 1870's. I attributed that to the house being remodeled in the early 1900's.

The next thing I noticed were the nails used in the construction of the house. There are a lot of cut nails used but I was very surprised when I started finding wire nails in the framing of the house. I started researching nails. Wire nails were around as early as the 1850's but were not used all that much until a new and easier way of making them was devised in the 1880's. But they weren't widely used until the early 1900's. So it was possible that they built the house in 1870 with wire nails but highly doubtful.

One reason it took me so long to definitively answer the age question was that every time I would come up with a piece of evidence showing the house was not as old as I had thought, I found another piece to contradict that. One such thing was the doors in the house, most of them are hand made with hand saws (straight cut marks instead of circular). Another was the wood used in the house, a lot of the framing is very old. A lot of the sills are hand-hewn 8x12's. Also, all of the siding was attached to the house using old cut nails.

Another thing that troubled me was the artifacts I was finding in and under the house. Almost everything I found was from the early 1900's. I found lots of pieces of newspaper under the house but most of them were from the 30's and 40's. The earliest one was from 1919. I also found a lot of melted glass under the house.

A while back I found that the old Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for my area were online. When I looked up my lot I found a 1 story house instead of a 2 story. It also appeared to be closer to the road and a different shape and size.

1895

1909

1915

Now I know that the Sanborn maps are not always perfectly accurate (I have found a few errors in other houses) but that much off? The two "twin" houses to my left are drawn perfectly.

A few weeks ago I went back to the courthouse and pulled all the deeds I could find for my property. The period when it was owned by Mrs. Sarah Leila Oxford (1906-1939) is what interested me the most. I found two deeds that pretty much settled it.

This deed, dated Nov 24, 1914 shows a one story house

This deed, dated Oct 17, 1929 shows a two story house

There were a large number of second mortgage deeds in between these two.

Date	Paid	Amount	Lender
7-Sep-14	1-Sep-20	$800.00	Ida Mccormick
24-Nov-14		$64.45	Wheaton-Tyus Co, Material Men
4-Aug-16	8-Nov-17	$800.00	Blanton & Sons
8-Nov-17	4-Sep-20	$365.01	Griffin Banking Co.
1-Sep-20	1-May-22	$898.56	Savings Bank of Griffin
7-Jun-28	1-Aug-28	$508.16	Commercial Savings Bank
3-May-29	18-Sep-29	$1,020.00	Commercial & Savings Bank
17-Oct-29	21-Apr-36	$1,250.00	Griffin Building & Loan
10-Aug-34	20-Dec-34	$200.04	Southern Loan Co.
13-Jul-35	21-Apr-36	$242.00	Personal Loan Co.
21-Apr-36	19-Nov-42	$1,510.73	First Federal Savings and Loan
16-Dec-36	18-Mar-38	$106.75	The State Bank
18-Mar-38	29-Mar-39	$132.50	Commercial & Savings Bank

What I believe happened is that the original house burned down, insurance money was used to build this house, and the second mortgages were used to build the additions. Most of the mortgages were used, at least in part, to pay off older ones, but a few stand out to me. The 1920 mortgage stands out because the clawfoot tubs in the bathrooms are dated 1919.

The house appears to have been built using mainly salvaged wood. The framing, siding, doors, and upstairs mantels all appear to have been reused. The interior doors and upstairs mantels look to be 1830's - 1850's, this would tie in with the hand hewn framing under the house. Many beams also have mortise and peg notches cut in them.

So now I'm left with what to call the house, both 1870 house and Darnall house are wrong. I guess The Oxford house would be the most accurate. I'm thinking The Oxford-Boynton House. The Boynton being for Helen Boynton-Stroud and Miss Kitty Clyde Boynton. They lived in the house from 45 to 55, the Boyntons were a prominent family in Griffin. I believe their uncle was James Stoddard Boynton, he was a Colonel in the Confederate army, a Judge, the mayor of Griffin, President of the Georgia Senate and was even Governor of Georgia for a short time when the then current Governor died in office.

I still need to tie down the exact age of the house. I really need to find the relatives of Sarah Oxford to do this. The problem is there's not much out there. Her maiden name was McKneely, she married Luke Crawley in 1895. Her name was Crawley when she bought the house. She married George Oxford in 1909, he died in 1925. She married a C. H. Hungerford in 1935 but appears to have kept her last name of Oxford. Another thing that makes her hard to track is that sometimes she goes by Sarah and sometimes by Leila. Her names have also been misspelled as Sara and Lela.

If I can ever track her family down I can hopefully get a solid date on the house and maybe even pictures.

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.