Today we pulled the inside off what was the exterior wall of the old bathroom. In the photo below, you can see the sink to the right and just the slightest bit of one corner of the tub on the left, behind the door. (The intent is to replace the tub with the laundry machines that are now in the kitchen, so we're leaving the tiled walls that used to be around the tub as a surround for the machines.)

Here we have made a few discoveries. In no particular order:

- All that crap on the floor used to be insulation inside the wall. It seems to be of the old cellulose-fiber type that prevailed before fiberglass became popular, after years of accumulating dust and water damage. It's disgusting and hard to clean up, and I hope to hell it isn't asbestos, because I can feel the tickle of dust in the back of my throat even now, hours after we stopped mucking about in there and shut the door.

- See that lighter wood around and below the window? It appears there used to be a larger window there, which was replaced by that smaller one. This was probably done when that corner of the kitchen was walled off and turned into a bathroom. There was no insulation in that newer area, which is what led us to think that the wall was completely uninsulated when we took the recessed toilet paper holder out of the wall--there was just an empty space behind it.

- Note how all the older wood is black? That's because it's all, without exception, rotten. There has been a lot of water flowing inside that wall over the years. This is not completely surprising, because that part of the house used to have chronic trouble with ice dams in the winter, though I only ever saw evidence of them on the other side of the building. It's stopped happening since I had the roof redone in metal a few years ago, but evidently it went on for a long time.

- Apart from some old tin foil, some quarter-inch cladding, and the vinyl siding, there is nothing else there. The exterior wall is basically just the siding and the flimsy plywood it's attached to. Coupled with the rotten framework, this means we're basically going to have to build a new wall there before we can put a door in it. It also calls into question the structural integrity of the rest of that side of the house, at least on the single-story level. So that's... nice.

In the medium term, what this means is that our original plan of "get everything ready, remove the window, cut a larger hole, and put in the door" isn't going to work. We're going to have to figure out a way to go for multiple days with a hole in the house there, because we won't be able to take out the window, completely reconstruct the wall, and then install a door in a single operation.

Old houses, man. It's always something.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.