End of Summer -1

I am hoping to accomplish a great deal of accomplishments this weekend. Today is Day One of the Labor Day Holiday...the unofficial end of Summer.

Let's see how I do!

The plan is to start the remodel of the main floor bathroom. We have budgeted $5,000.00. The big expense will be any plumbing changes we make and the possible purchase of a new bathtub and maybe a shower.

We really don't know and won't know until we have the wall down to see what we can do with the space.

Oh...another monkey wrench has been thrown into the mix. Susan is suddenly without a job. Her boss of nearly 20 years laid her off on Friday. It could be a temporary thing, perhaps a couple of months. But we are thinking we can't really wait around a couple of months for her boss to decide whether he can keep her or not.

And so...the bathroom project is on a temporary hiatus until we know what's happening with Susan and the job market. 

But that doesn't mean there isn't work to be done. Even if the downstairs portion of the remodel is on hold, we can still be working on the upstairs portion.

You see, the expansion of the bathroom involves removing the wall between the bathroom and the back staircase. We never use the back staircase and feel the space can be more efficiently used as usable living space.

So the bathroom gets larger downstairs and the back bedroom gets a nice closet upstairs.

So my project this weekend is to build a floor at the top of the stairs and maybe cut a hole in the wall for the closet door. That's pretty ambitious but let's see where we get to.

Here are a couple of pictures of what I'm starting with. An observant person might notice something unusual. There appears to be a staircase under the staircase. "WTF?", one might exclaim.

Well, when this house was a group home, they built a staircase to accommodate the code of the day over the very steep and treacherous original staircase.

So, I got to work a few weeks ago to take out the newer one.

I also got to work taking down the drywall in order to expose the walls. Here's something else to observe. The boards on the wall in the picture above are ship lath. The cover a layer of tar paper. That indicates to me that the wall there was at one time an outside wall.

This was not a surprise to us as we knew the kitchen had been added to.

This pile of razor blades fell out of the wall when I started removing the ship lath. That's because the medicine cabinet in the bathroom had a slot in it for disposing of razor blades. They just shoved them into the wall. 

I eventually got the whole wall cleaned up which gave me a crap load of wood to start cleaning up.

So cleaning up the wood was my main task today. Once again, we're going to be burning a good portion of the house this winter.

That's enough for today. We have Mom and some of her friends coming over for a nice barbecue to make up for the missed Mother's Day earlier this year.