Tiles are a whole amazing universe unto themselves. After three passes through four different stores in Watertown, aka Tiletown, we’ve finally settled on our choices for the new bathroom.
The ones on the bottom are for the bathroom floor (tumbled marble mosaic from Indonesia). The top ones are the shower walls and floor (Italian porcelain), and the middle ones (handmade glass with bubbles) are “accent” for the shower.
Blowing loose fill cellulose insulation into your walls is a pretty neat process (even though the insulation contractors were really crappy and we had to make them come back twice to fix all the many spots they missed).
They cut lotsa holes all over your walls, then take tiny little fuzzy bits of recycled paper (treated to make ’em fireproof and unappealing to critters), load ’em into this big blower fluffer machine, and then shoot the stuff through incredibly long hoses run up from the street into all the holes until your walls are filled up! Whew. So much dust everywhere… Hard to believe none of the workers ever wears a dust mask.
For those who enjoy a blast from the past, here’s the archive of "before" photos of 19R. We’ll post some direct comparisons soon, I’m sure…
In an attempt to actually put my washer and dryer in the back entry hall (instead of the basement), I’ve been forced to knock out the back wall of my only bedroom closet (the machines are too big to fit). That means that, for the moment, you can stand at the front door and see straight through out the back door of my unit:
Of course, after opening up part of the closet wall, we discovered a 1 1/4″ thick iron pipe. It appears that this pipe is part of the disused gas system (from when the house was lit by gas lamps!). However, one doesn’t simply hack apart a potential gas line without doing some pretty careful research… which will further delay this part of the project.
The fun never stops!
The guys who cut our insulation did a pretty careless job. This is the worst of the damage — they pulled out a whole section of wall:
The stuff they use — “blown-in cellulose” — consists largely of recycled office paper:
By popular demand, here’s the naughty pulp paperback that was stashed under the floorboards.
In other news: whereas in our living room we found a few polite, cursive notes on the walls, the middle bedroom (aka “latex-covered wallpaper scraping hellhole”) seems to have been used to conduct a symposium on tagging.
We found these notes written on the walls in our living room, under 1 layer of wallpaper, a layer of paint, and 2 more layers of wallpaper, all apparently applied since 1960.
Can anyone decipher any more of these messages? I can’t make out some of the words. Also, they seem somewhat contradictory in the dates and who deserves the credit… Did they change their wallpaper between June and August?
“This paper _____ by Barbara(?) _______ 6/21/60”
“This house papered by ____ Campbell Aug 14 1960 for _____ Â _____ Â _____ Â _____ Boston”
Derek the plumber shows off another fine specimen from our house. Once he found out we are into decaying old things, he found us a baseball card from 1978, an old sex book, and this postcard from Scotland and/or Canada, all under the floor.
Gutting the basement. The stinky old illegal apartment where the last owner spent all his time is totally gone! No more asbestos either.
Framing the new bathroom under the eaves.
The builders are working from plans that Phil and I drew. For this project we get to be amateur architects as well as lawyers, de-wallpaperers.
They cut a big hole for our eventual bedroom closet.
This weird old sink thing we found boarded up behind the wall.