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- Feb 12, 2020
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I have multiple projects going on all at once so I'm going to make a thread for each of them. They are not in chronological order, nor by order of importance.
The house I live in was built sometime in the 1930s or 40s (possibly even 20s). I'll save more exposition for another thread. We currently have 3 bathrooms but only one works. Two are ensuites that need major repairs/updates but the guest bathroom is the worst and the laundry room is terrible. To compound the problems, the previous owners did some terrible DIY mods and we had deadbeat tenants who did a lot of damage by tampering with electrical, plumbing, structure, and pretty much everything they could.
The guest bathroom had a wall-mount sink (which our former tenants managed to knock off the wall & break so we came back to broken drain pipes with no water in the S- trap). There's a small one-piece 30" shower and the toilet crammed in to a 23" alcove (for the record, minimum alcove size must be 30" to be to code with 15" from the center of the toilet to the nearest finished wall or fixture). We don't know if the previous owners did it or if the tenants did it, but someone mucked with the plumbing so that after the S-trapped lavatory pipe went down under the house, it branched with a black or green colored tee (looks green but could be something on it) that is NOT a sanitary tee and runs to merge with the drain from the shower. The shower does NOT have a P-trap or any trap at all. It goes straight down to the main soil pipe with a side inlet from the lav. I have to check, again, but I believe the connection is via sanitary tee on it's back instead of a wye. I suspect the tenants were the ones who screwed with the shower's plumbing because there was a horrible sewer gas smell when we came back that wasn't there when we left (we were stuck overseas for 9 years while the tenants nearly destroyed out house & property). We were constantly getting sick until put something over the shower drain and covered the broken trap from the lav-- it has a chrome-plated one-piece S-trap thing going on so it is harder to cut and cap than PVC.
The closet flange for the toilet drops down to a large sanitary tee where the side is reduced to what looks like 2" or 1-1/2". A Fernco fitting with no metal straps connects the tee's side outlet to the main vent which goes out through the roof. I believe it is roughly 13" or 14" west of the inside of the house's east wall. The bathroom door is about 24" wide, although we have taken the wall panels off on one of the sides of the room. It is currently stuffed with junk & old couch cushions. There is a heat-vent-light fan in the ceiling but it no longer works. The wiring going to the vanity light is pretty damn old and thick. The door to the bathroom is on the north of the room and to the west of the bathroom there is a hallway leading to the laundry room. The laundry room is south of the bathroom. There is an exterior door on the east side of the house north of the bathroom. The main circuit box is north of the exterior door & is perpendicular to it-- so parallel with the bathroom door. There is some electrical running from the box through the king studs & cripples for the door to a light above the door, and then going to a switch to the south.
The light was an exterior one that got knocked off in hurricane Rita & never got replaced. I've been told that the box for it was done incorrectly. We originally had a 78" steel door at the back, but it was gone when we came back & was replaced with a cheap 80" wood door but they cut in to the sill & trimmed the bottom of the door slightly to make it fit-- although it's all lopsided as what was supposed to be a header is sloped downward and is 1" lower on one side than the other (it slopes down to the north). There is no actual header for the door-- just a flat 2x4 spanning two uneven jack studs. Since it is an exterior door in a load-bearing wall, this needs to be rectified.
The laundry room is very tight and baskets have to be narrow to fit in while being carried. You can't walk through the room if the doors to the machines are open, and you can hit your butt on the wall while hitting your head on the machines when bending. We upgraded to Electrolux IQ touch washer & dryer with pedestals since our previous washer & dryer were in horrible condition. On the west side of the hallway there are two doors (one to a bedroom and the other to a small closet). There is a doorway (no door) with a curtain on the north wall going to the kitchen.
The floor in the entire area had been hardwood parquet (even in the bathroom- but hey, it was the one bathroom that didn't have carpet so that's a plus) but it was completely destroyed by the time we came back. I had to tear it all out so the flooring installer could put linoleum in. It was a nice neighbor who was a smalltime businessman who did the flooring & his helpers messed up on the laundry room. They used the wrong cut of the sheet and we ended up with a seam. There was a hole in the substrate almost all the way to the subfloor so the installer poured some white powder in it and added water to patch it, but it later broke apart when we were moving appliances around.
