Old House Handyman: Shower makeover doesn't dampen bathroom renovation
There’s nothing like a shower to start the New Year, especially if yours has been out of commission for the past nine months.
Our Daughter No. 2 bought a century-old house in July 2022 and spent about six months getting it ready for move-in. Regular readers of this column might remember that within a few months of calling it home sweet home, her upstairs bathroom developed a leak.
We chased it for days before deciding that we needed to tear up the floor to find the leak, which is when we found some scary plumbing and even scarier structural issues caused by plumbers who had hacked through floor joists to install pipes decades ago.
Our daughter’s plumber summed it up during an initial inspection: “Don’t stand in that bathtub unless you want to end up in your kitchen.”
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Thus began nine months of hard work by a host of friends, neighbors and a wonderfully efficient plumber. At the center of all this activity was our daughter, the planner and project manager by trade, who knows what she wants and figures out ways to make it happen. And she does not shy from a difficult path to her goals.
This is the child who, when she was 2 or 3, decided what to wear each day based on what she thought was pretty. That meant some days she wore a striped shirt with a polka-dotted skirt and mismatched socks so brightly colored they could light up an airport runway.
Her taste is much refined these days, as is evident in the new bathroom. She redesigned the room, picked out the plumbing and lighting fixtures, and decided on the tile for the shower surround.
Which brings me to one of those difficult paths.
The shower space is complicated by the fact that it has a window in the middle of the long wall above the tub. If not for that, a person seeking the easy path (me, for example) would have picked a molded acrylic shower surround and would have had it installed months ago. And even with the window, which was a common vent for a bathroom in the days before vent fans, I think we could have found a way to cut a window hole in a surround.
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So, our daughter chose to tile the shower walls. And she picked what I would call a complicated pattern — especially for someone who had never done tiling before. Adding to the degree of difficulty, she chose to install wall coves with shelves for soap, shampoo, conditioner and razors. And each one of these little nooks required tiles with edges and — oy! — lots of cutting and patience that I don’t have.
I helped when asked, but only to do things such as cut bull-nose edges for the nooks, to come by every once in a while and say, “Nice job!” and welcome her several times a week when she came to our house to use the shower.
To her credit, she did as her dad did years ago, and she asked experts for their advice. She did a lot of research. She either bought or borrowed the right tools. She exercised immense patience. And she saved a lot of money by doing so much of the work herself and with the help of family and friends.
And she started off the New Year with the satisfaction of taking a shower in her own house.
Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.
@youroldhouse