Demolition Continues

Thanksgiving came and went in the usual style. Christina and Dan served up an excellent meal, Andrew got to be the fun uncle, and my pies turned out really well. The weather was lovely and we even got to go for a pleasant afternoon stroll.

Today, we got back to business in the bathroom. Well, it used to be a bathroom, anyway. Now its not much of an anything room. Dad turned up around 8:30 and we set to work making assessments for ripping out the bathroom walls and fixtures. The first thing we discovered in our plumbing survey is that there was no shut-off valve on the pipes leading to the bathroom. Upstairs there was a shut-off valve for the toilet, and one under the sink (but only for the hot water, nothing for the cold), and the shower had no shut-off valves at all. The only way to work on the plumbing in the shower or the cold water in the sink would be to turn the water off to the entire house. I'm telling you, there were some really bright folks working on this house.

So, first things first we had to plumb in new shut-off valves in the basement. Or, I really ought to say that Dad had to plumb them in since he's the only one of us with any real plumbing experience or know-how. Right away when he started with the solder we could tell something wasn't right, though, since the solder didn't seem to draw into the fitting like it should. He kept heating and adding solder but it just dripped off onto the floor. But, we thought we would test it to be sure, so we turned the water back on to see how bad it was leaking. Well, it wasn't just a leak--the whole valve blew right off the end of the pipe and went flying across the basement on a blast of water. Much swearing and foul language was to be heard at this point.

We turned off the water and broke for lunch.

Take two: Andrew runs to the hardware store for soldering paste. That gets slapped on, and the valves are resoldered. I turn the water back on, we check for leaks, and now the solder doesn't leak but the drain gaskets drip. Probably they got overheated with all the soldering and now they don't hold quite right. Finally we get those drips stopped and I turn the water open all the way. But with the increased pressure, a new leak appears in one of the joints! ack. But, after one more go with the solder the leak was stopped up and we could finally shut the water off to the bathroom.

In the next act, we rip out the walls. And the sink, vanity, light fixture, and toilet. And we make the most incredible mess. Mortar dust is EVERYWHERE. The entire bathtub is filled with debris. But the really fun moment was as I was coming back in from hauling out the sink, I open the hallway door and suddenly see a geyser of water blasting out from the wall across the bathroom! Dad and Andrew got so carried away ripping things out that they forgot that the valve under the sink was the shut-off valve for the hot water! So I had to race to the basement to turn off the water again. Oh, the unbelievable mess. We thought it was a mess before... then we added water to the mortar dust and chips and made mud. Although it did settle the dust in the air a bit.

Anyway, we stopped around 5:00 after hauling out bag after bag of debris and cleaning up the floors a bit. We've more demolition to do tomorrow, so there's not much point in doing a serious cleaning up right now. But tomorrow sometime the demolition should be done and we can start on reconstruction. We hope.

Here's the most recent photos:

My other classroom

Here's me in the computer lab at Lehmann Center.



And my most faithful open lab attendee: Manivanh Voravang, working on one of our brand-new emac computers.


And here's Koffi Kodegui, working on his class assignment.


This is a typical evening class at Lehmann Center. Annie's class is learning about the Pilgrims, the voyage of the Mayflower, and the First Thanksgiving. This website has great audio and video, that's why everyone is wearing headphones.


The ladies all say, "We love computer class!"


Annie, say hello! Annie is one of the wonderful teachers that I work with here at Lehmann Center.

My Classroom

I had my camera with me in the classroom today to take pictures for a ABE awareness/publicity event that is coming up in January. Since I have permission from the students to use their photos, I thought I would post a few of them here for friends and family to see.

My Monday volunteer, Helen, took this picture of me teaching (at the moment, listening to a student in the back row).

The students are at work, practicing a conversation from our textbook. Musa and Issa are in the front row; Sahro and Nasra are in the second row, and in the back row is Jisow.

Sahro thinks about what she will write.

At break time, I finally catch up with Helen and get a snapshot of her with Jisow, Aman, and Halimo.

Susan looking teacherly again... helping Musa with a question.


Shukri always listens so carefully. What a wonderful student!

Asha and Zerithun reading a dialogue together. What a cute pair!

"Commander" Jisow is working on his vocabulary sentences.

