When we purchased this house in 2005, it had 1 3/4 baths. We’ve never used the shower stall in the basement bathroom; I have no idea if the water is even hooked up to it. Why would I want to go take a shower in the basement where it’s always colder there than the rest of the house?
But that gave us 1 1/2 baths that were useful to us. Then this summer we had to get work done to fix the leak in the basement, and in order to drill the floor to make the drain, they had to have us remove the plumbing fixtures and tear out the wall in the downstairs bathroom. We’ve had trouble finding someone to put it back together (at a price we can afford, anyway), and we certainly don’t have the skills to do it ourselves. So we were down to one bathroom.
Over the past three years we have fought a losing battle against mold and mildew in the upstairs bathroom. Someone who came in to take a look at it told us that the wall had been made with ordinary drywall instead of the water-resistant kind intended for bathrooms. We made plans to get the wall repaired – but then had to put those plans on hold when the leaky basement took priority.
Finally this winter my husband found someone (a man who attends the church pastored by a co-worker – and he also turned out to be the father-in-law of one of my co-workers) to do both bathrooms. He started cutting away the old drywall – and found a second layer of drywall underneath it. As best as we can tell, a previous owner had the same problem with mold, and decided to cover it up. (We found similar signs of covered up repairs when the basement work was done.)
So for about a week, we were down to 1/2 bath, as the tub and shower were very much out of commission.
I had seen houses under construction before, but only when they were initially built. It was interesting to discover this hidden space between the bathroom wall and the kitchen wall, and over the stairway to the basement. It occurred to me that it would be a perfect place to hide something that I didn’t want found. But I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to hide and never see again.
Later it occurred to me that I could have put something for an archeologist in some future century to find. But it’s too late now; our new shower insert is up.
I can see I would never have been able to do the installation myself. I had talked to a co-worker who does her own remodeling, including bathrooms. And I briefly wondered if we could manage it ourselves, with the help of the do-it-yourself books that had belonged to my father-in-law. But I would never have known to set up the wood like this to keep everything in place while the adhesive set.
Now we finally have a working shower again, so we are back to 1 full bath. No pictures to see of it yet; the walls are patched but we need to do some painting. And while the previous owners left lots of stuff behind (books and CDs in the downstairs bath, bottles for recycling in the closet, all sorts of knickknacks and hardware and miscellaneous who-knows-what in the basement), I haven’t yet found light green paint for the bathroom.
Next project: a working downstairs 1/2 bath.
Perennial Student 