Wednesday, November 01, 2006

This Old House: Always Something

In the process of working on one of the windows in our bedroom over the weekend (all the windows in our house are painted shut...so we spent Saturday finally tackling the first one, which involved removing the storm window and the bottom window, stripping paint and sanding, removing broken panes of glass, weatherstripping, etc...have I mentioned how glad I am that my husband knows how to do all this stuff?), we discovered a leak in our basement. Unlike all the other water in our basement coming from outside, this was coming from underneath our bathroom. Steve investigated upstairs and couldn't figure out exactly where the leak was coming from.

Monday night, the leak was getting worse, so he decided to move the vanity and dig a little deeper to see if the sink was the culprit. In the process, he discovered that a) the drain pipe was so corroded that when he tried to detach it, the pipe tore; b) the bottom of the vanity was rotted out; and c) the leak wasn't coming from the sink anyway.

Lovely. So he unexpectedly spent the rest of the evening tearing things apart and hauling the vanity in pieces out to the trash. We plan to completely redo this bathroom as one of the higher-priority projects on our list, but are definitely not ready to tackle that right now--among other reasons, it is our only bathroom in the house, so we would like to put in at least a working toilet and shower upstairs before we remove the only working toilet and shower in the house.

At any rate, we figured that if we bought a small vanity now, we can still use it for the as-yet-nonexistent upstairs bathroom after the downstairs bathroom gets redone. So we headed to our favorite place (riiiight...never mind the terrible customer service that we're dealing there with related to our originally-ordered-August-5-but-still-not-here basement door) and bought a new vanity and faucet. A box fan is going 24/7 to dry out the bathroom (even the wood lath is soaked at the bottom of the wall) and we are using the kitchen sink for all sink needs until further notice. The leak seems to becoming from the shower, as water was running along a nice channel where the shower wall wasn't well-attached to the tub and trickling down the side. Steve caulked it but that didn't seem to fix the problem...more troubleshooting and home repair to come.

Ah the life of a homeowner in a 70-year-old house...once again I'm soooo thankful for my handyman husband :)

3 comments:

Kelly said...

Your bathroom may be a mess...but you have beautiful hardwood floors. I can't wait to see pictures of how you painted the rest of the house!

Love you girl! Been missing you a lot!

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain! Nathaniel had to remove an entire section of the wall in our utility room because of a leak and then he found out that we have to completely replace to hotwater pipe, so I am washing all of our clothes in cold water right now until we can fix that. On top of that, our air condition started leaking as well (also in the utility room). So that room was a mess. Luckily we have a few months to save up to get the air conditioner taken care of.
Good luck with all of your projects!

Michael Hickerson said...

Reminds me of a house I lived in with my family back in high school. There was never a simple repair. But it did help my dad and I have bonding time and I learned a lot of ways to be handy from watching and working with him.