Almost as soon as we arrived, the plumber had to put a hole in the living room ceiling to repair the shower in youngest daughter’s bathroom.  Much like the music room, this began as a small hole to see what was going on and slowly more and more needed to be opened.  We soon discovered that the radiator in her room also was in need of repair.  We had the option of through the floor or through the ceiling.  Since the ceiling was already opened we went in that way.  Eventually the hole had to extend into the coved ceiling.  We all worried that we would not be able to repair the cove in the plaster work.  Although I seem to have not taken a picture before the work began, I do have this picture of the patch.  It may not look like it,  but this was a rather large corner of the living room ceiling that is missing.

The dust and sometimes water that came out of the hole made me crazy all summer.  It has been an impossible job to eradicate the dust.  Now that we have the hole covered I am hopeful that my daily dusting will be a little easier.

The repair came out great.  We will need to repaint the ceiling (and maybe skim coat the whole thing) but once that is done I don’t think anyone will ever be able to tell this was patched.

We talked about all the damage done on the first floor music room.  We have nearly finished the restoration work there.

The room had some funky metallic and orange wallpaper.  You can’t tell from the photo but there was plaster crumbling behind the paper above the confessional window (have I mentioned our home has a confessional?!) above the built in leaded glass cabinets on both sides of the room and visible damage on the ceiling.  The ceiling is clearly not original and while the period art deco chandelier is pretty, it doesn’t fit with the home’s architecture.  We put the room on the to do list.

Soon we discovered most of the problems here came from the leaking plumbing in the master shower.  So we had to open up the ceiling:

Then open  it some more:

Eventually we had to remove the whole ceiling, actually there were at least four ceilings.

My guess is whenever the water damage got noticeable or perhaps when an owner decided to sell the house they didn’t fix the problem but covered up the ceiling with a new one.  In the process we found the original lay out for the ceiling and the painted canvas mural that was original on the ceiling.

The plumber found the first pieces and we were shocked to discover most of the mural was still intact.  We made the decision to try to take the ceiling back up to its original height.  This was made a little complicated due to the plumbing repairs we had made.  We couldn’t restore the ceiling to the original height with just the corners dropped down.  The plumber actually suggested having the center of the ceiling at its original height and adding a cove or tray to the edges that would give the room a more modern look and hide the plumbing.  We thought it was a great solution and moved forward with the plan.  We decided to put can lights in the tray to highlight the cabinets and doors and not put a center light back in since there was not one here originally

We still need to paint and plan to add trim and a rope light around the tray. Here is how it came out:

My sister was an art major in college and she thinks she can recreate the ceiling mural in the tray.  I am looking forward to seeing if we can do that and think it would be so great. I wonder how long it has been since anyone has seen that original mural? It will be great to restore that piece of the home’s history.

There has been a lot of action at our home in the last few weeks.  The kids are all back in school and we have been hosting family from both coasts and from another country.

Our home is far from completed and is still in fact a construction zone but we did manage to knock a few items off the list before all the guests arrived.

The biggest project to come off the to do list was the completion of the third floor bathroom.  The bathroom that was here when we bought the house looks like it came from a 1970 mobile home.  Really, it was that bad.

This little bath was wedged in under the rafters.  You stepped up one step from the narrow hall into this nightmare.  There is carpet on the floor and none of the fixtures is working.  Rather than remodel this awkward and ugly space we decided to convert the smallest of the four third floor bedrooms into a new bathroom.  They say bathrooms and kitchens are good investments and I don’t think having eight bedrooms instead of nine will negatively impact our home value.

The project was a great success.  We are really pleased with how everything turned out.  There are still a few loose ends to finish, trim pieces to put back up, a new light fixture in the toilet room but it certainly made having guests here easier.

There are still plenty of bathrooms that need some attention but it was nice to have the third floor one completed.  All the other full bathrooms in this house are en suites so this is the only bathroom that is accessible from a hallway.  Much nicer option for guests than to have to go through someone’s bedroom to get to a shower.  Oddly, the master bath will also have hallway access once it is finished.  Work is under way on that one again this week and we may finally have a master shower by the weekend!

I explained the trouble we had with the master shower pipes and floor pan leaking into the music room.  We had made a bit of progress inside the bathroom getting the shower rebuilt.  This project seems to be one step forward and two steps back at almost every turn.  Unfortunately, I failed to get a picture of the shower prior to demo.

We had hoped to be able to reuse at least a portion of the marble in the new shower.  We contacted nearly everyone we could find to get a quote to polish and cut the old marble.  Waiting to figure this out has kept this project at a standstill for nearly a month. Only one quote came back.  The price tag? $3,500!  This would only put marble on the bottom three feet of the new tile shower. The marble is old and nobody wants to cut it.  It is also nearly an inch thick. As much as we had hoped to reuse the original marble and have it be a feature in the updated bath it just isn’t in our budget.  Our plumbing and heating problems have dipped into a lot of our renovation budget.

So off we went to the tile store.  Deciding what to put in was a difficult task.  The bathroom has the original cream subway tiles on the walls and a black and hex tile that is not original on the floor.  (The original floor was, you guessed it: marble! At some point it was tiled OVER)  Modern tile will not match either of these.  We decided to do a more contemporary shower so it doesn’t look like we tried to match the existing features and fell short.  Hopefully we will have tile up by the end of the week to show you.

We took a week off and enjoyed our vacation.  We are now back home and ready to tackle the challenges of repairing and restoring our home.  Everything came to a screeching halt while we were away.  First order of business, get the master bath in working order.  The antique tub is the only functioning fixture in the room at this time.  The master bath is an active construction site at the moment so you can’t even enjoy the tub.

The plumbing problems have been the most challenging thing we have dealt with so far.  When the previous owners had the water turned off to the house we should have suspected there were problems.  They kept promising that all plumbing would be in good working order before closing and all work was being completed by a licensed plumber.  Four days before we closed we finally discovered that the plumber had not completed any of the repairs he was paid to do and most of the plumbing was not in working order.  In fact out of 36 fixtures in the house (toilet, faucet) only three were actually working.  The sellers had contracted another plumbing company to complete the work and gave us the money to pay them out of their proceeds of the sale.  We went forward with the purchase and hoped for the best.

We moved in two weeks later and had only slightly more functioning fixtures.  In fact, the first two weeks here a cold shower or a hot bath were your options. My kitchen faucet leaked (still does) and the sink didn’t drain.  The washing machine drained into the kitchen sink which did not drain.  I am sure you can imagine how that worked out!  Some sinks had cold water, only one had hot.  Four of the six toilets were working, that was a plus.  Where there was hot water it took 20-30 minutes of running the water to get it to the faucet because of the way the plumbing runs in the basement.  The water goes a long way before it reaches its destination!

The good news is much of the plumbing is now functioning.  The bad news is most of it is not functioning that well.  The master bath is the current priority.  Hopefully this week that project will pick up speed and get wrapped up.

We returned home from vacation relaxed but the restored part has a long way to go!