People in my family tend to be rather large so even if the bathroom wasn't so full of junk we can't get in, none of us can use the toilet because there is no room. No one likes having to stand up to wipe and my brother can't even move his arms if he sits on that toilet- his shoulders hit the walls. Speaking of walls, when we tore down some of the walls, we discovered the shower has no above-floor shutoffs. The cold water line is PVC and the hot water is CPVC (CPVC is fine, but PVC is no longer code approved-- I believe my state currently uses IPC 2012). I could not see where my washing machine drains to & I suspect it just dumps water under the house. Plumbing where I want to put the vanity is somewhat roughed in already for a laundry sink that never got put in, but the drain goes the opposite direction of the main line & I think it just goes to a french drain under the house.
I spent a lot of time on Houzz and other forums (like Houserepairtalk and plumbingforums & terrylove's forums) to get advice and plan. Shoutout to @Frodo for putting up with my incessant questions, drawing pictures for me, & teaching me most of what I now know about plumbing. I won't bore you with the previous iterations of my plans. Instead I'll try to get to the point and show the current layout and planned layout. We decided the best thing to swap the laundry room & bathroom so the laundry room is easier to access & the bathroom has more space than before.
I obviously will need to do better measurements when I get more walls down. My positioning of the exterior door is not quite right-- it's a couple inches north so there is more space between the door and the bathroom wall, but the current laundry room is slightly over 5' x slightly under 7'. It's enough to fit a tub against the exterior wall. The washing machine and dryer (which currently have their backs to the north wall of the laundry room) will be rotated 90° and placed with their backs to the east wall. I'll be leaving a little stub-out from the old north wall of the bathroom for electrical switches & outlets, & I'll put a shelf behind the washer and dryer to keep stuff from walling behind-- and might get the Haus Maus laundry guard or create my own version.
Apparently there is a 10,000 character limit to posts so part 2 of this post is going in the next post.
The house I live in was built sometime in the 1930s or 40s (possibly even 20s). I'll save more exposition for another thread. We currently have 3 bathrooms but only one works. Two are ensuites that need major repairs/updates but the guest bathroom is the worst and the laundry room is terrible. To compound the problems, the previous owners did some terrible DIY mods and we had deadbeat tenants who did a lot of damage by tampering with electrical, plumbing, structure, and pretty much everything they could.
The guest bathroom had a wall-mount sink (which our former tenants managed to knock off the wall & break so we came back to broken drain pipes with no water in the S- trap). There's a small one-piece 30" shower and the toilet crammed in to a 23" alcove (for the record, minimum alcove size must be 30" to be to code with 15" from the center of the toilet to the nearest finished wall or fixture). We don't know if the previous owners did it or if the tenants did it, but someone mucked with the plumbing so that after the S-trapped lavatory pipe went down under the house, it branched with a black or green colored tee (looks green but could be something on it) that is NOT a sanitary tee and runs to merge with the drain from the shower. The shower does NOT have a P-trap or any trap at all. It goes straight down to the main soil pipe with a side inlet from the lav. I have to check, again, but I believe the connection is via sanitary tee on it's back instead of a wye. I suspect the tenants were the ones who screwed with the shower's plumbing because there was a horrible sewer gas smell when we came back that wasn't there when we left (we were stuck overseas for 9 years while the tenants nearly destroyed out house & property). We were constantly getting sick until put something over the shower drain and covered the broken trap from the lav-- it has a chrome-plated one-piece S-trap thing going on so it is harder to cut and cap than PVC.
