Wait, It’s Already 2019?

I cannot believe that it’s already March!. Granted, it has been a rollercoaster year so far, but I can hardly believe how quickly we are moving along with 2019. And do I have anything to show for it?…. Nada… OK, that’s a lie.

After losing my Mom last month, I took some time to grieve and sort out the meaning of life. I didn’t actually figure out the meaning, but I did grieve and that has been helpful. Although, I still expect her to leave embarrassing comments on my Facebook posts.

If you are a blogger, you will know what I am about to say is so true. I have, at all times, about a dozen different blog posts either started, half way finished, or just sitting in my head, spinning around waiting for me to take action. I struggle with the fact that I want to do everything this very minute and the reality that I can only do so much at a time. This struggle is behind my finally getting to my first real project of the year, the half bath. And I am only doing half of it.

 

I wrote about my plans to halve the half bath in two phases last December, and after setting the goal of getting started in December, I only managed to pull the old toilet on New Years Eve (because we are those kind of peoples). Then the half bath sat…. And sat…. Then finally, a few weeks ago, I got an earnest start on it again. I pulled the sink out, and then started the process of pulling up the floor.

 

First I had to pull the vinyl “wood like” planks up which were put down by the previous owner before she sold the house. As I pulled them up, I discovered that the floor was previously covered in ugly white asphalt tile glued down to luan board. If you are not familiar with luan board (sometimes spelled luaun), it is basically 1/4 plywood with the thinnest veneer of wood on both sides over a substrate of low quality crap wood. Back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, luan was commonly used for paneling, doors, and the lesser sections of cabinetry. Originally it was veneered in mahogany, but now they use birch. The older stuff once shellacked, looked sorta nice… Sorta. Because it was cheap, it was also used as underlayment for flooring, which was the case in our half bath.

 

As I began to reverse engineer our half bath, I discovered newspaper was used to line the floor under the luan board (on top of the original floorboards). They were mostly classifieds from what must be the 1970s . This is an educated guess because of the mostly alphanumeric phone numbers which I have confirmed weren’t completely phased out until the early 80s in Philly, along with the types of things they were selling which seemed to be very much from the 70s. So, based on this, I am guessing the half bath was put in in the 1970s.

Pulling up the luan was both easy and hard at the same time. Whoever put it down in the first place used far more nails than were ever necessary. While the luan panels came up without too much effort, there were SO MANY SPLINTERS! (so grateful for leather gloves). But it was what lay underneath the luan that gave me pause. Wood rot was everywhere…. I knew that the boards around the toilet were rotten, but I didn’t realize that most of the remaining boards in the half bath were also rotten as well. Not that this was a total shock, as I could see from basement below that there were LOTS of issues with the bathroom floor.

 

When we were buying the house, our inspector pointed out several issues on the underside of the bathroom floor, and at that time advised us not to sit on the toilet as the only thing holding it up was the cast iron waste pipe. Other issues included improper patches with random chunks of wood, including an area that was patched in with paint stir sticks from Home Depot.

And then there is the other elephant in the room. It turns out the rot in the floorboards extends beyond the half bath and into the parlor. Now, let me explain something unique to Philadelphia (and probably also Baltimore and Boston) rowhouses built in the 1850s… Our house is sixteen feet wide. Correction…. Our lot is sixteen feet wide. But because we have shared walls with our neighbors, the interior is only 15′ 2″ wide (The brick party walls are eight inches thick and there is one inch of plaster on each side).

When the house was built in 1852, they inserted sixteen foot long floor joists across the width of our entire house for each floor. They then laid down 10′-16′ random width tongue and groove floorboards directly on the joists (no subfloor). Only then did they build the walls… On top of the floorboards. The upside is that with the exception of the wall dividing the main house and the rear portion (holding up eight tons of brick on the third floor above), there are no load bearing walls in the interior of our entire house.

 

The wall dividing the half-bath and the parlor is literally suspended between two joists and sitting directly on floorboards which run under the walls. And the floorboards directly under that wall are completely rotten along the entire stretch of wall which faces the half bath. Why is there so much rot? Good question!

I initially thought that the 1970s plumbing was the first plumbing in that portion of the house. Originally, the area was the end of a hallway which had a door leading to the rear yard. I uncovered the door frame as I pulled sheetrock off of the wall.

 

But as I was pulling things apart, I stumbled on three holes right next to the now closed up rear door which look as though there was a tiny sink on the wall at one time. But these look to be quite old. I also could see water stains on the undersides of the floorboards from the basement extending out just beyond the area where the half bath is. It is entirely possible that between the door being there and the sink next to it, water infiltrated the area and seeped into the floorboards, including all the way under the parlor wall.

I also believe that most of the damage was already there when the half-bath was installed. It is clear that they laid the luan on top of what were essentially already rotten flooring instead of pulling up the boards and doing it the right way. Given that we know the house was a rental for most of the 20th century, it is logical that a landlord was just trying to maximize rental income by installing a half-bath on the first floor without concern about fixing the underlying problem.

 

And then there is the giant chunk of missing joist. I have no idea why it’s there. Could there have been a toilet there in the past? When I look at the cut, it is obvious that it was done at a point in time when the floorboards were pulled. But why? There is no other evidence of a toilet having been there, nor is there any evidence that there was a wall to block the area off before the one from the 70s was added. Regardless, I fixed it by filling in the gap with a block of wood, and then “sistering” the joist on both sides with 2×10’s nearly five feet long and carriage bolts.

 

OK, enough rambling…. I am happy to say that after pulling the rotten floorboards up, I managed to cut some 3/4″ exterior grade plywood and get it installed. In order to minimize seams, I laid it out so that there are only two pieces of ply required. I planned the seam across toilet waste pipe to make it easy to cut around the pipe flange. By doing this, it also minimized the possibility of cracks forming in the eventual tile floor due to foot traffic since people generally don’t tend to walk along the side of a toilet. I hope…

 

Once I had the plywood down, I primed and painted it with about six coats of a medium gray semi-gloss paint left over from our New York apartment. It will be at least a year before I can get in there and install the tile floor, and I did not want raw plywood under a toilet. It could get pretty nasty from dudes with poor aim (yes, it is always the dudes who do this). Having the floor painted will make it much easier to keep clean.

 

Once that was done, it was time to install our new modern toilet! My criteria for a toilet was that I wanted a low profile, one piece with dual flush that didn’t use a lot of water . It didn’t take long to find one at a local big box store that uses only 1.1 GPF/1.6 GPF and has an online rating of 4.6/5 stars on nearly 3,000 reviews for only $149.00. This is a far cry from the hugely inefficient 3 GPF that I took out, and it is quiet too! With the toilet installed, as well as a paper holder (with a built in mobile phone shelf!), and a bottle of hand sanitizer, the bathroom is an incomplete, but functional place for guests to use. (They can wash their hands in the kitchen for now.)

 

And this is where I stopped…. Phase one of the half bath is done!
Mission Accomplished!

 

There remains much to do for phase two. This will involve shrinking it down to half the current size, building it out with beadboard, having the plumbing installed for a tiny sink, and then tiling the floor. It will be a stunning jewel box when it is finished… But not until the master bath above it has been completed, all the plumbing lines run, and the the heating duct rerouted. Also, we hope to add a multi-zoned air-conditioning system this year, of which one of the units will be hidden above the half bath ceiling.

 

That’s it for now… Next project will be building out and painting my studio.

Oh, before I forget…. If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to check out the ‘True Tales From Old Houses’ podcasts from my blogger friend Stacy over at Blake Hill House. And if you are not following along with Stacy’s house, you really should. She has an amazing old house with lots of fun stories of old house woes.