|
Six months ago my wife and I bought an old house in an established neighborhood known for its strict building code and architectural requirements. The house sat on the market for two years and the asking price came way down to within our budget. It's a cutie, right? Built in 1929 in a registered historic neighborhood and architecturally unique by requirement. Except for the horrible wallpaper in every room and mauve-painted trim, we thought we got a steal. Our inspector ran the water for a few minutes  , did a four hour look around, and gave it a clean bill of health; a few leaks and minor roof repairs that the owner took care of. And a previous inspection, done a year earlier, got similar results. "It's got good bones," we told ourselves. Maybe it does have good bones, but it also has heart disease.On day one of moving in, my wife and the inlaws went to work stripping wallpaper and painting white over purple. Here's my dining room as the previous owner had it (sorry about the grainy Trulia picture):  This photo doesn't do it justice. The ceiling and trim are mauve and the wallpaper is a champagne-metallic, birch bark. It was really pretty special. The girls immediately noticed that the ceiling sagged from wet paint and water was dripping out of a Bic-Pen size hole. The wallpaper still hangs in a different room:  This room is dark so it's hard to capture the bizarre color. Here's the dining room repainted and also set for a party:  We called the plumber. It was already his third visit. He tells us the seal on the upstairs toilet, directly above this room, is probably bad so he seals it (more on this later). If it's something else, he said, he would have to go into the wall to find it. The leaking didn't stop so I turned the water off to the sink and toilet and we ignored it for six months, which seemed fine. We just had a baby and focused on other more pressing home repairs. The leak seemed to stop. Now it's December, and things start failing. The leak returned with a vengeance. First I found a sizable puddle on the hardwood floor of the dining room. A few hours later drywall starts coming down. I stick a bucket under it, call my dad to come to Ohio to help, and we go back to ignoring it. This thread will be about a leak that spurred a multi-room renovation in an old Tudor in Northeast Ohio.
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2016 00:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 23:44 |
|
|
Day One: Figure out where the leak is coming from We got out the Sawzall cut down some ceiling to find the leaky pipes.   Seems straightforward. That cast iron elbow is obviously cracked. At this moment we're working under the assumption that the right-side pipe is under a toilet and the left-side pipe goes to a shower and sink. This is also where our inspector boned us. After talking to some friends, they told me their inspectors ran the water for hours. Our guy ran a fixture for just a few minutes and flushed toilets just once. This would have been an easy find if we knew to do that. Those floorboards are rotted and moldy, too. They'll need to be pulled up which means some tile floor needs to be ruined. First, we go downstairs to see what's going on.  At some point this waste line changes from cast iron to PVC so we knew they've had problems here before. We go back upstairs to dig around.  Here's a patched wall, getting closer. This pinhole came with the house:  Really hard to get a good pic of what's going here, but that's a band clamp visible through that hole. That's where our cast iron meets PVC using one of these:  Time to turn off the water to the upstairs bathroom to remove the toilet. We go back to the basement and find that the valves have become useless. The cold water valve is completely missing its knob and hot water valve doesn't stop the flow of water. On top of that, some of the copper is corroded and leaking. Time for the soldering iron.  We cut this stuff out:  At some point all the plumbing in the basement was switched to copper but everything going up is still galvanized steel. Check out the steel pipes we removed. This is an 8 inch nipple:  This is a half inch street ell. Check out the corroded threads. They're almost completely gone:  Believe it or not, the bathroom had pretty good water pressure. Here's a copper tee that was about to fail:  New valves installed. Home Depot only had blue levers in 1/2 inch copper valves. One is going to have to be tagged for hot:  We can finally turn the water off to the second story bathroom, but we'll get to that tomorrow.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2016 02:12
|
|
|
These are the things my nightmares are made of.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2016 21:58
|
|
|
