Happy Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving, we're focusing on family and being grateful for what we have.

At The House on the Isthmus, we have a lot to be thankful for - not the least of which is all of you wonderful readers. Thank you for your support throughout this project!

As we're about to start the holiday season, allow me to encourage you to spend all of tomorrow with loved ones considering all we have to be thankful for and not begin shopping until the day after.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Throwing a kitchen off a balcony...

In recent weeks, we've been talking about the demolition and reconstruction of the bathroom. Simultaneously, I'm working on the upstairs kitchen.

I mean, workshop. I mean, master bedroom.

Needless to say, this room has gone through a few lives already since I bought Isthmus House last May. When the house was a duplex, it was a kitchen and when we moved in I made it my workshop almost immediately.

A while back, I had the house looked at by my realtor, Tobi, to get a better idea of how restoration efforts were coming from a value perspective partway through the process. One of the things she felt I should prioritize was removing the kitchen to make it a bedroom. It made sense since, if something did come up, it would probably be challenging to sell a house with three bedrooms, two kitchens and one living space.

Once I made the decision to pull it, we got right to work pulling out the range and gas line and capping off the plumbing.

Plumbing and gas lines gone, we could get to work pulling out the cabinetry. The goal was to salvage them but it turned out that they weren't particularly well built but they were built right in place.

Since they weren't going to leave in one piece, we got to work dismantling them with some friends who agreed with chucking building materials over a balcony sounded like fun.

After much prying and minimal anything else, we ended up with one very, very torn up wall and one partly torn up wall and a giant wood pile in my backyard (because, really, we did throw everything over the balcony).

Now, normal people would probably say, "Great! Cabinet demo's done - let's rebuild!" An old house person might say, "Uh, what's that green tile?" To which I would respond, "Wait 'til next week and you'll find out!"

No shower drips here!

Another week and we're getting closer to having a done bathroom upstairs!

Last week, we finished demo and roughed in some plumbing once the wall was moved eight whole inches. A little unorthodox to be sure but still got the job done - and inspection passed!

Next up was getting in electrical rough ins. You know, light can be important when it's going to be dark half the winter! Once that was all set and inspection passed, we were ready to move on to the base and waterproofing.

While generally I likely would have done this myself, I planned a complex tile design for the back wall and my tile guy only raised the price slightly to do the whole wall and floor including backer board (kind of like drywall but cement so it doesn't get wet and moldy), waterproofing and one very large surprise for later.

Once my plumber was done with the newly cut holes in my bathroom floor, the tile guy had to patch in with 3/4 plywood where my plumber had cut out the floor.

Once the patching and leveling of the floor was complete, he hung the Durock using special hardi board screws - these are important so that water doesn't follow normal metal screws and rust out....

And waterproofed! This membrane, similar to the Red Gard we used in the downstairs bath, protects from lots of water damage inside and out of the house.

Suddenly, we were ready for tile! Stay tuned next week for the beginning of the pretty part of this new saga!

How to get a 400 pound tub out of a small bathroom

It's hard to believe how close we are to "done."

There are a few reasons that word is in quotations. The biggest is that, well, I really don't think it's possible to be done. Underline, italics, bold, period, whatever, I feel fairly confident that done is an unattainable goal in any home.

Our version of "done" however, is not even done for us - it's done upstairs, with perhaps some small tweaks and mostly done downstairs. After all, even all done for us would lead to a bored Katie and then what would y'all read about every Thursday?

Last week, we talked about making a gaping hole between two rooms while trying to just move a wall out a tiiiny bit to make my upstairs bathroom a tiiiny bit bigger. Then the wall had to go back up so that we had someplace to put the fun stuff like plumbing and electrical where, naturally, we encountered a few surprises.

Let's talk plumbing:

First off, you need permits. Don't be one of those people who learns after the fact that they paid a few thousand dollars for shoddy work that has to be redone. Then you'll be one of those people who has to pay for work to be done twice when then city finds out - and you'll probably have a nice fine too. You should only pull the permit if you're personally doing the work - otherwise, your licensed plumber/electrician/HVAC person/contractor should.

To pull your permits, you need at least a pretty good idea of what you're doing. In our case, I'd planned and replanned and replanned and replanned the layout.

Don't most people's living rooms look like this? Spoiler alert: this was one of the failed plans.

Despite originally thinking that we were going to put in a walk in shower, the associated costs just got too high. All of the fixtures (toilet, sink [or lavatory in plumber speak - lav for short], and tub) were going to stay where they were. In many cases, it's cheaper to move plumbing four feet than four inches but it's almost always cheapest to keep it where it is.

To start the plumbing once the permits were pulled, we had to get everything out and I do mean everything.

Out went the pony wall, plastic floor tile, medicine cabinet plaster, vanity, everything:

And then there was the 400 pound tub.

Let me preface this with a disclaimer: this tub was not original to Isthmus House or even close. Even so, I would have preferred to salvage it for another house but couldn't for several reasons I'm not going to get into here.

The only way to get a cast iron tub out: smash it.

Here are some step by step instructions:
1. Put on long sleeves and pants (not shorts), gloves, eye protection, a mask and hearing protection. Do not skip any of these items. Trust me on this.
2. Disconnect the drain and the water supplies.
3. Pick up a sledge hammer. The Roommate and I are both pretty strong women so we used a ten pound sledge hammer. Using a pendulum motion (i.e. let gravity help you), hit the edges of the tub in as small an area as possible until you see a crack. A lot of men can crack a tub in a few swings with a bigger sledge hammer but we were more comfortable with it taking 6-10 swings before things really started moving.
4. Break the tub into movable pieces. There will be shards of the glaze flying - it's why you're wearing protective gear. I've heard of people using wet blankets inside the tub to dull that effect when they do this.
5. Clean up the little pieces as much as possible - if you use contractor bags, you'll only be able to fill them a little before they get really heavy. Double them up at a minimum - the shards are sharp as glass and can go through one layer pretty easily. Gorilla bags may work better for this but we didn't have any. I also used a filter that was close to trash-ready in my shop-vac to remove the dust and tiny pieces the broom didn't catch.
6. Take the big pieces to your local metal scrap yard. Our tub was worth about $45 in scrap - that's two boxes of basic subway tile!

Finally, the room was completely clear and we were ready for plumbing!

In went new water lines and a new, bigger drain for the tub and sink. Naturally, it couldn't be easy and we ended up needing to replace a lot of the drain line to meet code.

No matter how you cut it, this bathroom is coming along. Now what do we do with all of those holes in the floor?!