Indoor Plumbing is a Home's Worst Enemy

Don't get me wrong. I greatly appreciate indoor plumbing. When I was growing up, we used to visit a set of older relatives who lived up in the mountains, and the only bathroom was a wooden outhouse set a good distance from the house. I hated going to the bathroom there - it was dark, there were spiders everywhere, and since we usually were visiting in the summer, it was smelly. Actually, I don't remember the smell so much, because the spiders were enough to motivate me to "hold it" until we got back home to our clean porcelain toilet.

While indoor plumbing is a boon to the inhabitants of a house, however, that luxury can definitely take a toll on the house itself, as I've discovered twice this spring. We rebuilt our shower at home thanks to water damage and mold; also, while doing demolition at our renovation project in town we discovered it was a wonder the toilet hadn't simply fallen through the rotted floor. Here, in brief, is the story of each of those problems.

Case #1 - The Shower

Since I told much of this story in an earlier post, I'll only summarize here. A few years ago (maybe three, maybe four - they all run together now....) I replaced the silicone sealant between our bathtub and the tile wall. However, I apparently didn't do a very good job of it, because water had been leaking through that seal, probably since shortly after I resealed the joint. Multiply two showers per day by four years' worth of days - that was a lot of water available to leak. We had to replace part of the floor under the tub, as well as parts of several studs in the wall around the tub. The damage even extended to the floors of three closets (a project for this summer is to tear up and replace those closet floors). I know I posted this picture earlier, but since we're talking about the damage water can do to a house, here is another reminder:

This story has a happy ending (at least I hope it does). We decided to rebuild as a walk-in shower and to waterproof the heck out of the whole thing. Our biggest hold-up was when my husband reworked the plumbing to eliminate the bathtub spout. There was a tiny leak at one joint in one pipe, with just a thread of water running down the pipe.
It took several tries to get the solder to seal the joint completely. That meant what we intended to be a couple of hours of plumbing turned into a four-hour job, but at least it is right and tight. There shouldn't be any future problems from the plumbing (fingers crossed!).

We also put up Hardibacker as a base for the porcelain tiles we planned to use for the shower, and then I painted a waterproofing membrane over that. Painting on the membrane was another job that took an entire day; I had to let it dry completely between coats, and I put on four coats.

From there, I put on the porcelain tile with very small grout lines (1/8th inch) and filled those lines with a grout that is supposed to be waterproof. I stuffed the joints where two walls come together with the grout, and I hope that is enough to keep water from getting behind the walls and into the drywall on the other side. I ran a line of high-quality silicone between the tiles and the shower base. It's a wide line, and it's kind of ugly (I'm no professional when it comes to applying silicone), but I wanted to be sure it won't leak this time! I've also been very diligent about wiping down the shower walls every time I take a shower, especially in wiping away any water that collects on the lip of the shower base. Keep it as dry as possible, that's my motto. (Unfortunately, that's not my husband's motto, so if he takes a shower after I do, the water just sits there until it evaporates or I wipe it up....)

Here's the finished product. I like it a lot, and I feel reasonably certain we won't have a repeat appearance of the mold.

Case 2 - The Town House Bathroom

The little house in town had more serious problems with water damage, many of them the result (I believe) of putting a temporary patch on a problem rather than doing the work necessary to really deal with the problem and the source of the problem.

We had decided we were going to redo most of the plumbing in the house because we're reworking the floor plan. When we took up the bathtub, this is what we found beneath it:

Obviously, someone had discovered water damage under an original tub and had cut out the old subfloor and put in a new one. What my husband and I can't figure out is WHY they would replace that rotten subfloor with some kind of chipboard. The board that was under the tub has absorbed so much moisture over the years that it simply flaked away rather than coming up as a solid piece. Terrible. It was also obvious that the source of the problem hadn't been solved; water was still coming from somewhere, enough water to pretty much rot away the subfloor AGAIN. Once we had all the old junk out of the way, my husband has gone in and put new 8x10 joists to support the tub and a water heater, and he's put pieces of treated plywood as the subfloor. We have a plumber coming in early next week to redo all the existing plumbing in the house, so maybe the leak, if it was in the water lines, will go away.

