Plumbing, Electric, and Tile, Oh My!
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 12)
“What I’d like one day — and I won’t be around for it — is that they can eat their words about what they said about Detroit. Because Detroit’s gonna come back.” — Mike Illich
Rough Plumbing is Complete!
These past two weeks started off great with our first functioning toilet! This is a great milestone for us, given that for the past 3 months no one in the house has had a place to go. All of our PEX and copper plumbing is currently run to their proper locations throughout the home. We did, however run into a major issue at the end of rough plumbing.
As the plumber turned on the water supply to the home to test what he’s done so far, the drain pan and trap below our master bathroom shower immediately began to leak like a sieve. This was not part of our plan. As you may have seen in our last episode, we had a plan to redo our master bathroom completely, but had decided to hold off for a year or two due to our budget. With this leak, we are now being forced to remove all of the tile in the bottom of our shower as well as 2 feet up the walls in order to reach all of the damaged plumbing.
It’ll be about a $4,500 fix between tile, plumbing, and labor. Unfortunately, that money will be wasted in a year or two when we decide to redo the bathroom entirely. We’re now starting discussions around if we should just do the master bathroom plan we initially had to avoid wasting this money on what will be essentially a band-aid fix.
Wallpaper Removal and Wood Working
Last week began with a lot of scrubbing. Christian and Chad pulled out all of the remaining wallpaper and began spraying and scrubbing the walls with wallpaper glue remover. Our plaster walls are now buttery smooth and ready for our plaster repairer to fix holes and cracks before priming!
Christian then moved on to framing in the extension to our chimney running through the master bedroom. Because it was oddly off-center on the wall, we decided to extend it so that it would make a more proper headboard for a bed in the room.
Electrical in Full Force
Lots of electrical work has been happening this week. There are wires everywhere. It’s been a challenge running around the house for hours on end trying to figure out what switches activate which lights and what circuits each one is connected to. A hallmark of these old homes is that they are wired very haphazardly compared to modern construction homes, so connecting the dots of the home’s electrical layout can be difficult.
We’ve finally gotten the majority of the home under control with fresh wiring where we can reach it, adding extra circuits where we can. It has required a lot of planning on our end to decide where ceiling fixtures should go and how many, where we want switches and plugs, what those switches control around the home. Deciding on lighting when we don’t even have a kitchen to look at makes these decisions difficult, but we (and by “we,” I mean Brandon) pulled it off.
Tile Time
The discussion of tile has been long and remains incomplete, but we are edging closer. Brandon and I finally were able to catch Virginia Tile during their strange hours of operation to look at their selection.
Brandon and I found some great options for the kitchen back-splash as well as tile to go with our pink tile bathroom that we like. We now are now having doubts though about our choice of charcoal to go with the pink tile and are considering switching gears to a lighter color or even white.
Our Journey isn’t over! We’ve been working hard since we purchased the home in November 2016 and are writing updates on our progress roughly every week. Make sure to check out our latest updates on our homepage!
