The Quest for a Bathroom

The title of this post is not referring to the situation where you may have super-sized your ice tea at lunch a couple of hours ago and now you're rolling along that stretch of I-5 in the San Joaquin valley where they have a sign just past the exit you decided to not use. The signs tell you how many miles to the next services (read bathrooms and gas) and you have decided in order to make record time getting to your destination, you can easily wait til then. That's probably about when it would make sense to fuel up anyway. It's funny how once that decision has been made and you see in plain English there is thirty-something miles to the next services, your bladder sends a message to your brain that it made a huge error by not making you take the last exit, AND, to top it off, the low fuel warning light comes on. If you're anything at all like me, your brain goes into overdrive trying to solve the one problem you never could get right back in algebra. You know the one where a car is traveling 80 mph with someone that has only fifteen minutes to live unless they can find a bathroom and you have less than two gallons of fuel in a car that can go 18.26 miles on a gallon of gas if the headwind is less than 3 knots but has to be factored down ten percent for every tenth of a knot over three? That was the one word problem I always missed and karma has made me play it out in real life the past forty years every time I go on a road trip.

OK, now that you know what this post is not about, let's get to the point that it is about. The "new" algebra problem to solve is this. We have about twenty or so days to move into our hundred year old farmhouse and a super scientific poll has indicated a fully functional bathroom is an absolute requirement. The bathroom we started with is being gutted for the most part. I call this the bathroom we started with instead of "original" because you can see from the picture, it was remodeled sometime back in the 1960s and the house was built in 1908. It would hardly be accurate to call it original.

I think the second picture pretty much captures my opinion of bathroom decor in the 1960s. I broke out the sledge hammer and wrecking bar to make some badly needed adjustments. These adjustments included removal of the tub surround, sink, toilet, vanity, and first layer of flooring. Once these were out of the way, closer inspection revealed some water damage to the sub-floor and lower wall areas. I'm a firm believer in not ignoring signs like that so most of the sub-floor and all of the lower half of the wall surface will be replaced. As you can see in the picture, this means cutting and removing quite a bit of material. One very important Law of Remodeling is this: That which is removed MUST be replaced. Being the law abiding person I am and have been for at least the past several days, I will obey this to the letter.

That leads us to the question of what will replace all of that mess? That has been the fun part of this quest. After demolishing the 1960s bathroom, we discovered clues underneath the layers of stuff that told a cool story. The way the toilet drain was constructed, the house was built with indoor plumbing back 1908. At that time in rural areas, that was not too common because of expense. Under the bathtub surround, the original linoleum was still stuck to the subfloor boards. This means there was a clawfoot tub in there too. Under the sheetrock is good quality 1x12 planking, but unfortunately it has had tile scraped off of it in the past, and is too damaged to refinish. Above this planking is a layer of cloth-backed wall paper. In those days, this type of wallpaper was hung and painted. It's almost as thick as canvas and appeared to be very durable. Given these discoveries, it only made sense to put this bathroom back to as much of a historically correct state as possible. It was very fun to research the fixtures and materials that would have been in a bathroom at the turn of the last century. You can lose yourself for hours looking at pictures and imagining what our humble little hall bathroom could look like.

Here is what we have settled on and hopefully this gives you a sense of what it will take to complete this quest. The bathtub will be a clawfoot with a tall gooseneck shower. It will sit where the original one would have sat. There will be a wrap around shower curtain hung from a rod that hangs from the ceiling to keep the overspray from going everywhere. The toilet will be the high tank type where the bowl (the business part) is separated from the tank. The tank will be mounted on the wall behind the bowl and connected by a tall pipe. I'm told these types of toilets work very well and hardly ever get plugged because of the increased water velocity from having the tank so high above. The sink will be an open console with two fancy front legs to sit on. It will be similar to a pedestal sink in that it's open under the sink deck, but will have the legs at each corner. All of these old style fixtures had their plumbing exposed for the world to see, so the new pipes and subsequent finish work is being planned very carefully. In those days, trades people took their time and fit everything together neatly because they had to. The fixtures were not designed to "hide" all of the pipes so you could just put them where ever it was easy and fast to do.

With all of this said, here is the recap of the bathroom quest we are on. In the next twenty days we need to have completely new supply and waste pipes installed under the house. It will also be very helpful to have the new electrical wiring run through the walls and connected to the light switches and outlets. Then the floor will be put back into place and prepared so that 2" white hex tiles can be laid down and grouted. Then the above mentioned fixtures will be installed and hooked up. At that point, I hope we can put up new wall planks and get them painted. We will also tile the walls behind the tub and toilet with 3"x6" subway tiles. After all of that is completed, then it gets pretty easy with painting the planks and installing some light fixtures. Finally, I will put the door back on its hinges and call the job finished. Somehow I think it's about at least a million times easier to take care of the bathroom quest of an over-taxed bladder in the middle of the San Joaquin valley stretch of I-5.... But that's not nearly as much fun.