Day Two: remove the toilet and pull up the floor The bathroom we're about to work on is a Jack-and-Jill style second story bathroom. For those of that have never heard of a Jack-and-Jill, it's when the bathroom sits between two bedrooms and has a doorway into each. This bathroom has a small vanity, toilet, and stand up shower. Sorry, I didn't get good before pictures.    Check out the disco wallpaper the old owners put up. First thing we did was unbolt the toilet and stick it in the shower.  The old wax ring got thrown away with some debris, but it was a few decades old. So that plumber from before, yeah he scammed us.  Here's the tile floor we have to remove. The room is dark and the orange wallpaper tints it a bit, but this tile is white with gray squares. My wife and I had the same pattern in the first apartment we shared, and it's old features like this that made us fall in love with the house. Bye bye!  We start pulling up the tile. Hm, something weird is happening here:  Oh god drat it's four inches of concrete. WTF. Yep, our whole floor needs chiseled out now.  It gets weirder. Check out the the hot and cold coming in under the vanity. Something is capped and the hot water comes from the side of the room:  Let's look around the corner:  Here's a painted copper pipe, exposed in a closet behind the bathroom, delivering hot water to the sink from Christ-knows-where. I wonder why:  Because the original hot (left) and cold (right) were cemented into the floor, and no one felt like tearing it up to deal with this leak:  Let's take a look at the waste line we originally came up here to repair. Remember, we originally thought the left side went to the shower and the right side went to the toilet: Something here doesn't look right. This pipe is right next to the downstairs wall:  It's the left side pipe. What the hell is the right side pipe to?   Oh poo poo, it's the sewer vent. It's the first pipe in this picture (sorry, blurry):  That cracked cast iron elbow has about sixteen feet of cast iron stack on it. I can only imagine what that weighs. It's not all bad though. Here's some of our knob and tube. I was worried about its condition. Well here it looks pretty drat good. Also pictured it the actual waste line from the sink and shower.  This hole goes straight to the basement. This will allow us to completely replace all the galvanized steel piping with copper.  And this is where we give up for the day, and this brings us up to the present. Here's our short term plan: -Bring up a hammer drill and destroy that concrete -Replace all steel pipes with copper -Cut the dining room wall and replace all cast iron with PVC up to the second floor -Repair the cracked elbow and support the cast iron stack to the roof -Lay new floor boards and cover with cement board -Retile the bathroom Long term plans: -Strip bathroom wallpaper and paint -Replace vanity with a pedestal sink -Tear down dining room ceiling and hang a tin ceiling -Replace dining room wall and build custom wainscotting I imagine the short term plan to be carried out by February and the long term plan to be completed by late summer. If anyone can help with the following questions it would be appreciated: How much does that stack weigh and how is it secured going up to the roof? How badly do I need a rubber cap for that open waste line? Should I run out tonight and get one? FingersMaloy fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jan 12, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2016 00:40
|
|
|
FingersMaloy posted:How badly do I need a rubber cap for that open waste line? Should I run out tonight and get one? Yes. Had a bad experience with a clogged drain once after leaving it uncapped / temporarily fixed (see below advice) for too long... Or does whatever the heck that's filling it currently seen to be doing a pretty good job? Was that just debris from opening up the floor? You could also temporarily cram in a wet towel or something until you have a better solution.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2016 01:43
|
|
|
It's just a dry rag so it's probably doing nothing.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2016 01:48
|
|
|
I'm curious, tin ceiling in the dining room? Like, tin panels on your ceiling? Or this something from the 1920s that I'm just not familiar with? I bought a house about two months ago, and besides part of my fence falling down on Christmas, I haven't found any surprises like you have. Mine is just dated from what an 80something year old lady would enjoy.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2016 23:32
|
|
|
americanzero4128 posted:I'm curious, tin ceiling in the dining room? Like, tin panels on your ceiling? Or this something from the 1920s that I'm just not familiar with? Tin ceiling consists of metal sheets with a pressed design, usually 2x2ft. They are nailed to a plywood ceiling so our drywall will have to come down. Tin ceiling was invented during the Victorian era and was/is meant to look like the carved wood and molded plaster ceilings of the great houses of Europe. Usually it was painted, but it eventually became popular in its own right and people started leaving it bare.  We're going for a formal, Federal/colonial style in our dining room so we want classical revival elements, wreaths, defined right angles, and painted white.   We already have this really pretty molded plaster crown molding in that room with little rosettes and scroll work, but it's been painted about four times. It needs stripped and hopefully it will survive the plumbing update.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2016 01:18
