Men At Work

 So the Little House turned 100 last year. Yep. 1922-2022 and still going.

That said, there's a LOT not to like about the Fire Direction Center.

The single bathroom, increasingly constraining for four adults.

The cheap fittings and appliances, many of them courtesy of former owners, that are a constant, low-grade nuisance. The - as my Bride call them - "ugly bones" of the house itself, a legacy of the pre-mid-century spec-house throw-it-up-quick-sell-it-cheap pedigree of this joint.

This year we finally had enough. Time to gut some of the interior and rebuild.

Specifically, the kitchen and bathroom.

The vanity was perfectly representative of the way this place was furnished.

The countertop was painted over linoleum, and the paint continually peeled and chipped. The sink was a gimcrack Home Depot-grade porcelain-over-cast-iron thing which had a big chip over on the left that had never been repaired and was rusted out, spreading red runoff whenever it got wet.

The drawers were fabricated from the cheapest three-ply with junky hardware. The outlet behind the sink never worked (which is why it has a blank cover over it.

Just around the corner...

...is the tub/shower and toilet. Both leak. The tub is interesting because it appeared to be a stock model that was about three inches too short for the space it was shoved into. The "solution" the architectural genius devised was not to find a larger tub but to fabricate a weird little stub-wall on the right side of the tub as you see it.

The whole setup was cheap and felt cheap, and my Bride hated it.

So...

...the vanity went first.

Note the long stick of white PVC pipe where the sink drain used to be. The plumber noted that it was utterly outside any close relationship to a sink drain per City of Portland code. Which fits with the rest of this house, which seems to have been remodeled and altered repeatedly without bothering with details like that.

Then the shower:

Note the faint pattern on the floor underneath the former tub location. That's very old - as in probably 1940s or earlier - linoleum. My guess is that the original bathroom had a standing claw-foot-type tub with a linoleum floor underneath which was left in place when the fitted-tub was built in the 1950s-1960s.

The real revelation, though, was underneath.

I mentioned that the tub leaked, right?

Okay, well, that leak began just days before the demo crew was scheduled. Well, fuckadoo, I figured it wouldn't kill us if we were without a shower one extras day or two, so I went downstairs to find and close the shutoff to the bathroom.

No such thing.

Not only that, but I looked at the plumbing - really looked at it - for the first time since we moved in more than twenty years ago. Guess what?

It's as fucked up as everything else around here.

Pipes going every which way. Random stretches of copper spliced directly into the original galvanized (which, BTW, is a big plumbing no-no; the iron and copper are incompatible and the solder (or clamp) will eventually fail and leak...). Lack of shut-off valves everywhere (except for the dishwasher, weirdly, but probably because it's a very late installation).

The sanitary stack is the original 1920s ductile iron, which I shudder to think looks like inside after a century of literal shit going down the drain. If the house next door - which is an exact mirror image of ours and was built by the same outfir - is an example the connection to the sewer main is old-school precast concrete, notorious for being invaded by roots (as the next-door house's was..).

I talked the plumber into looking at this literal plumber's-nightmare to give me a guesstimate on unfucking it. We'll see how that comes in.

And then there was this.

The kitchen remodel is going to include knocking out part of the wall to open the kitchen up to the front room. To do that we need to add additional support to the remaining wall, meaning a pair of new posts extending from the first floor to the ground.

This is the first attempt at one of them.

What's funny in a not-funny way is that, footings?

That's what I do. What I did, anyway, for thirty years. If I'd bothered to look at this fucker when they were building it I'd have screeched like a wounded eagle. That's so not-right it's not funny. Either the footing or the post are in the wrong place, seeing as how the one is supposed to be centered on the other.

The City inspector came in, peeked at it, and said "You fail". THAT's when I looked and was like "Ohfuckyeah".

The earthwork crew came and redid the work pro bono. Then it passed.

Oh. And the other thing.

The general contractor employs designers to work on, well, the interior design. We had one early who left, and were working with her replacement all the way up to the start of construction.

When we found out she'd been canned. Because, among other things, she failed to order parts and materials we needed. Among other jobs she'd fucked up the same way.

So we're two weeks behind on the shower tile.

That's...not great.

So if you'll excuse me, I gotta run to the gym.

To use the shower.

True fir

It was a long, nasty, ugly job, but I finally refinished the bedroom floor.

The picture above is the "before". Please don't let the revolting mess on the scrap of carpet in the center of the room fool you; most of this house is not as clean as that, and is probably bound together by spilt milk and cat hair.

The explanation for the tatty patch of carpet is tortured, but the shorthand version is that Mojo and I wanted to see what the Former People had done with the floor prior to carpeting it (fearing that they had done as they'd done with the front room, replacing fire-damaged flooring with cheap and nasty particleboard...) so we tore out the strips along the east and north walls.

Exposing, to our relief, the good fir floors that the builders had laid in 1922.

But...

In the interim the wood had been slathered with multiple layers of paint, including what I suspect was the original floor color, a deep red oil-based stuff that deteriorated when treated with paint stripper to a sort of Vile Jelly that stuck to everything.

The first night that Mojo and the Littles were gone I moved all the furniture out and yanked up the remaining carpet before literally getting down on my knees to pull out the thicket of little staples the damn Former People had used to secure their cheap and nasty carpet.

And found that before they had done that, they had slopped a mess of plaster and white paint all over the floor, probably while applying the disgusting "texture" to the ceiling. And stepped all in it, grinding it into the old paint.

Ugh.

Plus the carpet, cheap shit that it was, had absorbed every liquid ever spilt on it (and I don't even want to think about THAT...) and had then produced a rot that had eaten into several portions of the floorboards.

So...

I spent the next week getting home from work and repeatedly stripping and sanding the floor, removing the soft spots, and then applying several coats of polyurethane spar varnish.

And here's the finished work;

I'm ridiculously pleased with the overall effect. The old fir positively glows, and the resulting spare cleanliness appeals to my military soul.

I like the way the new register cover works with it, too.

There are times, usually times like this, when I wonder if I would not have been happier and more satisfied if I had made my living with my hands; been a finish carpenter or a mason.

But then I think of how often I've seen modern builders slap together awful, cheapjack, gimcrack crap and suspect that I'm better off being a house carpenter only to myself.