Today I'm going to follow through on my inept tease last week and elaborate on the current Saga of the Bathroom.
A warning for those who are faint of heart: There is no happy ending... yet.
It all started with a young childless couple looking for a place to live somewhere in Silicon Valley.
VC cash or the insane play-money options of the Bubble didn't insanely bloat our net worth. Therefore, buying an 800-square-foot box in Palo Alto for $600K, leveling it, and spending another $350 to erect a 2,500-square-foot vertical vanity mansion with obscene faux columns was completely out of the question. Likewise laying down $750K for a dead common, 40-year-old tract home in Mountain View.
Luckily, we happened on a not-for-profit real estate organization. They printed a list of over 200 houses that met our slightly lowered expectations.
After our seasoned real estate agent deflected our naïve zeal from a complete disaster with the first house we toured, we came to recognize a certain pattern. The houses in our financial and geographical range were either comically tiny and gorgeous or spacious and complete rat traps. So when we pulled up to yet another tract home in south San Jose with all the curb appeal of a beached whale rotting in the sun, I found it difficult to dredge up even a ghost of our first enthusiasm.
I noted the ancient asphalt shingles on the roof, the chiaroscuro effect of the weeds in the front yard, the blessedly small volunteer palm beginning to lift the concrete of the walkway, and the delaminating plywood of the garage door.
When we stepped inside, the place shocked us with a vaulted ceiling in the living room. After so many houses had stimulated my latent claustrophobia, the extra space over my head left me a little giddy. I could feel the old house-hunting fire rekindle in my gut.
When our agent's eyes popped at the prices of the comparable houses in the neighborhood, we made an offer and here we are.
As Harlock formulated in his Postulate of Home Ownership, we are the fourth or fifth owners of the house slapping our foreheads at all the evidence of abject stupidity that has been visited on the place over the years. Our foreheads are now swollen, cracking welts.
The focal point of folly, the lodestone of lunacy in our house is the guest bathroom.
The first strong inkling of idiocy occurred when I stepped into the bathroom, towel in hand, to take a shower. My universe clunked into a different configuration when I noted the complete lack of a shower over the tub.
This was the first domino to fall.
See, the fiberglass shower pan in the master bathroom was cracked and leaking. Replacing the shower and the floor underneath it popped up on our radar during the routine inspections that happen when you buy a house. Because of the amazingly low asking price and as-is terms of the sale, we didn't worry too much… because we stupidly assumed that we could be showering in the other bathroom while ripping apart the master bath.
Duh.
Priority number one became "install a shower in the other bathroom".
We replaced the nasty, aluminum-framed window over the bath with aluminum-reinforced vinyl and tempered glass that is less likely to do a Norman Bates if shattered.
Speaking of bathtub, we briefly considered trying to restore the existing, tired fiberglass tub, but considering that we needed to replace the walls around the tub and that the tub was just basically ugly, we brought in a new Kohler model that could be installed easily.
We ripped out the mold-infested, plain, non-moisture resistant wallboard thrown up by the criminally cheap builders of 30+ years ago. With the wall down, I soldered in the new copper shower plumbing and a sexy pressure-balanced valve.
New fiberglass insulation filled the voids in the studs and we screwed in a solid expanse of fiber-reinforced concrete board, specifically Hardibacker 500. I couldn't imagine using anything less. Oh, and because I was a bit tired of dealing with fasteners that had long since oxidized into rusty stubs, I used stainless steel, self drilling, self-countersinking, square drive screws. Schwing.
White tile slowly crept across the Hardibacker as I taught myself tilesetting. Our across-the-street neighbor was neighborly enough to loan me his tile saw. I have since vowed never to tile anything without a decent tile saw. The permanence of tile and its sometime fickle nature meant that I took each step as carefully and methodically as I could, thus the "slowly crept" bit. Still, a mistaken measurement or two meant scraping off entire rows of freshly laid tile.
Once the tiling reached a certain point, we needed to make some hard decisions. We needed to tape the transition between the Hardibacker and the regular wallboard. On one side, this meant tearing out the old wallboard that had been hideously scarred by some cock-jockey's lame attempt to remove wallpaper. We replaced the wallboard replacement in a couple of evenings, minus taping the seams and texturing.
The other wall was perfectly fine. But (and there is always a but), I would need to sand off the paint from the wallboard so that the taping compound would stick... and then somehow match the finish of the new wall to the old wall, which, even in professional circles, is considered extremely difficult.
So we decided that the wallboard in decent condition had to come down. This meant that we needed to remove the toilet. Having always intended to replace the toilet and having been told by our home inspectors that the floor under the toilet needed work, we weren't daunted. In fact, the new toilet had spent many months in our garage waiting for its day in the sun.
Removing the toilet offered us the opportunity of pulling up the old, cracked, ugly vinyl flooring. With the vinyl off, we could then pull up the particleboard underlayment to inspect the condition of the plywood subfloor underneath. We might then get a clearer picture of exactly what we were dealing with.
Every job on this house is like some sort of twisted archaeological dig, but without the fedora, whip, and chanting mass of Thugee cultists. Though I have to admit that the things we discover sometimes make me want to scream like Kate Capshaw.
Peeling back the vinyl, we hacked away at the underlayment and discovered that it had been replaced before. The lazy bastards who had done the work never bothered to remove the staples holding the old underlayment down. They just hammered them down so that they could rust and squeak.
The floor around the toilet was a nightmare, a horrid patchwork of plywood that got me wondering how the toilet hadn't fallen through to the ground before now. In fact, our digging revealed that the toilet had begun to sink and tilt like a Leaning Toilet of Pisa.
It didn't take us very long to realize that the vanity and sink had to go as well. Luckily, busting it out of the room went quickly and smoothly. Underneath, I found the scariest part yet.
The plywood subfloor under the vanity, which none of the cavalcade of lazy, bumbling fools had bothered to replace, was a mere latticework of wood rot. It was like a cleverly concealed pit trap. I had to be careful not to step too close to it.
Seeing the horrible condition of the subfloor started a diabolical chain of thought that lead me to poke at the sole plate of the wall behind the toilet.
In your typical tract house with your typical wall of 2x4 studs, the ceiling joists rest on a top plate of 2x4s laid horizontally. The top plate rests on the studs that transfer their load to a sole plate, another horizontal 2x4. The sole plate sits on top of the plywood subfloor, which is then attached to the floor joists. You might hear folks refer to a "sill plate". My understanding is that a sill plate rests on the masonery/concrete foundation of the wall.
Anyhoo, the sole plate crumbled and powdered under the probing tip of my saw.
This was bad.
The sole plate takes all the load of the studs and if it turns to powder, the wall is likely to collapse.
My solution? Run to Home Depot, buy a bunch of materials and a reciprocating saw, shore up the ceiling with a 4x4 opposite of the wall I need to repair, and cut out the rotted wood.
And that's where things stand now: I am spending my time this weekend standing on the ground under our bathroom with floor joists between my legs. I've sawn out all the bad wood out and ensured that the floor joists aren't rotted out as well. That would suck to an entirely new level of suckiness. A new toilet flange is patiently waiting for me to install it. But before I can do that, I need to cut the new plywood to size, spray all the wood I can get to with borax anti-fungal treatment, screw the new plywood in, replace the sole plate sections with treated wood, tie the studs back in, and lay down some new underlayment.
Enough typing. Time to get back to it.
Pakeha