... but not for much longer.
The basement reno is proceeding. With some not-minor hiccups.
Monday tools were dropped off.
Tuesday they started ripping out paneling and walls. The first delay in Chuck's ambitious timeline came when he realized that the Murder Bathroom was built to double as a concrete bunker. Every piece of tile was set in concrete. What he expected to be a one hour demo took four hours of sweat and some cursing. The bathroom is now gone.
Wednesday they started to hammer out the new lines for the new plumbing. And to remove a poorly placed lally column, that I paid good money to have put where it was and am now paying good money to remove. So it goes. Dust, dust dust... In the process, Chuck found Cthulu, a demon pipe that defies adequate description. It would appear, from the initial glimpses, that we have a custom cast iron pipe, many armed/tentacled, bringing together all the dread drains of the house. The actual beast can't be seen yet, still locked in its concrete lair, but I got a sketch.

What this means practically is that they can't just tie another drain to it because the fittings are custom and they can't cut and cap the old drain because there isn't room before the next tentacle branches off. Cthulu rejects my toilet. It apparently means jack-hammering the whole thing out and re-piping all the drains in the house. The guys don't seem phased... but I personally think this explains why that bathroom was so very very cursed.
Thursday nothing happened except the start of a new year, hanging out with friends, and doing laundry at two different locations.
Friday, the lally column finally came out, lubricated by a stream of four letter words and some frustration. They cut it lose from its foundation with a saw that I am sure would make any man feel more manly. The house still has a faint molten iron smell to it. Friday, the guys also put up the studs for the new rooms... and a problem we had seen on paper came to life in 3-D.
In short, the doors to the bathroom and the laundry would have to be sized for midgets in order to clear under the boiler pipes. The guys gambled that once it was framed in, the problem would solve itself, but amazingly enough, it didn't. It looked worse.

(click on the image for mouse-overs in Flickr)
Everything wrong here we'd already gone over before the framing but they were optimistic that the gamble of framing it out would pay off. The maximum clearance there would be 73.5 inches before we allowed for 3/4" of tile on the floor. (The door to my office is a cushy 80 inches and it's not unusually tall.) Out-swinging doors were one solution, but we all hated the idea of losing space in the family room to doors. Pocket doors were bandied about, but that would still require changing the framing and they are also not ideal. Neither solved the problem of the looming pipe over the vanity mirror.
Friday night, I sat looking at this. I'm pregnant and I have insomnia a
lot, so I spent HOURS actually sitting on a compressor in the basement
last night wondering what the hell to do now that this problem was
framed in. And worrying that the contractors were going to go ape-shit when I called them Saturday morning to tell them that this did not work, at all, and had to be re-done. But first, I needed a solution...
I didn't have a solution until Saturday morning, when Bill and I walked and talked it together. What will work is if we turn the bathroom on its side (8X5, instead of 5X8) and reconfigure the laundry. Once this is done, the doors can all avoid the pipes, can all be nice pre-hung jobbies, and I think everything still fits. My nice spacious laundry room is now long and narrow, but I'm willing to sacrifice the laundry area for a nice bathroom.
I drew it all out, typed it all up, worried a good deal, and then left a VM for the guys. Then, because I really needed a change of scenery, we all went to Union Station to walk about and see the Norwegian Trains.
The guys came over this afternoon and I walked them through the issues. I waited for the fight or the push-back, some 'tude or defensiveness. This is the part where they blow up that this is so late in the game, the framing is already up, the drain for the toilet already hammered out... but they nodded in agreement, saw my points, and totally accepted the necessary changes. Pause and consider that. They have to rip out the framing for half the project and re-route the plumbing they have already jack-hammered but they didn't seem bothered in the least. I'd like to imagine it is because of my charm and persuasion, but it never works that well for me generally.
Here is the new plan.

I'm pretty sure everything will go more smoothly once Cthulu is evicted. I'm sure it was his malign influences all along. Yup. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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