They call it home improvement because it can't get much worse

[Solfy]

The bathroom project has been crawling along, but this week it's been practically walking!
I photographed my progress today so I could see how far it's come.
The "before" shots were taken to give the plumber an idea of what we were starting with:


There had been a bathroom in here before the last owners bought the place, but the pipes burst so they ripped it out. It was still ripped out when we bought it. The terracotta block wall is exterior, at grade. The floor drains were redone when we had the sewage line replaced. Turns out what was originally there wasn't even proper drain line. It was plastic conduit.


Behind the kinda sorta but not really framed wall is a storage room. (old coal room). Both rooms comprise the basement of the "new" part of the house, added in 1923. Originally we were going to put a freestanding shower in because space is really tight. It was even tighter in the original bathroom - you can see the footprint of the original wall on the floor beside the toilet tank. It was tiny. Instead of having a hallway outside the bathroom, we've opted to make it so that you have to pass through the bathroom to get to the storage room, adding more than 15sq foot of extra space



Above is the same corner as the first photo, now with newly framed walls, insulation, plumbing, bathtub, tub surround, and drywall. The toilet will go roughly where it was in the 1st pic. We decided to put in a full tub instead of just the (cheap ass) freestanding shower, necessitating moving pretty much all the floor drains except the sink. While they were at it, the plumbers suggested we swap the supply lines for the shower for ease of access (can get to them in the storage room if necessary). We insulated and sealed the fuck out of the exterior wall - that corner is where the addition joins the house and you could see daylight where the terracotta met the rubble stone foundations. Hence our pipes freezing last winter. Oh yeah, the plumbers fixed that mess, too. And framed the walls around the tub. And installed the tub. They were expensive, but worth every penny.


This is the wall dividing the bathroom from the storage room. The blue stuff on the tub surround is just protective film. A pedestal sink will go here. You can see the door to the storage room. I'm going to paint it to blend in with the wall and hang a floor-length mirror on it.


To the right of the door is the storage alcove - an ingenious solution to a pain in our collective asses. The foundation from the mid 1800's addition is also rubble stone, and gets rather wide and jagged at the bottom. Previously it was a closet. We've framed off the sticky-out parts and will put shelves in the top portion. The ceiling drops a hair in the alcove too, which will be a treat to finish, but it was necessary because plumbing was in the way.


This is a slightly better (but dusty) shot of the alcove and the door to the rest of the bathroom, which will be finished (again; it had the same fate as the original bathroom) sometime in the far distant future.

My lasagna's almost done, and brownies are cooling. After dinner, fun with drywall mud!