Dennis Foley Plumbing » preventing dust when remodeling

Progress report on bathroom renovation Part 1

Dennis — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:53:42 +0000

My customer’s bathroom is now gutted, but the cleanup is far from over. While the gutting crew was amazing, cleaning up is a lot of work. They aren’t too careful on de-nailing, so that ‘s the first thing to do. It’s not fun to keep getting caught on old nails and pieces of old wire lath. This bathroom tile was an old mud job, so there were little shirt and hand ripping remnants of wire lath left behind. The mud floor was installed on “cripples”, small pieces of rough boarding set on nailers in between the floor joists. We have ripped out many of these floors in the past thirty years. Sometimes they actually pointed the joist tops, but on this job that wasn’t done.
The biggest problem is all the stuff that falls into the joist spaces when you gut a floor like this. We strive to always clean up the joist spaces. I’ve cursed enough when I got pieces of smashed cast iron, rocks, boards, tile, and etc. in my face and on my head when demolishing that I don’t want to be one of those slobs. If you ever use a contractor that does that, FIRE THEM! There is really no excuse. It’s lazy and unprofessional. This is what it looked like after the gutting, but before the pre work cleanup:

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.

Long time customer’s bathroom remodeling

Dennis — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:55:52 +0000

We just gutted a bathroom for a customer that I’ve been working for since my son was a baby- and he’s 36 now with 2 children of his own! This bathroom was probably original to the house, but the owners are very neat and everything was in amazingly good shape after 60 years or so! The tile was starting to crack in the bathtub area, and the whole bathroom, while very clean and tidy, needed an update.
When I worked at their house for the first time, I was a plumbing apprentice. I was moving a 2 pipe steam radiator. At that time I hadn’t spent the last 30 plus years seeking out steam knowledge, so when I look back it’s kind of frightening how little I knew about what I was doing. It worked fine, but not because I knew what I was doing!
Years later I did all the interior finishing of a 2 story addition, with a family room, a master bedroom, walk in closets and 2 bathrooms. I didn’t build the addition, but I did finish it after they experienced one of those all too common contractor nightmares. I don’t remember the details about the nightmare, but the addition still looks great because of the work we did. One interesting (at least to me) factoid was that I met a plumber on that job who worked for me for about 20 years and still fills in when we are busy. When we met, he was an electrician, and I was plastering the walls in the addition!
This bathroom is very tight for space, so the only choices were what color and what tile. When we are done, there will be no wall surface to paint, as the walls will be tile, door, window or mirror. A lot of mirror is a good way to make a small bathroom feel less claustrophobic.
The mirror job is a process. First we will do all the regular bathroom remodeling that lasts work, and then after the walls are plastered and the vanity and top are in , the mirror company will come and make a template of the mirror. The main mirror will have 2 cutouts, one for the medicine cabinet, and one for the light above it. One of the side mirrors will be cut out for the switches and plugs. Then they will go away and manufacture the mirror, and finally come back and install it. That should be the last thing that is done. Here is a link to the mirror company that we use: http://www.bannerglassshelmar.com/
The floor tile is a blue granite, so I’m going to take a sample to the counter top installer I use and have him make me a threshold and some pieces for a recessed soap dish. Hopefully we can match it fairly closely. Stone surfaces link: http://www.stonesurfacesinc.net/
We are also replacing the window with a duplicate. The old window is in bad shape so we are ordering a new one to match.
Luckily the owners have a summer home, so they won’t have to put up with too much of the disruption that we are causing. That means that we have a key, and the code to the alarm, so I go there every day to make sure that it’s set. I trust everyone who works for me, but I don’t really want to be telling a lot of people the alarm code. It just seems like a bad idea.

Kitchen Design

Dennis — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:37:05 +0000

We are now working very closely with Mary Regan of Wayside Kitchens on the design of our kitchen and bathroom cabinets. With the variety of cabinet vendors they carry, we’re sure to find a suitable style to fit your taste. Mary and I collaborate on the kitchen layouts. I have been working in houses all my life, plus I do most of the cooking at home, so I have a real world idea of what works and how the work should flow in a kitchen. I also lean towards making the mechanical aspects of the kitchen work. With Mary’s knowledge of the cabinet lines, and her aesthetic sense and experience, she is able to translate my rough ideas into a beautiful finished product based on the owner’s input. Mary has an interior design degree and over 15 years of kitchen and bath design experience.

We take the same old school care with the kitchen renovation process as I described in the bathroom remodeling blogs. Even more importantly, we make sure that you know what to expect from each step of the process. Have you ever felt that a contractor wasn’t listening to you? Our goal is to always hear and understand what you say.

What we hear from people is that they are frustrated by talking to answering machines, upset that the designer didn’t listen to their concerns, disappointed by the way the construction experience went, and worried that they didn’t get the quality of work and products that they really wanted. Does any of this sound familiar?

Bathroom Remodeling That Lasts (part one)

Dennis — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:23:35 +0000

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.