The tub wasn't the only source of water damage, though. This is the drain for the toilet. Notice the little hole on the right? That's where I stuck the end of the crowbar through the subfloor. I didn't have to beat my way through; no, the floor was so rotten I just gently poked the crowbar all the way through. Clearly, there had been another leak that someone ignored for a really long time. Again, we are reinforcing the joists and rebuilding the subfloor and will make sure everything is sealed properly as we continue with the renovations.

The moral of these stories: Don't ignore problems! I know it's a pain to have to deal with them. They don't solve themselves, though, and the pain of dealing with them is only going to get worse.

Indoor plumbing for bathrooms, blessing though it is, is a big source of many of these problems, but it's certainly not the only source. Think about all the ways we bring water into our homes - kitchen sinks and dishwashers, washing machines, icemakers. And there's also the issue of rain getting around windows and doors. Problems can even develop from the condensation that forms on windows from the contrast between warm and cool air (on either side of the building). It's a battle that calls for constant vigilance, as Professor Moody in the Harry Potter series would say.

Speaking of that, I have two more battles to fight with water. Our toilet at home has taken to running when no one has flushed; clearly, there's a leak somewhere in its system. And the house at town has a fairly wet spot that has appeared on the floor in what is going to be the master bedroom. It's been raining a lot here this week, so we suspect a leak in the roof somewhere (OK, that's what I suspect - Jeff says it's not the roof). But none of our investigations so far have produced any culprits. Frustrating. But we have to keep on until we find it. Wish us luck.....

Here's What's Been Going On

It's been an incredibly busy few months. Of course it's always busy at the end of the semester, with finals and grades to be turned in. This spring, I also served on the search committee for an important administrative position at my university, and that took up quite a bit of time, especially during April. But now, school is over, I'm not teaching summer school, and it's time for some updates on the projects from the previous posts.

First, some unhappy news. Broody Judy's attempt at hatching chicks failed. I believe the first blow was my own fault. After one nice spring day, I left the hen house door open so the hens could enjoy the lovely evening air (silly, I know). The next day, six of the nine eggs were gone, and one of them was moved to a different nest. It was the fact that the egg was moved that made us believe a raccoon must have crawled up the wire to the spot at the top of the coop where the wire is drooping a bit. I guess he had a big feast that night. I stuck the remaining eggs under Judy and she kept sitting on them, but the eggs eventually disappeared one at a time. I found one of them broken in the nest, and I believe one of the other hens was eating them. So Judy gave up. That's sad enough, but I think that same hen is still picking on Judy, who doesn't look very good (she's lost a lot of feathers). I guess I need to institute a "no bullying" policy in the hen house.

The other projects went better. We completed the shower project in our home (I'll write about that later in the week), and the town house is coming along nicely. We finished all the demolition early in April, and we are the same as finished with reframing (I'll also write about that later). Last Friday, we put up electrical boxes; the next stage is electrical and plumbing. That may take a while, however, because the city requires that kind of work to be done by licensed professionals, and the licensed professionals tend to be pretty busy.


We have to completely rewire the house because we found the knob and tube wiring made famous by HGTV. Plumbing is also going to be a major undertaking because we are relocating everything in the house that uses water except the toilet. This is because we are reworking the floor plan so the front door doesn't open into a bedroom. It's going to be really much better, but getting there may take a while AND a significant part of the budget...

A Little Diversion

I know, I know...the last post was about the renovation projects, and now here I am with a picture of a chicken.

I will return to the renovation projects with future posts (when I have more time to write), but for now I'll provide this update: 1) the shower project is finally finished and is VERY nice and VERY much appreciated; and 2) the demolition stage of the house in town is complete, and we are beginning the rebuild. I have pictures of each project, and I do intend to tell those stories. It's just that those projects consumed my life for about two weeks solid, giving me no time or energy to blog. I'm completely serious.

