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.