Every bathroom needs it’s own 20 Amp circuit, so the electrician ran a new wire down to the panel in the basement, and replaced all the wiring to the bathroom. We installed a new fan and light combination, which is ducted through the attic to the outside.

New electrical box

In renovations, things that aren’t planned for do happen. A defective fitting on one of the new shower valve stops leaked into the kitchen below. It made a stain, but didn’t do any other damage. I had my  painter stain kill and paint that ceiling.  Hey, there are going to be problems in renovations. It’s not weather you have any problems, you probably will, it’s how your contractor deal with them that’s important.  We just fixed it.

We also replaced all the plumbing that we could get to. This included new hot and cold copper water piping to the basemen, and replacing all the drain piping that we could get to.

New drain tied into old

We replaced the drains and water piping for the sink and toilet

And we replaced the drains and water piping for the tub/shower, adding valves for future servicing, since there weren’t any there, but there is already an access panel

New bathub and shower piping

We then installed new plywood on the floor and set the cast iron bathtub in place. We installed backing in the whole side wall, since the owner wants a grab bar but hasn’t picked it out yet.

We closed up the walls with wallboard, and cement board and are tiling the bathroom now.

Under the floor before cleanup

Under drum trap before cleanup

We then proceeded to de-nail the walls and floor, and then to clean up under the floor, at the base of the walls, over the door and window, etc. This is before we ripped out the old plumbing, or really before any other work. After all, who wants to work in a mess?:

Under the floor after the cleanup

As you can see, the plumbing wastes were old lead drum traps. There were actually a couple of spots that had started leaking, although it wasn’t showing down stairs:

Lead drum trap after cleanup

Drum trap after vacuming

In the next installment, I’ll show you what we did to upgrade the plumbing.

Hey, it’s blowing my own horn a bit, but I recieved a nice testimonial from a customer I’ve had for 30 or so years and I wanted to share it.

This is from Rona from Cambridge:

“Dennis Foley has helped me renovate a small Queen Anne house in North Cambridge over the past thirty years.  He has installed garbage disposals and dishwashers; he has gutted and rebuilt the kitchen, two bathrooms, and assorted other rooms; he has replaced hot water tanks and toilet stacks, installed a wood-burning stove, and reclaimed a front porch – so I guess you can say that he has done it all – even including the kitchen sink!

Dennis is particularly creative in solving problems encountered in old houses – somehow, he has always been able to find relatively simple solutions to what seem to be insoluble problems.  He understands budgeting constraints and he has always been willing to think through alternative approaches and to identify trade-offs that can help lower costs.  I have long relied on his judgment about where the money needs to be spent on any given project.

The quality of Dennis’s work has never varied – the plumbing doesn’t leak, the windows don’t leak, the chimney doesn’t leak.  Those are strong statements since some of the work is now twenty to thirty years old.  He has always been honest and straightforward and accountable and most importantly, accessible in an emergency.  I wouldn’t trust my home to anyone else.”

This is the reason for my tag line, “A Name You Can Trust!”. I may not always be perfect, and I have been wrong a few times, but you can trust we always have YOUR best interests at heart.

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!!

Dennis Foley Plumbing is a flat rate plumbing contractor. That means that we will give you a price in advance for just about anything that we do, and we expect to get paid the same day.

Standard Water Heater

To help illustrate what a flat rate contractor is, let me tell you a few stories.

Here is a typical burst water heater call that many of you have put in to a plumber in the past. Let’s say he’s a good one and calls you back promptly. He comes to your house, takes a look, maybe makes a few phone calls, leaves and returns either that day or the next, with a new water heater. He disconnects the old one, installs the new one during which he realizes that he’s missing a part. He leaves to get that part, returns promptly, finishes the job, takes the old water heater with him and leaves. Hey, I said he was a good one. He called you back, did the job promptly, took his trash with him and completed the job in a timely manner. There is one big problem though. You have no idea of what the bill is going to be. You don’t know if you’re going to pay for the first visit, the return visit, the extra trip to the supply house, you don’t know what was included and what was extra, you don’t know if taking the old heater costs more, and you have no idea when you’ll get a bill in the mail! Sound familiar? If you’ve used a good plumber it will. I know, because I was that good plumber. My customers used to call me up and ask for the bill! When I was busy I wouldn’t bill for more than a month for smaller jobs, sometimes more. And my customers didn’t know what I was charging them, and when. Often I had to go back and figure out what I was charging them myself. I didn’t know either.

Contrast that to what we do as flat rate plumbers. First, we strive to always have our phones answered by a person. Sometimes it might be an answering service, but they always let us know when someone calls. Then we explain that there is a $49 dispatch fee, and that the plumber or technician will tell you the cost after they look over the problem. He arrives, looks at the water heater and gives you a price. You know the cost in advance. Many times he’ll have what he needs to do the job on his truck, and will do it right then, and you know the cost in advance. He explains what is included in the job, and let’s you know if any thing not included needs to  be repaired. And you know that potential extra cost in advance. He starts the water heater and realizes that his truck is missing an essential bit of hardware. He has to go to the supply house to get it, but you know it’s not costing you anything extra, because you know the cost in advance. He finishes, cleans up and takes the old water heater, which you know was included in the cost, and collects the money. You knew at all times what was happening, and what the cost was. That is flat rate. Hey, we’ll show you the prices in the book anytime you want!

I can tell you  more stories. Here’s another one about water heaters. One of our customers decided to have Home Cheapo install a water heater for them. Hey, it was 30% less than the cost my plumber quoted. I do understand that motivation, I’m not rich either. To keep the story short I’ll tell you the outcome. He didn’t have hot water for 2 weeks. There were many trips to his house, and many extras, to the point where the cost ended up being over $300 more than our quote. Of course, they would have hot water in few hours if they had given us the job. Just check out Yelp to get some feedback about Cheapo Depot plumbers. You do get what you pay for.

Here’s another one. We had to replace a back outlet power flush toilet. We hate them, and our toilet company doesn’t make them. We quoted the job and installed the new one. There were so many problems with it that we had to return the first one and install another one. There were so many problems with that one that we returned it and installed a third one from a different manufacturer. The customer paid the original quote for the plumbing. That’s it. Hey, we gave him a price and we stood by it

In the price book there is a list of value rates. Those are the discounted rates that the The Denny Club members pay.

Thanks for listening. Sorry I don’t have any pictures of money!