Another Blast From the Past

The winter after we bought the house and had painted the kitchen just to have some fresh paint to look at disaster struck! I believe it was February, and an extremely cold night, we awoke to the sound of rushing water. A pipe had burst in the maid's room where we had removed the second floor kitchen and capped off the pipe to the former sink and there was water everywhere. It had been running for a while and had run through the wall to outside and down, covering the kitchen window, through the floor to the kitchen ceiling below, and on through the kitchen floor to the basement. It was so cold that the water had frozen on the back (interior) stairway and I almost went flying through the door to the kitchen on my way to the basement to shut off the water. (The FO's in their infinite wisdom had not installed any shutoffs in this kitchen.)


We did little plumbing work the next day and a lot of cleaning. The water had made a real mess in the kitchen, pouring through the ceiling and even getting into the cabinet and ruining my drawer of recipes. We took pictures and this is our card for the next Christmas.



The next year we had gutters and downspouts installed. There had not been any on the house for quite some time and you would not believe the amount of water that rushes off a house with a roof pitch like mine!
Sometime after that we started work in earnest on the maid's room. We took out the rest of the plumbing and the falling plaster and discovered that the exterior wall was rotted because of the lack of downspouts and gutters. We removed the rotted windows, one a replacement because the original had rotted. (Duh!) We removed the rotted sheathing and real 2x4's and kept the rest of the wall jacked up with one of our handy Model T jacks. I love these things and buy them whenever I see them. They keep coming in handy for times like these.

We doubled up on the studs and re-sheathed the wall.


I had windows made to match the originals and we installed them and insulated the wall. When I finish this room it will be the only insulated room on the second floor.

On the other side of the left-hand wall is the upstairs bathroom. The plan is to take out that wall and make a nice big bathroom. On the right of the windows is a closet where a washer/dryer stacked unit will go and I will learn plumbing and hook everything up so it drains correctly to the stack without having to put in another stack. The plan is to put my nice '20's pedestal sink in front of the left-hand window and a deep old porcelain wall-hung sink under the other window for laundry purposes. The tub will go along the wall opposite the windows with the head at the chimney. For heat I hope to find a wall unit like the ones you used to see in bathrooms that runs on gas and doesn't need to be vented. I have some old porch posts and gingerbread salvaged from a house in my neighborhood that I plan to use to separate the laundry functions from the bathroom functions somehow. I also want one of those nifty built-in ironing boards and one of these.
Oh yeah, I plan to make interior storm windows from some salvaged patterned glass for privacy. The toilet will stay in the old bathroom and I'll break into the wall under the attic stairs and put in storage shelves and drawers.