But on to the hen.

A year ago, I bought some chicks at a local farm supply store and raised them to be laying hens. It's been really nice for the past several months to have farm-fresh eggs. And I'll admit, those hens are great stress relievers. They come running to the fence every time I go by their pen, for I've often brought them some kind of treat, usually dry bread or bread with a moldy spot. They do love bread. And I do love to watch them scramble for the crumbs, greedy girls.

Recently, though, one of the hens has gone broody, meaning she sits on the nest box all the time to hatch the eggs the other hens lay. Unfortunately for her, we have no rooster, so she could sit on those eggs for the rest of her life and she would get no chicks. For a while, we would lift her off the nest and take the eggs (or, my approach - gently hold the feed can over her head and reach under her soft, warm feathers to steal the eggs). She doesn't like that; if anything comes within four inches of her, she pecks, and believe me, she is quick (hence, the can over her head).

She persisted, though we stole her clutch of eggs every day. Finally, we decided it might be fun to see if she really can hatch some chicks. A friend at school is a more serious farmer than I am, and she brought me some fertile eggs yesterday, including a couple of green ones (which thrilled me! I wanted a hen that lays green eggs.). I marked them so we could tell the fertile eggs from the sterile ones when gathering eggs in the evening.

Cute, aren't they?

Of course, Broody Judy (as we've started calling her) was on the nest, so I fed the hens and went to get some fresh hay for the nest box. While I was gone, she came off the nest to eat, meaning it was easy to switch out the fertile eggs for the sterile ones.

When I checked back later, she was on the nest, and she was still there tonight when I went to feed the hens and gather eggs. Maybe she will get to raise the babies she is so determined to have. I'll post a picture if she does.

Being the word nerd that I am, I couldn't help thinking how very appropriate the term "brooding" is for a gloomy, depressed individual. Broody Judy sits on the nest with a sort of glower on her face (ha ha), and doesn't move unless someone tries to take her eggs. Then she will strike out at the offender. She is quite irritable, and last night I noticed that if any of the other hens tried to come in the hen house to eat while she was eating, she would run them out. I can just imagine the first time some farmer used the word "broody" to describe a human (probably the wife). I'm sure that went over well.... 

What "Ph.D" Means - At Least This Week!

Sorry about the delay in any updates about the renovation project. Last week was the week midterm grades were due at the university, meaning I was so tied up with grading (and search committee duties) there wasn't a spare minute to blog. But this is SPRING BREAK!!!!! So maybe I can put together several posts this week about the fascinating fun that is renovating an old house.

We are at the halfway point (more or less) in tearing out the inside walls of the "town house," as I call it. My husband is very methodical about the process - we started in the southwest corner of the house and have moved from that room to the next room just north of it, then to the one just north of that one. Well, that's what he's done. I have much more of a hop-around style. (In my defense, I hop around from room to room because I don't want to be in the room where something might fall on my head as he pulls it down.) The daughter and I have taken down drywall in various sections in the room that will become the living room, as well as tearing out part of two closets (since that room was a bedroom). Here are a couple of shots of that room:

Ah, the sledgehammer! My daughter's favorite tool!
She has a pretty mean swing for a 5' 2" girl.....

That room has 10-foot ceilings, so the daughter and I have only tackled the part we can reach. We'll leave the heavy-duty, overhead stuff for my husband. He's the one who's really done the bulk of the work, including tearing out the built-in cabinets in the old kitchen (which will become a bedroom). He said that job was pretty hard, since everything was made of solid boards and nailed to the wall. He finished tearing them all out about a week ago, just making a huge pile in the floor since the dumpster was full. We then had to leave it all there for several days, since neither of us could get away to work on the project. But a new dumpster was delivered and all the trash was cleared out in about a half-hour, giving us a clean slate for tearing out the old vinyl flooring.

