We’ve been doing a lot of complete bathroom renovations the last few months, so I wanted to write about what it is we are doing.

First there’s the issue of protection. We live in an area where most of the houses are old, and have been remodeled at least once, so there can be a lot of layers of bathroom to remove. And remove we do. We take it all, right down to the studs and subfloor, or floor joists. If we are going to put in a bathroom that’s going to last for a good long while, we really need to get right down to the framing. Adding more layers of finish on top of other questionable finishes is just going to cause trouble down the road. That trouble may happen well past our warranty period, but we have a lot of pride in what we do and don’t want our clients to have any problems for a long time. We have to do a lot of protection of the rest of the house for when we rip off all those layers. We cover floors that we have to cross with a cardboard like floor protection material, and then put plywood on top of that, all taped down. We close up our route to the outside with plastic, and plastic walls with zippers when we need them. We spend a lot of time doing this. Our goal is no dust in the rest of the house.  Period. We just finished a bathroom for a client who has serious sensitivities to dust and chemical smells, and while she couldn’t stay in the house while we did the work, I’m happy to report we did keep all her rooms clean!

Next is framing. If the floor isn’t level, we fix it. If the walls aren’t straight, we straighten them. When we’re done we want everything to be as level and square as we can get it!  We reinforce the floors to fix all the old damage that was done in the past by leaks, trades or bugs. We are just in the process of finishing a bathroom where we basically found no floor joists left. Due to inadequate repairs that had been performed in the past, the shower had been leaking for years into the condo below, doing who knows what damage, and leading to an infestation of ants, which we had treated while it was all ripped out.

Next we make sure that the plumbing is all up to date. We remove any old lead, brass or galvanized piping, and replace it with new PVC pipe and fittings, making sure that everything is vented as it needs to be. We replace any old water piping with copper tubing. No, we still aren’t using PEX tubing. I think I’ll give it a few more years to see what problems might develop with it. We’ve already seen some squirrels eat through it in a house in Brookline, twice, causing a lot of damage to the second floor apartment.

We do whatever heating is needed. In the bath we are just finishing, the heat is one pipe steam. The original radiator was a wall hung cast iron type, but someone had come along and replaced it with a plain piece of pipe, hammering out a bunch of tiles in the process. We actually found a wall hung type of radiator and had it sandblasted and refinished and installed it to bring the bathroom back to what it once was.

The electrician is next.  The new code requires a separate feed for the bathroom, so we take care of that, and install a ceiling fan that is so quiet you can hardly tell when it’s running. Most of the time that is a fan, light and nightlight combination. We install a receptacle and a light over the mirror, with everything on separate switches. And that exhaust fan gets vented outside.

Next time I’ll write about the rest of the process.

Let me tell you a few stories.

We went to look at a leaking waste pipe in  the basement of one condo, it was a converted two family house, so there were only two units. The leak was in an old cast iron drain that served both units, kitchens and bathrooms. The leak was fairly active, and kind of disgusting. We gave our client a price, and she was going to approve it. We would have had it fixed that day or the next, as it was leaking sewage into the basement. She just said that she had to talk to the other owner and then we could come and fix it, please. Well, as you might have guessed, when she talked to the other owner he really didn’t care that much about it. First, he hadn’t really been aware of it, as I guess he didn’t use the basement. Second he didn’t think he should pay for it. And third, he said if he did have to pay for it, he would find someone cheaper!  The last I talked to her, the pipe still wasn’t fixed. Was she going to have to take her housemate to court? Was she going to have to put up with some butt crack plumber making a mess of her basement and leaving his trash behind?  Who knows! This is one aspect of condo living!

We had a top floor client who house mates didn’t want to pay for a new roof. After all, it wasn’t leaking on them!

Multi family condos

Recently we’ve been trying to deal with a client’s problems  whose heat freezes when it’s really cold out. The problem is, she is the top of three floors, and the chairman of the condo association lives below her and isn’t interested in helping her fix it. He would barely even turn up his heat to try to thaw it (we aren’t sure if he did turn it up- he was very rude to us and we weren’t able to go into his unit to see). The problem is, her pipes run up his wall, and any fixing of her problem will probably involve some demo in his unit. Does she have the right to do it? Of course she does, as it is a common heating system and it needs to be fixed. The question is, what is she going to go through to get that done? Now the management company is involved, so we have no idea what will happen, and we have no standing with the management company, so we won’t be in there looking out for our client, which is where we want to be. Who knows what will happen.

I don’t mean to be completely negative. After all, it’s the only way that many people in Massachusetts can afford to get into the housing market. I just want you all to be aware of some of the potential pitfalls of condo living. I’ll probably tell you more stories another time. What I won’t be telling you about are all the condos that do work out OK for people. After all, happy stories aren’t that entertaining.

Caveat Emptor!!