The closet flange for the toilet drops down to a large sanitary tee where the side is reduced to what looks like 2" or 1-1/2". A Fernco fitting with no metal straps connects the tee's side outlet to the main vent which goes out through the roof. I believe it is roughly 13" or 14" west of the inside of the house's east wall. The bathroom door is about 24" wide, although we have taken the wall panels off on one of the sides of the room. It is currently stuffed with junk & old couch cushions. There is a heat-vent-light fan in the ceiling but it no longer works. The wiring going to the vanity light is pretty damn old and thick. The door to the bathroom is on the north of the room and to the west of the bathroom there is a hallway leading to the laundry room. The laundry room is south of the bathroom. There is an exterior door on the east side of the house north of the bathroom. The main circuit box is north of the exterior door & is perpendicular to it-- so parallel with the bathroom door. There is some electrical running from the box through the king studs & cripples for the door to a light above the door, and then going to a switch to the south.
The light was an exterior one that got knocked off in hurricane Rita & never got replaced. I've been told that the box for it was done incorrectly. We originally had a 78" steel door at the back, but it was gone when we came back & was replaced with a cheap 80" wood door but they cut in to the sill & trimmed the bottom of the door slightly to make it fit-- although it's all lopsided as what was supposed to be a header is sloped downward and is 1" lower on one side than the other (it slopes down to the north). There is no actual header for the door-- just a flat 2x4 spanning two uneven jack studs. Since it is an exterior door in a load-bearing wall, this needs to be rectified.
The laundry room is very tight and baskets have to be narrow to fit in while being carried. You can't walk through the room if the doors to the machines are open, and you can hit your butt on the wall while hitting your head on the machines when bending. We upgraded to Electrolux IQ touch washer & dryer with pedestals since our previous washer & dryer were in horrible condition. On the west side of the hallway there are two doors (one to a bedroom and the other to a small closet). There is a doorway (no door) with a curtain on the north wall going to the kitchen.
The floor in the entire area had been hardwood parquet (even in the bathroom- but hey, it was the one bathroom that didn't have carpet so that's a plus) but it was completely destroyed by the time we came back. I had to tear it all out so the flooring installer could put linoleum in. It was a nice neighbor who was a smalltime businessman who did the flooring & his helpers messed up on the laundry room. They used the wrong cut of the sheet and we ended up with a seam. There was a hole in the substrate almost all the way to the subfloor so the installer poured some white powder in it and added water to patch it, but it later broke apart when we were moving appliances around.
People in my family tend to be rather large so even if the bathroom wasn't so full of junk we can't get in, none of us can use the toilet because there is no room. No one likes having to stand up to wipe and my brother can't even move his arms if he sits on that toilet- his shoulders hit the walls. Speaking of walls, when we tore down some of the walls, we discovered the shower has no above-floor shutoffs. The cold water line is PVC and the hot water is CPVC (CPVC is fine, but PVC is no longer code approved-- I believe my state currently uses IPC 2012). I could not see where my washing machine drains to & I suspect it just dumps water under the house. Plumbing where I want to put the vanity is somewhat roughed in already for a laundry sink that never got put in, but the drain goes the opposite direction of the main line & I think it just goes to a french drain under the house.
I spent a lot of time on Houzz and other forums (like Houserepairtalk and plumbingforums & terrylove's forums) to get advice and plan. Shoutout to @Frodo for putting up with my incessant questions, drawing pictures for me, & teaching me most of what I now know about plumbing. I won't bore you with the previous iterations of my plans. Instead I'll try to get to the point and show the current layout and planned layout. We decided the best thing to swap the laundry room & bathroom so the laundry room is easier to access & the bathroom has more space than before.
I obviously will need to do better measurements when I get more walls down. My positioning of the exterior door is not quite right-- it's a couple inches north so there is more space between the door and the bathroom wall, but the current laundry room is slightly over 5' x slightly under 7'. It's enough to fit a tub against the exterior wall. The washing machine and dryer (which currently have their backs to the north wall of the laundry room) will be rotated 90° and placed with their backs to the east wall. I'll be leaving a little stub-out from the old north wall of the bathroom for electrical switches & outlets, & I'll put a shelf behind the washer and dryer to keep stuff from walling behind-- and might get the Haus Maus laundry guard or create my own version.
Apparently there is a 10,000 character limit to posts so part 2 of this post is going in the next post.
