You've got free labor, use it!

A great day has dawned. My children are now old enough to help. I mean it. Not "help" as in make things harder and get in my way, but really help. Our job yesterday was to remove all the nails from the bathroom studs. When the lathe and plaster was ripped out, we didn't take the time to pull the nails. We are now at the point where they need to be gone.

It started with Dug armed with a nail puller and I with a hammer. Of course, since Dug was in charge, I had to pull a nail, grab it , then fling it in the garbage can. A dropped nail was immediately located and dealt with. Left to my own devices I would have been pulling them like crazy, letting them fall where they may, but once again, Dug's method proved the most efficient.

Our oldest son wandered into the kitchen, saw what we were doing and wanted to help. We had an extra hammer, didn't want to bend over or squat, so we said, "Sure, you do the ones by the floor."

In walks oldest daughter. "I want to help, too." I told her that the best way to help was by loading the dishwasher. We didn't have another hammer and it was her brother's turn right now. She didn't like that. Of course she wouldn't. Nails are much funner than dishes. But I told her that after she did some dishes, it would be her turn. She loaded it up, asking, "Is that enough?" after ever dish. I told her she had to load it all.

When she was done, her and her brother switched places and she pulled nails while brother washed the non-fitting dishes by hand. It all worked very well and I was very proud of myself for orchestrating it.

In the end we pulled over 446 nails! Not sure how many over because I got the idea to count them after I had already started. Now, if we had done it my way it would have been a lot more cleaning up to do, but it would have been a great picture, right?! Probably close to 500 nails scattered on the floor. That would have been cool. Oh well.

Home Renovation, cont'd.

We've been working. Slowly but surely it's coming around. We're about to move into the "noticable improvements" phase of our bathroom reconstruction. Up until now everything we've done has been hidden. Our kitchen wall is still down, no new plumbing is showing, the floor isn't even fully in, nothing that someone off the street would walk in and say, "Gee, you've been busy haven't you?" But we have been busy!
This picture has some whacked-out exposure levels, but I needed to tweak it so you could see the pipe we were dealing with. Amazingly enough, it is the only picture we have of that black thing. See it there at the back wall running most of length of the photo from top to bottom? And of course it has a 2x4 partially obscuring it. That black monstrosity (you really can't appreciate its size and girth with this photo) was a cast iron pipe that we needed to remove. I don't know the proper terminology but it's the "breather" pipe for our plumbing. The joints where one pipe is fitted to another were over 6.5" wide! The pipe itself was only 4" but it had huge joints. Left in place, the tub we ordered wouldn't fit.

Dug did some 'net research and found the tool needed for the job. A soil pipe breaker. Sounds menacing, doesn't it? It's actually the simple ratchet tool that Dug is holding in the picture. (Once again, sorry about the photo. Dug had ten minutes to get it back to the rental shop and I only had one shot. Hey, at least it is in focus!) Simple doesn't mean light, though. That baby was sooo heavy and guess who got the job of holding it? You guessed it, me! Dug had to thread it around the pipe, attach it, flip some levers and tighten it up before it could stay in place. I had to hold it level so it wouldn't bind. My arms were bent with my hands at my shoulders in the most stable, least energy-used position I could muster. Did I mention it was heavy? The cool thing was that, once in place, it only took about two pumps on the handle when we heard this loud crack. Dug stopped pumping and I went in for a closer look. Sure enough, there was a nice clean crack all the way around. I think the chain breaker was in use for all of ten minutes. It cost us about one dollar/minute and it was the best money we've spent so far. Our other options were using two sawzall blades to cut through the pipe, taking roughly fifteen minutes OR bashing the thing to pieces with a sledge hammer and spending about an hour cleaning up the mess, hoping nothing too big fell into the sewer pipes. (I must admit, the sledgehammer option sounded the most fun, but not the cleaning part.) As most renovation takes longer and is harder than you think it will be, it was nice to be surprised in the other direction.

If you need to get a cast iron pipe out of your way, get yourself a pipe breaker. You'll be glad you did.

A wee bit of progress..

We've been working on the bathroom every day that Dug is on vacation and we are seeing progress. We are in the building-back-up stage. Finally! The main reason we gutted our bathroom in the first place was because we had some water issues. The bathtub/shower had been put together poorly and it was leaking into our basement. Not good. The linoleum had some discoloration from water damage, the floor plan was less than stellar and our toilet had seen much brighter days. Oh, and we were using an adjustable wrench to turn the hot water on and off and the shower drain was slower than molasses in a blizzard.

side story-
When you think about things that can be devastated by children, one's first thought does not go to the toilet. But, alas, toilets are not impervious to my young ones. The porcelain throne's first injury was dealt by my oldest daughter. The tank lid didn't sit fully on the tank because the toilet was built in too close to the wall. (One example of the faulty floor plan.) The back side of the lid sat on the tank edge. Daughter #1 leaned on it in a funny way and it fell off. I think she was 3 or 4 at the time. It broke in two pieces. Dug fixed it with epoxy, but didn't realize the tube was for gray and not white. So our poor, white toilet had a jagged gray scar on its tank lid. Injury part deux occurred when Daughter #2 dropped a large glass candle holder into the poor toilet. It knocked out a hole about the size of my index finger in the bottom of the bowl, which proceeded to empty its contents onto the floor. The "upside" was that it had been recently flushed. I was so grateful. Odds like that don't come my way every day. So prior to the gutting, the john had two scars: a toilet's equivalent of a knife slash and gunshot wound. Poor thing. He never saw it coming.)
-end of side story

back to main story:

For defining purposes, when I say gutted, I mean gutted. The only things left standing are the studs and floor. The linoleum and sub-floor had been removed so we are standing on the actual floor boards, which, if removed, would leave a gaping hole into the basement. So, what do we do? Why remove them, of course. Not all, just a few. Some of the floor boards and part of the framing boards had rotted from the leak. With the kitchen wall gone, we had a hole from the kitchen through the bathroom, down into the basement. The picture of my kids peering down from the kitchen counter was taken by me while I was standing in the basement, looking up through the bathroom floor. Or, more correctly, where the bathroom floor formerly was located. They think this whole renovation thing is pretty fun.

Side note: My youngest son, who is three, does not remember there ever being a bathroom there. He wasn't yet two when we destroyed it. In his mind, having a gutted, non-working room in your house is completely normal. Wierd, huh?

Today we fixed the floor. It was so cool. It was progress. We took what was once a hole and made it whole again. (I just reread that, and that's just funny.) What accomplishment. Even though it was small in the grand scope of the entire project, it was still movement forward. And I'm all for forward momentum...

Here are a couple pictures of the beautiful fresh wood stuffs. The first one is from inside the bathroom. We put the new piece of floor in and replaced the missing framing 2x4 along the base of the wall.


This second one is from the basement looking up. You can see where we had to put in 2x4 pieces to attach and shore up the replacement piece.


That's all for now...I'll keep you posted.