The Throneroom

This was one of the reasons I dreaded even thinking of remodeling. Bathrooms involve plumbing, and plumbing involves checking for leaks, as I described last time. My father taught me how to do it, and I would really enjoy it if I did not have such a negative memory about it. Just before I got married, my father had me plumb the house he was building. It was in December of 1976. I got it all done, so there were no leaks when I turned the water on. Very pleased with myself, I went home, forgetting one very important item: To turn off the water.
It got down to 20 degrees that night. As you ought to know, water freezes at 32. Of course, we were not heating the house at that time, and, you guessed it, the pipes froze, and broke in several places. When I came back the next morning, there were leaks everywhere. Some of them took months, possibly even years to find.

When I went to work on the downstairs bathroom, there had been a slow leak down there for probably half the time we had been in the house (fourteen years) The sheetrock was wet underneath the vanity, and along the whole wall, and it was black from mildew. When I touched it, it fell off the wall. Why had I not done anything about it? Because it was downstairs, out of sight. The kids might have complained a little, maybe even a lot, but until then, it fell on deaf ears.

So, when I went down there to assess the situation, I was shocked. I didn't dare to accusingly ask the kids why they hadn't said more, for fear they had and I just hadn't been listening. Mumbling unpleasantries under my breath, I yanked out the sheetrock, which makes such a huge mess, and then turned off the spigots under the sink, and ripped it out. It was a tiny little vanity that was really not big enough for full sized people. Then, with a vengeance, I came up to the shower. It was tiny, two feet by twenty inches, not really big enough for an adult. Since the bathroom was four feet wide, I couldn't see why the builders had installed such a tiny shower. I made the assumption it was to accommodate pipes that must have been behind the wall where the shower could have been.

It was a one piece, prefabricated shower stall unit, (but I don't know where they found it, unless there was a manufacturing plant in Bangladesh, where they make people really thin) and I had to destroy it to get it out of there. Since I didn't have, and never would have a place to put it anyway, I indulged myself with the youthful pleasure of destroying something, and hammered it to bits, carefully hammering when I got to the inside parts, not wanting to harm the nest of plumbing I would find in the wall.

But to my surprise, there was nothing in the wall, other than the copper piping which serviced that shower. The space between the wall and the prefab unit was empty. I had to think about it a while before I realized why.

The shower was an afterthought. Since this was in the basement, when they built the house, they had not been planning on finishing it. At some point, they had decided they would finish it, but they ended their project with the bathroom. At that point, all the doors were framed, and all the sheetrock was in place. The only shower stall that could fit through all the doors and around all the corners was the starvation unit they used.

I had bought an American Standard shower tub that happened to fit the bathroom perfectly, and which the designer of the house had in mind when he or she drew up the dimensions. I had to shim it in a few places, and had to cut back the firring on the outside wall (remember, this was a basement) but Murphy's law taken into consideration, it went in smoothly. Then I put Hardy Backer (cement board) on the walls, then tiled the whole thing with twelve inch tile. This particular tile cost about $1.15 per tile at Home Depot, in a very nice color. I made the joints tight, and I extended the tile a foot beyond the shower. After it was grouted and cleaned up, it looked really good. We bought a shower door at Lowe's, and it operated smoothly, better than any shower door I'd ever had dealings with. By the time I was finished, my attitude about the shower had completely transformed. I wanted to take my showers downstairs. Only the knowledge that it wouldn't be terribly long before the upstairs was just as nice kept me from doing it.

There was nothing wrong with the toilet, except it was in an unacceptable bathroom, so I replaced it. The new one was an American Standard, using less water per flush, and it was more comfortable than the old one had been. I replaced the needed sheetrock, then put in a toilet topper cabinet for toilet paper, reading material, Game Boys or whatever else people need for entertainment while they're multi-tasking on the wall above the toilet. It looked nice too.
Then I turned my attention to the vanity. It had sat in a space wide enough to accommodate a four foot sink, but we decided on something else. Since this was the bathroom the kids would ordinarily use, we thought it might be nice if we put in two vanities, with a dressing mirror. The plumbing was a little tricky, but I accomplished it. Both sinks worked perfectly. We ordered a special 16 inch countertop to go between the two vanities, and I installed a little bit of tile over the countertop. A girl could sit on the stool, look in the mirror and do her makeup, hair, or whatever else she does that takes a half hour. I put in a large mirrored cabinet on the other wall, so girls sitting on the little stool could see the backs of their heads, just to make sure everything was all right.

Of course, I didn't think of any of this. When I say 'we' in the above paragraph, I really mean 'my wife.' I only said 'we' because even though it was her idea, I had to put it in.

But this does bring up an important point. If you ever decide to build a house or remodel, don't presume you can do it without any outside input. When you are working on areas of the house where your spouse spends more time than you do, (and for most men the only place they might spend more time is one specific place in the bathroom, or the garage) let your spouse give you input about her desires. Some of them may not be possible, but most of them will be, if you allow yourself a little imagination. It's true. And the nicest thing is, when you get done, you'll have a wife that is really happy, and she'll tell you multiple times. And you can get some good mileage out of that.

The last thing we changed in the bathroom was the flooring. When we moved into the house, there was carpet on all the bathroom floors. I don't know everyone that lived in the house before we did, but I can see only three possibilities. Either the bathroom floors stunk all the time, no men lived in the house, or they had been trained to go sitting down. There isn't a man alive, from whatever age he learns to do it outside the diaper through youth and middle age, up through dotage, who hits a dead ringer every time, without dribbles, in spite of the ample target. Not only that, toilets flood sometimes, and showers or baths splash out on the carpet. Who in their right mind carpets a bathroom? Either an idiot or a terrible optimist.

Needless to say, I had taken the carpet out soon after we arrived. Underneath it, I found, to my great surprise-- linoleum. Perfectly acceptable linoleum. I think there was a fad in the eighties, somehow created by the carpet lobby, for carpeted bathrooms.

So we bought a nice piece of linoleum that matched the tile in the shower and installed it. We bought a type that is weighted to sit where it is placed without glue. It cost about seven dollars a square foot, but once it was in place, it looked great. More than anything else we had done, it transformed the bathroom. From being a place where we never allowed guests to go, it became the first room we showed off. I had torn out walls, replaced sheetrock, replumbed three fixtures, tiled and linoleumed, placed vanities and other cabinets, redone the baseboard, rehung a couple doors that had holes where kids had kicked them when their siblings had barricaded themselves in the bathroom, redone the door trim, textured the ceiling (after I had patched it with a two by three foot piece of sheetrock) where a large hole had developed from a leak in the upstairs bathroom, (I fixed the leak, of course) and just for good measure, changed the light fixtures.
It was a new room, and especially compared to what it had been, it looked spectacular. I might have grumbled when I started it, but I was very happy when I was finished. And, it may be just my fancy, but it seemed like my kids stayed cleaner. I'm positive the backs of my daughters' heads were in better order.