We are taking the walls down to studs, to make it easier to do new wiring (a necessity!). I always like the "stud" stage of a house, when it's possible to see how the rooms are laid out but there is a sense of freedom from being able to see and walk through the walls.

My husband estimates we should be able to finish the demolition with a couple of good, long days this week. He would even like to have the new walls he plans to add (for closets in the new bedrooms and for an extension to the hallway leading from the laundry room) by the end of the week. But....there may be a mighty big kink in his plan.

We are also involved in a renovation project in the house we live in. A couple of months ago, my husband had to go under the house for something, and he noticed some mold on the joists under our bathroom. I had been suspicious for a while that there was a leak around the edge of the tub, so we decided this would be an opportune time to take out the tub/shower and convert the bathroom to a walk-in shower. Today we started that project (since it's spring break and we don't have to take showers every day, ha ha!). (Actually, we can use the shower in the kids' bathroom.) I started scraping off the popcorn ceiling, we carefully removed the tile (which we may use in the "town house" - I couldn't stand putting perfectly good tile in a landfill), and my husband and son carried the fiberglass tub outside.

It was at that point we discovered the extent of the damage. It's not terrible, I suppose, but it's a good thing we decided to redo the shower now, because there was significant water damage behind the tub. Apparently there were two leaks, one where the silicone sealant between the wall and the tub wasn't thick enough, and another where a gasket of some kind on the tub drain had simply rotted out from age (our house is about 17 years old). There are a couple of wall studs that are a bit spongy, and the plywood subfloor has a couple of soft spots. To fix it right (which I insist on) will mean cutting the wall of the closet on the other side of the shower, replacing the lower half of some studs, replacing at least one section of subfloor - in other words, a LOT more work than my husband had intended to do for this project. He's not happy. I can understand why; it probably will mean we won't get as much done at the town house as he wanted to this week. But as I keep reminding him, this is the house where we live; we want it to be in the best shape possible.

So that's where things stand as of 10:00 p.m. Sunday night. Let's hope by 10 p.m. next Sunday that at least the shower project is complete!

Oh, and the Ph.D. reference? I've been joking that for this week, that "Ph.D." after my name stands for "Professional House Demolisher."

Renovation Realities

You might recognize that title as the name of a program on the DIY television network, a show in which people with varying levels of experience take on a remodel of their home. My husband loves that show. I have a suspicion it's because he likes to feel superior to the poor, poor souls who are over their heads with their renovations.

Well, we're about to enter our own real-life version of "Renovation Realities." When our son announced at Thanksgiving break that he planned to transfer from the college he was attending to the one where I teach, my husband and I started weighing options for housing. Although my position at the college gives a significant tuition break, housing costs are not covered. And while we don't mind having the son back in the household for a semester, I think we all are agreed it's a good thing for a young adult to live on his/her own rather than staying in the homey old nest.

The end result of our deliberations is that we decided to shop for a small house in town where our children could live while going to college (since the daughter says she wants to attend the school where I teach, as well). Our reasoning was, if we're going to be taking out a loan to pay for housing, we might as well be putting that money into something that will give us tangible property at the end rather than simply paying rent on the dorm or an apartment. So we scouted the local real estate market and found this lovely little old house not too far from campus.

It was something of a bargain, since it was a foreclosure with some damage from an indoor dog (the carpet reeks, believe me!). We closed on the house in mid-February, and recently, we began the process of bringing the house up to our standards of "liveable." While it will be a departure from the normal content for this blog, I plan to do a series of updates on our progress over the next few months.