We're remodeling now...

Yep, I think we can safely say that this project has been upgraded from "stripping paint and repainting" to "bathroom remodeling". Sigh. Well, we knew we wanted to do it eventually. I guess eventually is now. Good thing we've been socking money away in our savings accounts this year.

I think we were doomed to remodel by the awful "home improvement" choices of previous owners of this house. Their shoddy work, poor decisions, and half-assed plans have left us with few options other than to gut the room entirely, right down the wall studs, and start over from scratch. Ultimately, this will mean a much better result, but of course it's a lot more work and the room will be out of commission for much longer. Oh, and it's much more costly, of course.

The good thing is that if we really do rip out the plaster walls and lay new sheetrock, we will also be able to do some of the other projects that will really improve the room--like put in a moisture vent, insulate the outside wall, replumb the shower, and make the medicine cabinet a built-in rather than just hang it on the wall.

But we've little choice now. I think we passed the point of no return last night when we discovered the old tile hiding behind the top layer of newer tile. We were definitely not expecting that, and it seriously derailed our plan of scraping down to the plaster and lathe wall and repainting. If it had just been the newer layer of plastic tile we could have done it--the stripper does take that putty off--but two layers of tile? and who know what behind the older one? I don't think we have any option other than ripping the wall out. We were doomed from the beginning, we just didn't know it until we started scraping off the outer layers. Working in this old house is sort of like archeology--peeling back layers of house history to discover hidden mysteries.

Lady Lily, Chief Archeologist in Charge of Bathrooms

Tile Disasters

Our beautiful bathroom...

So the super-stripper seems to be doing a good job of softening up the putty, and we can scrape down to the plaster and lathe using several coats of stripper. This system worked well enough that we decided to chip the plastic "tiles" off of the remainder of this particular wall and strip the putty off tomorrow. And then we found another, unwelcome surprise: underneath a large portion of the plastic tiles is... another layer of tiles, this time real ones (probably original to the house). Oh dear. Now we're faced with the thought of trying to chip these original tiles off the wall and sand off the mortar. Or maybe we'll have to give up entirely and knock the wall out and put up new drywall. We were really hoping to be able to avoid that. But we may be left with no other choice due to the stupidity of the previous owners of this house. I mean, who lays tile over the top of old tile??? Honestly, these people must have been complete idiots.

The tile mess.

Anybody know how to hang drywall?

Bathroom Destruction

We started out with the intention of scraping off the peeling paint and repainting the walls. Then we discovered that underneath the layers of paint, the original layer over the 80+ year-old plaster and lathe wall was... A piece of linen cloth. Then we discovered that we could grab the edge of this linen cloth, pull, and peel off every layer of paint with it in huge sheets. The entire painted area of the bathroom has now been "peeled" down to the plaster. It took us about an hour once we made this wondrous discovery.

Then, we may have gotten a bit carried away. We decided to see if we could also peel off the ugly, painted-over, plastic "tile" using the same method. It started out great in our test area, so we dug in whole-heartedly on the main wall... and we now discover that the cloth layer appears to not continue all the way down the wall. Uh-oh. We are now trying Plan B: the super-stripper that we bought with the intention of peeling paint is now being tested on the putty that was used to put up the crappy tiles. Initially, it seems this might do a decent job of cutting the putty so that we can remove it with paint scrapers. But we haven't actually tested that yet. I will update this page with the details as they continue to unfold...

Lady Lily, Paint Peeler Extraordinaire

Here's the documentation!

A return to the blog

Wow... I haven't been here in a while. I keep thinking about it, just not acting on those brain waves. It's good to be back online, though.

This is a picture of the best apple pie ever. Well, at least in my personal baking history. I made this pie as a "birthday cake" for my mother in law. It's the first time in my life I have ever made a pie crust that did not fall apart, get soggy, burn, or just not taste good. It was a beautiful thing. And it lasted about 24 hours. I hope to make one just a beautiful and scrumptious for Thanksgiving, and pair it with an equally scrumptious deep-dish pumpkin pie. If you are lucky enough to be joining the Wetenkamps and Brandts in Apple Valley for Thanksgiving, you can sample them. Love and Hugs!

Lady Lily, Mistress of the Pies