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.

In your kitchen, you can clean your dishwasher by running a load with only white vinegar and water , or you can buy cleaning products for the dishwasher to clear out the lines. This might be important for your health!

The disposal can use a cleaning. If you mix 1/4 cup of vinegar and water and run it through the disposal, it will clear out any built up grease. Then you can run a cup full of ice with not water to sharpen the teeth, add a cap of cooking oil after that and run it until it sounds smooth.

In the bathroom, you can put a dye tablet, or a little food coloring in the tank to make sure you aren’t wasting water. Just put 5 drops or so into the tank and wait an hour. If it’s leaking, the water in the bowl will get colored and the toilet will need some repair. You can save thousands of gallons of water this way.

If it’s not flushing as good as it used to, it may be because the wholes up under the rim are clogged with mineral deposits. This can be a nasty job to get clean, but it will allow the toilet to perform better. You should use something like Shaw’s Pads to remove any rings that have built up over the year in the bowl. Just make sure whatever product you use won’t hurt the finish of the toilet.

All the junk, small particles, minerals, even in some areas tiny bits of leaves, get lodged in the faucet aerators. If you’re experiencing reduced flow from a faucet, particularly if it’s from both tht hot and the cold, you might just find the aerator needs a good cleaning.

One of my customers removes her shower head once a year and soaks it overnight in vinegar to clear out the mineral deposits. If you don’t want to remove the head, or don’t have those skills, I’ve heard of hanging a plastic bag with vinegar over the head to do the same thing. This sounds a little tricky, and if you try it be careful of spilling the vinegar in your face! I’d like to know if this works, so if you co it, send me a message about your results.

In the basement, it’s a good idea to flush some of the water out of your water heater. Sediment precipitates out of the water due to it’s being heated, and it’s that sediment that eats out the lining of the water heater. Just run a few buckets of water out of the drain to help the water heater last. For those of you with tankless heaters, you should have your plumber descale the unit once a year. Why not in the spring?

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.

The next time you’re at your sister in laws house and see a plunger sitting out in the open beside the toilet, you might want to have them give us a call! We sell and install Toto toilets, in a variety of shapes, colors and sizes, that really flush quite well. In fact, they flush so well that we will offer a full refund to anyone that has a legitimate complaint about how they function. No one has ever collected it. Our most popular shape and size is a Drake toilet that comes in comfort height, which is a few inches higher than the old toilets. It’s good for all our aging knees! The toilet seat has a soft close mechanism that prevents the lid from slamming.The Drake uses a later generation of flush valves that really flushes well.

I have 2 Toto toilets in my own house. One of them is the older model, before the Drake- in fact we have this same one in the office. It flushes very well and hardly ever needs a second flush. The Drake in my main bath, now that one really flushes! It’s even better than the old ones, and the hundreds of the old ones we’ve put in have never been a problem. Now the Drake is even better.

So, don’t think about plungers- that’s my job.