|
|
|
Our house is a similar vintage, and like yours it was a bargain for the area...before the repairs. Still, even with shoving money at the problems it was still more affordable than pretty much anything else in the area. However it wound up being about a year long process. Still, obvious plumbing, electric, probable sags and other problems aside it looks gorgeous. Good luck! I am digging the tin ceiling idea. Do you have that sourced already? I've heard those can be fairly expensive to get.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2016 02:54
|
|
|
Eglamore posted:Our house is a similar vintage, and like yours it was a bargain for the area...before the repairs. Still, even with shoving money at the problems it was still more affordable than pretty much anything else in the area. However it wound up being about a year long process. Our favorite pattern right now is from American Tin Ceiling using the pattern in the last pic I posted above. https://www.americantinceilings.com It runs $7 a piece for unfinished tiles and about $13 a tile for most finishes, for what we want. Some of really cool distressed finishes sell for $19 a tile and would go well with the rustic style of our house, but that's too much. Those prices are about average for high quality, real tin ceilings. They can cost as high as $35 for the really high end stuff. We have 144 square feet where tile will fit, then you use blank filler tiles that you cut for the area that's too small. The actual dimensions of the room are 13'x13'10". The tiles are 2'x2'. Then you can hang tin crown molding, which we might have to do if our plaster molding can't be saved. Overall, it will cost between $500 and $600. FingersMaloy fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Jan 18, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2016 04:23
|
|
|
That's cool. Before the last 15 years or so, people basically just threw those out, and now they mostly make them out of plastic, so the original stuff is hard to get.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2016 19:53
|
|
|
Oh yeah, that poured concrete floor on a second floor bathroom looks familiar. (1920s house here too.) We just had a lead toilet bend replaced and partially chipped out the concrete from the first floor ceiling to fit in new pvc. I guess 3 inches of concrete instead of 5 will be fine? I hope. I was unwilling to remove the entire bathroom floor to replace the rest of the lead drain pipes and galvanized water pipes. Once something leaks again I'm sure we'll have to. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2016 04:49
|
|
|
The concrete seems to break out pretty easily. My dad is brining up his hammer drill this weekend to get the rest out. We're using this as an opportunity to get all the lovely materials out and undo some bad workmanship. Copper and PVC have theoretical service lives of 100+ years so hopefully we do a good enough job that we never have to go into this floor again, or at least I'll be a few decades older when we do.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2016 18:42
|
|
|
The east coast snow storm delayed us by a week, but today we got to ripping some pipe out. Here's the fully exposed, cast iron waste line. That silver clamp is where PVC down to the basement begins. After some brute force all the iron and lead piping was removed. The house stunk like sewer gas for a good four hours:  Here the gaping hole in our floor/ceiling:  PVC was installed:    That's a temporary setup. We have more floor to knock out to get access to the galvanized waste line. Check out the clog we have coming from the sink and shower:  It gets worse. We found more abandoned pipe in the wall. The galvanize closest in this pic runs about four feet up the wall and ends. The copper to the toilet was run from the shower like the hot water above that was run though a closet:  Tomorrow we're patching the wall and ceiling and putting the piece of crown molding back in. Then we have to completely bust out the floor in order to complete the plumbing. FingersMaloy fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jan 31, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2016 05:33
|
|
|
