Quick Decisions and Staying Productive
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 13)
“Swearing is an art form. You can express yourself much more exactly, much more succinctly, with properly used curse words.” — Coleman A. Young
A Plumbing Disaster
As you may have read last week, we discovered a large problem with our Master Bathroom plumbing. This bathroom still contains much of its original green Flint Faience tile, excluding the inside of the shower. This had been redone some years ago by the previous owner, either due to old plumbing problems or for entry/egress concerns of the woman who used it.
When we bought this home, our initial plan was to remove this bathroom, which is a Jack-and-Jill, and take over the connecting bedroom for a large master bath suite. Given the house currently has 5 large bedrooms and a 6th small one if you count our 3rd floor nursery, going down to 4 or 5 bedrooms for the sake of a large new master suite seemed well worth it for our personal enjoyment of the space.
Unfortunately, when the financing of the home and the renovation work began, we discovered that the other comps in our neighborhood wouldn’t quite allow us to cover costs of the bathroom remodel. We set our plan aside for another day. But now with this new plumbing problem discovery, we’re back to deciding how to move forward on the master bathroom. It will cost us roughly $4,500 to fix the bathroom as-is, which seemed like a waste of money when we wanted to remodel the bathroom within a couple years anyway.
Bank Problems
Financing our home and work together in a single loan has been great for most of the process. But now that the bathroom has come back into the discussion, it has caused us a lot of problems with Wells Fargo. Our contractors placed all work on hold at the house to wait for an answer from Wells Fargo on whether we could move forward with our Master Suite plan. We receive an almost immediate “no way” and then quickly a “hold on, let us look into this.”
Thankfully for us, the bank had two appraisals done on our home before we bought it, one that included our master bath remodel plan, and one without. Without this old appraisal document, I am not sure we would have gotten the permission we needed to do the work.
The whole process ended up taking us nearly two weeks to finally get an answer that we could proceed with our plan if we could finance it ourselves. Cal and Christian got some much needed rest and personal work done during that time, but were anxious to get started again. Demo on our new master bath suite begins this week!
The Plan
We’ve had to make some fast decisions throughout this process, but none quite as fast as what we want to do with the master bathroom. Thankfully, because this was part of our original plan for the house, we had already done some work, but we worked with Cal and Christian to modify our plan for both costs and usability of the space as best we could.
In our plan we want to achieve these 6 things:
- Separate Tub and Shower
- Vanity space for me to do makeup and hair
- A Walk-in closet
- A 2nd floor laundry
- Enough room for a comfy chair in the bathroom.
- Avoiding the feeling of being in a former bedroom as much as possible.
Given the location of windows, planning this space is very difficult. No cabinets or showers can be in front of them because they are so low to the ground. We decided to place a large clawfoot tub in front of the main two bedroom windows next to the room’s radiator, which will be a great place to hang towels. Where our current shower is we are placing our laundry with a new opening that will allow access from the 2nd floor landing space. This is the ideal place for plumbing and access of laundry to the rest of the people in the house.
Finding the money to finance this ourselves has been incredibly difficult and stressful on Brandon and I given the time crunch, but we know that by doing it now we will avoid the most cost long term, and get the most enjoyment out of our home once we move in. But with none of the outside of our home currently budgeted for work, we’ve still got a way to go once the inside is complete.
Becoming Lawn Care Professionals
While the hold-up was happening with our contractors and the bank, we decided to take advantage of the great Detroit early Spring weather and do some yard work. We spent a weekend tearing out overgrowth, twigs, and weeds from our yard, which is a double lot. We had a lot of fun discovering many old stone cherubs, un-planted pots of plants, and stone pathways underneath all of the ground-covering weeds and ivy. Overall we felt productive, but the yard still has much work to be done.
Cast Iron Tub
Finally this weekend was a little colder outside, so we decided to tackle repainting of the 3rd floor cast-iron tub. We wanted to get it repainted before our plumber returns to place it back in the bathroom. It was a much bigger job than we anticipated. With 3 or 4 different coats of paint on the underside of the tub that needed removal, we started by chipping away. We then tested out paint stripper, which worked well for most of the paint, but not the original color underneath it all. We decided after a few hours to go to Home Depot and buy a sander. It worked pretty well, but was still pretty tiring.
Finally, we got the tub down to the metal everywhere and began with our first coat of primer. Due to the weight of this tub we did all of this work in the 3rd floor hallway, which is a testament to the size of the house that we were both able to work simultaneously pretty easily. It took the two of us about 4 hours or so to get the tub down to metal. We are currently very sore and exhausted, but treated ourselves last night with beermosas and pizza at Woodward Avenue Brewers in Ferndale after two long, hot showers.
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!