Although the weather has been seriously cold to work in a house with no heat, we've started. The first step was to get an idea of what was inside the walls. I took a hammer over one day after work and chipped in to a couple of walls enough to discover previous owners had put drywall over wall boards - without bothering to put in any insulation. It was at that point we knew the project was going to be, as my husband is fond of saying, a "total gut job." Since that time, we've been able to take most of the interior wall boards off one of the front rooms, so it looks like this:

We were pleased to discover the opening on the right was originally a door that had been boarded up; we were planning to put an opening between those two rooms anyway. One of the things we will have to do is reconfigure the floor plan of the house. As it stands right now, one of the two bedrooms was at the front of the house and actually had one of the two front doors opening in to it. That room is now going to become the living room, and the room with the other front door (pictured here) will become an eat-in kitchen.

My husband and I are excited about the project. I know it's going to be a lot of work, but we both like this kind of work (we've built two houses in our 25 years together, and we're still together, ha ha). We've never renovated an old house, though, so I know there will be challenges, just like the people on the TV show face. There will be discoveries, too; we've actually already had some that I will talk about in another post. One discovery, though, is worth mentioning here. Last Saturday, the husband and I spent the morning at the house tearing down drywall and boards. We noticed that someone had done work across the street to level out the ground, making it obvious that something is going to be built across the street. Some friends stopped by to look over our project, and since they live in town, they knew what our new neighbor will be - the new police station and a new park for town. We were quite pleased to hear that, especially since our kids will be living in what is now sure to be the safest house in town! : )

A Skill I Really Admire

One of the side effects of my infatuation with the Avett Brothers is a growing appreciation for good songwriting. The other day on my way to work, I heard the song "Vincent" by Don Mclean (yes, I DO listen to something other than the Avetts, ha ha!), and I was struck by how beautiful the lyrics for the song are.

Starry, starry night

Paint your palette blue and gray

Look out on a summer's day

With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Shadows on the hills

Sketch the trees and the daffodils

Catch the breeze and the winter chills

In colors on the snowy linen land

...

Colors changing hue

Morning fields of amber grain

Weathered faces lined in pain

Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

These lines with their visual imagery evoke Van Gogh's paintings so vividly. I especially like that last pair of lines ("Weathered faces....soothed beneath the artist's loving hand"). I know faces like that.

What I really appreciate about the lyrics is how efficient they are. In less than 70 words, Mclean not only provides a quick trip through a gallery of Van Gogh's work, but also captures a sense of the loneliness and intensity that characterized the artist and eventually led him to suicide. Not a word is wasted. As a person who can't seem to write anything except long-form stories, I'm simply in awe of this kind of writing.

There's another song I greatly admire that I've been meaning to talk about in a blog post, and that is Tom T. Hall's "Little Lady Preacher." While Mclean's song is poetic and impressionistic, I've always thought Hall's song is a wonderful story in miniature.

Oh, the little lady preacher from the limestone church

I'll never forget her, I guess

She preached each Sunday mornin’ on the local radio

With a big black Bible and a snow-white dress

She was 19 years of age and was developed to a fault

But I will admit she knew the Bible well

A little white lace hanky marked the text that she would use

She’d breathe into that microphone and send us all to hell

I love the way Hall chooses the details that not only allow us to picture the little lady preacher physically but that also create her as a living character in this morality tale. Hall actually creates three distinct characters: the little lady preacher, the narrator of the song, and Luther Short, a "hairy-legged soul lost out in sin" who gets the privilege of taking the lady preacher home after each radio session. Besides having three well-developed characters, the song also has a plot with rising action and a climax. 

I can see me standing in the studio that day

I had to face the heartbreak, unemployment and all

In 32 lines (that rhyme!), Hall brings to life a story that is funny, yet sympathetic and says something about human nature and life.

That's just looking at the lyrics. Add in the element of melody, and I'm really impressed by the skill it takes to produce something that seems so effortless.

It seems only right to close this post with a chance to appreciate the whole package, for both songs.