Had to take some time off of this project because of work, but got back to it last weekend. I started with prying up with rest of the concrete floor, which couldn't be completed without the hot water off to the sink (which was rerouted from the shower and through a closet). Opened the panel to the shower and no valves:  I headed to the basement to shut the water off to find another valve so corroded that it needed replaced before anything else could happen:  My dad came back up and we put a new valve in, ripped out the concrete with a combination of hammer drill and pry bar, and got to work on the plumbing. We went through three Sawzall blades cutting through all the steel.  We found no razor blades in the wall from the blade depository in the medicine cabinet:   Dropped 40+ feet of copper where galvanized once ran:  Capped the hot water circumventing the bathroom under the shower and through a closet:  A couple of Fernco fittings and we have a semi complete system again:   Time for a new floor. Measure twice cut once, right?  Almost   At least the new floor is in, or close to it:  The next steps are to lay the cement board and put a GFI in the wall. When $$$$ allows for it we'll lay a tile floor and put it a new low flow toilet and sink. FingersMaloy fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Feb 29, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2016 06:41
|
|
|
Is that a separate room for the shower over there on the right? Isn't it going to be more or less blocked once you install the toilet? Also please keep posting, this is amazing and reminds me why I just switched from homeownership to renting 
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2016 17:39
|
|
|
slap me silly posted:Is that a separate room for the shower over there on the right? Isn't it going to be more or less blocked once you install the toilet? Also please keep posting, this is amazing and reminds me why I just switched from homeownership to renting Yeah the shower is a tiled stall, no tub. The old toilet sat maybe 2 inches in front of the shower entrance but was far enough off that it wasn't noticeable. The shower is not original to the house. This bathroom was probably just a half bath originally. The new toilet will be slightly smaller. This is also a kids bathroom so I'm less worried about them fitting through the door.
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2016 19:26
|
|
|
I got the dining room wall patched And fixed the crown molding somewhat. It needs some more plaster. Then the wall needs some more sanding and repainted  I've been pricing/reading up on wainscoting. Going to use this as my guide, as well as some stuff from This Old House and Bob Villa's site: http://www.familyhandyman.com/walls/how-to-build-a-wainscoted-wall/view-all It was suggested to me to use a pocket joint rather than a biscuit. It would save a lot of time and a little money in tools, but I think I would have to do all the framing and then nail it up rather than rather build it right onto the wall which might lead to some crookedness. I have to think that out more. Here's how much garbage this project has generated so far 
FingersMaloy fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Feb 28, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2016 22:01
|
|
|
FingersMaloy posted:I think I would have to do all the framing and then nail it up rather than rather build it right onto the wall which might lead to some crookedness. I have to think that out more. Yes, you have the right of it. Learn from my mistakes; the former approach produces as crooked a result as you would expect, especially in an old house. Some of the joints I couldn't get to come together at all. Also, building it before mounting allows you to fasten all the moulding from behind, with much less need for filling of holes later.
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2016 22:23
|
|
|
We made some progress recently. We got the cement board in and finished up the plumbing behind the wall and under the floor: Check out my dad using a decorative vase to cut hole for the toilet.  We also installed a GFI. The bathroom never had an outlet before.  I was really surprised with how sturdy the floor feels. I was worried it would creak because the originally shaved the floor joists to a point when the poured concrete. It was nice and firm. We're ready for tile floor, new fixtures, and we're done. I also got a biscuit joiner for when I start the wainscoting. I like acquiring new tools.  Everything is going to be put on hold for a while though. Our roof starting leaking and the roofer uncovered a lovely repair job and now we have to replace a small section of the roof. 
FingersMaloy fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Apr 17, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 15:53
|
|
|
Hey I had this house saved on Zillow! How much cash did you have to put up for POS escrow? I ended up buying a slightly older house a bit north of you.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2016 15:40
|
|
|
Jealous Cow posted:Hey I had this house saved on Zillow! I don't remember POS inspection. Between some turmoil at work, buying house, and then immediately having a baby the summer of 2015 was a blur for me. Thread update: we've had some family poo poo happen so I won't be updating this thread for a while if ever.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2016 00:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 23:44 |
|
|
FingersMaloy posted:Thread update: we've had some family poo poo happen so I won't be updating this thread for a while if ever. Sorry to hear that. PM me if I can help out with anything.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2016 00:41
|
|