The Nest's Bathroom Rennovation 2016-2017

Our 2016 Bathroom Rennovation To The Nest

Our latest rennovations have been to our new old house - The Nest - a two bedroom, one bath bungalow in Mount Dora. It was built circa 1925, at least, we're pretty sure it was. The records say it was built in 1925, but there was this fire, a fire that destroyed all of the records previous to 1925. But I digress...

For most of this, I wasn't able to capture the "drama" as the story unfolded, so the details are looking back over a year ago. Unfortunately, I also have a tendency to jump in and start doing and demolishing things before I remember to take before pictures, as is the case here for the removal of the old oil furnace. It was covered over by a hatch in the hallway floor. I could have sworn I had pictures of it, but I think that when I copy pictures from my phone to the computer, I just look at the last date copied, and not the entire set of pictures, missing some in the process.

In any case, I do have plenty other before pictures of the demolition of pretty much the entire bathroom. I mean down to the studs and see the dirt on the ground beneath where the floor used to be. It was in that bad of shape. We would wonder if we were going to fall through the floor and end up on the ground when using the toilet. Hopefully that's not TMI, but it gives you an idea of how bad the condition of the bathroom was. So our original plan is to get started over Thankgiving break, then finish up over Christmas break.

Our revised plan is to open up that hatch and get an idea of how much demolition it's going to take before Thanksgiving so that we're ready to start demolition by then. At the time we had no idea there was still an oil furnace down there, but we did know we needed to jack up the bathroom "wet" wall and level and support the beams over the pier that had "tilted" such that it was no longer supporting them. We knew from the home inspection report before we bought the house that pier needed some attention as well as a leak in the waste line plastic into the old cast iron plumbing and stack.

Our hope was to gain access to these problem areas without having to totally tear up the floor all at once. So armed with a putty knife and a prybar, I gingerly coaxed bits and pieces of the hatch border out of the way. Eventually I was able to expose the nails in the tongues of the flooring and remove all of the pieces, only to reveal our next challenge, the old oil furnace. I thought it had already been removed when I found to old oil line and sediment bowl on the side of the house where the oil tank must have been in the past. No such luck...

I tried rocking it back and forth. At first it wouldn't budge, but eventually I was able to get it moving pretty good, just not enough to free it from whatever connections still held it in place. I didn't know what else to do but cut it out. Then I got the news that I'd be travelling on business the following week, the week before Thanksgiving. Their timing sucked, and looking back at this project that I was still working on the beginning of 2018, we could have flown there the week before and been just as close to finished... Never in my life have I ever seen two grown men so disdainful of each other, openly cutting each other down with insults, each absolutely hateful toward the other.

So while I'm still out of town, I have our son Nick pick up a #14 power metal shear from Horrible Freight and a set of replacement blades for it, just in case. When I'm finally back from the business trip, I get to work cutting that monster out of there, shaking my head that there isn't an easier way. Piece by sharp, ragged edged metal piece, I cut it out of there. I pretty much have to cut the sides off of it a little at a time all the way down to the base, or at least as close as I can get to the base, where the burner is getting in the way of any more cutting. I'm able to disconnect it from the stove pipe exhaust that runs over the ground and out the side of the house through the foundation blocks to the chimney. From there I'm able to lean the base over, disconnect the burner from the fuel line, and extract what's left of it, after folding it up some to clear the opening in the floor that is.

(23 November 2016)
Now that it's out, let's have a look under there... OMG, really? Someone seriously thought this was a good idea? I think that probably happened shortly after they installed the oil furnace. I mean the installers would have cut out the hatch in the floor to begin with, crippling the floor joists that now needed that half-@$$ed support they made for it. I mean what did they care, wasn't their house, right? And after all, their job was to install an oil furnace, not do a bunch of carpentry and stuff. Probably about the time the were pounding that last nail into the hatch, walking over it to pick up their tools and leave, right after they heard that loud crack! So that's going to need fixed, but let's have more of a look around under here first, shall we?

Looking at that pier under the area where the floor and the wet wall have settled, I can clearly see why. The pier has somehow managed to shift and lean downhill towards the old cast iron plumbing, right around where it was supposedly leaking, so right away I'm thinking the leak is much worse than we thought. On second thought, it looks like it's been that way for quite some time, as if the someone that found it that way figured chucking a chunk of wood between the block and the beams would be better than doing nothing at all, which was obviously their first choice. That would have been the someone that replumbed the bathroom, the cause of the leak to begin with, so something else must be going on here.

I'll get to that and more next in the demolition section. I will attempt to use this page as an overview, as I capture the details in each of the following sections.