 Don Mclean - "Vincent" 

"Little Lady Preacher" - Tom T. Hall

It's Complicated

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about the position of Native Americans in US history. One reason is because I'm reading On the Rez by Ian Frazier, which is mostly about Frazier's experiences with a friend, Le War Lance, an Oglala Sioux. Another is because I'm involved in a serious editing read-through of my second novel, which has the struggle between whites and the Cherokees over land as a major plot point. I'm also outlining a third novel that includes the famous Trail of Tears. As I'm reading both books and pondering the third, I find myself struggling with exactly how I should portray the Indians as I write.

On the one hand, there is the tendency to make the Indians the noble victims of history, overrun by greedy white settlers who snatched up the best land and pushed the Indians onto pockets of the least desirable land. Certainly, there's plenty of evidence to support that view. All the history around which I've built my second book supplies examples of treaties made and then renegotiated and then renegotiated again, always to the benefit of the white settlers. I haven't finished Frazier's book yet, but I read a section the other night filled with depressing statistics. For example,

• Forty percent of Indian homes are overcrowded or have inadequate space, compared to six percent among the general population.
• Indians are twice as likely to be murdered, and the suicide rate among Indians is high.
• Indians are four times more likely than the national average to die from alcoholism, and fetal alcohol syndrome is 33 times higher among Indians than among whites.

How much of that misfortune comes from being people whose culture was uprooted and transformed by hostile action by American soldiers on behalf of my ancestors and people like them? While doing the research for my novels, I'm ashamed of how Cherokee leaders were held in Washington, DC as virtual hostages until they agreed to give up their land in Arkansas. I just recently read shocking accounts of how the Choctaw suffered cold and starvation in Arkansas Post during the first wave of removal from Mississippi. Just as with slavery, the US treatment of Native Americans is a giant, guilt-producing scar on our national countenance.

Yet, as I'm reading Frazier's book, I am annoyed at the self-destructive and irresponsible behavior of Le War Lance, behavior that is apparently not uncommon on the reservation where he lives. The Indians routinely drive while drunk. I'm not even halfway through the book, and I've already read about two or three people who were killed while walking along the highway because they were hit by drunk drivers. This is a silly thing, but it really bothered me that Le planned to use a propane-fueled oven both as a cookstove and as a heater for his house. Everyone knows you don't do that! As for the statistic above about fetal alcohol syndrome, the link between drinking while pregnant and FAS is undisputed, yet pregnant Indian women are still drinking at a rate that makes their babies 33 percent more likely to have FAS. (Sorry if I'm misusing that statistic, but you get my point.) These are behaviors that are not noble, based on personal choices made now, not in the nineteenth century. Le War Lance seems to almost relish the danger he puts himself in, and to treat that attitude as a commonplace among Indians.

That's where things become complicated, especially for a writer. I want to be fair to my Cherokee characters (and to the Choctaw ones of the future). How do I navigate that line between showing the truth of the ways the Indians were mistreated and yet avoid the temptation to turn the Indians into "noble victims"? I get the sense from reading Frazier's book that Indians want recognition that they were treated badly, very badly, yet they don't want to be seen as "victims" to be pitied. One thing the book is bringing home to me is what variety there is among the individuals Frazier encounters. For every Le War Lance in the story, there is a Charlotte Black Elk (who engaged in some pretty technical scientific research to try to prove the Sioux have an ancient link to South Dakota's Black Hills). Each of the Sioux Frazier has encountered so far is unique. The big insult, I'm thinking, is not in showing the weaknesses of these individuals, but in lumping all of them together into a stereotype, even if that stereotype makes someone else out to be the bad guy. Does it honor the humanity of a person more to portray him/her as he/she really is, even if some of that reality is not too pretty?

I may think that, but I'm not so sure I'm carrying my philosophy through in my writing. Honestly, I'm intimidated by taking on the subject of Native Americans and their history. I surely don't want to bring down the wrath of the Cherokee Nation on myself for my speculation about what happened nearly 200 years ago. And I hope in my effort to avoid offending and to appease the guilt my forefathers laid on me that I'm not giving my protagonists attitudes that are far too 21st-century to be realistic for 19th-century folk. Sigh...As my title says, it's complicated.