The Money Pit

When we decided to buy a place we considered (for about a second) buying a fixer-upper. I harbored dreams of restoring someplace, of gracing a hulking burned out shell with my good taste and to be learned on the job handiness, and of a type of urban homesteading that someone who is bored with their job can dream about. My husband, saw nothing but trouble and quickly swung our real estate agent in the direction of historic but in good shape homes.

When we bought our place, we knew it had character and that it was in excellent shape and I thought it would remain quirky with cosmetic issues forever. That was very naive of me. In addition to the apartment being over 100 years old, the previous owner was a bit of an urban homesteader, DIYer himself and we're now dealing with those delusions of gradeur in this bathroom project.

It's hard to know what work he did himself and what was done in the 1984 conversion but here are some pictures of our soon to be ex-bathroom:



Here's an overall shot. You can see that we have really nice light in the room from a huge window. There are also very high ceilings. That's about all the nice parts. You can see how uneven the tile is in the bathtub area and how awkward the toilet is as it juts out into the room. The mouldings around the tub are completely rotted and someone painted the grout on the floor at some point and it's now grey.

When the contractor came to look for sources of leaks he pointed to the tub/shower fixtures, cracked grout, old silicone caulk, illogical plumbing on the sink, and the world's weirdest and poorly installed toilet.



The vanity/sink was on it's way to be replaced anyway since the doors are falling off and it's installed in a way that makes it impossible to clean.


The world's most basic lighting fixture and medicine cabinet that was hung incorrectly and now gapes open.



Ah, the toilet. You can see the half-inch gap between the toilet and the wall, the missing bolts, and insulating foam that was sprayed in there to compensate for the fact that it wasn't set into the wall properly. I don't want to blame the previous owner for all of the mess here. The room drops a full inch from the tub to the toilet, a consequence of settling. The plumbing juts out of the wall instead of the floor meaning that any toilet that goes in there will be loyal to the wall and not the ceiling.

The toilet itself inspired one of my favorite quotes "This is the type of toilet you install if you have very serious health problems or need to flush large buckets of golf balls." Given our delicate plumbing, this thing should never have made it through the front door.

There's also no ventilation in the bathroom, which we can fix when the roof is replaced. Did I mention that we need to completely replace the roof?