Golly Plumbing

"This Old House" it's not. We don't use only the best tools, wear designer flannel shirts, and speak in Boston accents. And we don't make everything look easy like on TV. But we git 'er done, eventually.

First, you grab a bunch of screwdrivers, wrenches, a hammer, and start taking things apart. Take the handles off the hot and cold water valve to the tub. Unbolt the tank from the toilet, drain all the water, and unbolt the bowl from the floor. Oh, don't forget to shut off the incoming water pipes before you start taking things apart. That would be a mess.

And it's a mess regardless. Get used to it. But this outfit cleans up frequently (I almost said continuously, not true) if only to breathe a minimum of dust and dirt, keep track of the tools lying everywhere, and see a semblance of the room this will eventually be. The back bathroom of Om Shanty has been in some stage of slow transformation so long that no set of before-and-after photos (which I haven't taken, sorry) would do it justice.

Once we got started in the demolition phase of the project, it was only slightly more complicated to detach the drain pipe from the tub, accessible from either the other side of the wall through a removable panel in the adjacent kitchen wall or from underneath in the dim and dank cellar. It was a big nut, so the pipe wrench came in handy, and once it was off, the whole tub lifted right out of there. Tub gone, toilet gone, sink long gone, it's easier to see how much (or how little) room there is in this room.

Then it's time to reconfigure the space. In this old house, that involves taking down lots of old plaster, some drywall, and a few studs I had put up when I recessed the fridge into a former doorway into the bathroom. This experiment a couple of years ago sort of worked for a while, and now Gven and I are rethinking the fridge placement, moving it a few inches to make better use of space in the transformed bathroom.

Tearing into the plaster and lath on two ancient walls was big fun. For this, Jessi Golly and I donned our handkerchief masks, gloves, wielded hammers, and did a convincing imitation of Samurai cowboy plumbing train robbers. It took awhile, but we got it down to the original 1884 brick wall and 1925 framing. Let the wiring begin.

Jessi did all the real work; I consulted, fetched tools, cleaned up, asked questions, and offered uninformed suggestions of improbable alternative solutions to the inevitable problems that come up. He's the one with the skills, the mind-set, the analytical ability, the physical strength and agility to crawl around in the attic, drill holes through old 2x4s that are actually two inches by four inches and pull old wires from an old switch box across the room to a new switch box mounted next to the door where it should have been in the first place.

Wall Street buzzes: Golly Plumbing merges with Jessi Electric, construction futures soar!