The hole in the wall

It always starts with a hole in the wall. A little hole at first. Then the hole gets bigger. Then other holes appear simply because it seems wrong to stop at one. Then everything goes crazy and carpet and trim gets ripped out... fixtures are removed... paint buckets start getting slopped around. It's madness! Madness, I tell you!

Oh but wanna hear something really scary? There are actually two holes.. in two different walls... in two different rooms at this moment. I feel chaos approaching!!

And now I'll stop being borderline psychotic and explain.

You may recall the mysterious water-stains throughout the house from previous posts. (If not.. try here and here.) During my most recent blog-silence, Dave and I have been snooping around the house systematically poking holes in walls and ripping stuff apart in search of the sources of the water. We found a few.

Leak/ceiling stain number one in the dining room is coming from somewhere around the dormer in what was previously William's room but is now something of a storage room while we plod through upstairs repairs. The dormer is surrounded by blank space located directly above our front porch. There is no attic access to this space -- which makes monitoring for leaks a wee bit tricky. Ah but being fearless in the face of intact sheetrock and the prospect of possibly unnecessary repairs -- we promptly cut a cute little whole in one of the walls of the room to get a look at what lurked behind. You know what we found? An enormous amount of space!

We were told when we were looking at this house years ago that the previous owner (also the subcontractor) had some sort of pathological fear and/or dislike of 'angled walls' and therefore designed the upstairs in such a way that all walls would be perfectly vertical without sacrificing any square footage. As a result - our roof is a 12/12 pitch and an obstruction to local air traffic.

Ah but we kinda like nifty 'angled walls' and can't help but dream about extending that bedroom wall back.. back... back... adding some space and architectural interest -- and getting a chance to get a good look at where the water is coming from. Of course it would be a lot simpler to just patch the hole we cut and move on... But we're way beyond simple over here.

The beauty of it is that George's room has exactly the same layout as William's former room AND we have the good fortune of having a roof/dormer leak in that room as well which results in the ceiling stains in the girls' downstairs room. We didn't cut a hole in any of George's walls though... Someone else did. And it was totally unrelated to the dormer leak.

Sandwiched between those two bedrooms is the bathroom. As I've mentioned before - all of the plumbing backed up during Katrina.. even flooding the upstairs bath with icky icky water. However, that bathroom has remained at the very bottom of our repair list. Until this weekend when Dave removed the toilet and ripped up the curling linoleum. I can't even begin to describe the stench. Just. Ew. A glimpse of the wood subfloor leaves us with the impression that we'll be replacing at least sections of it before putting down a new floor.... And we also discovered that the old toilet had been leaking all this time -- possibly accounting for several of the ceiling stains in the foyer downstairs.

These explorations still left us with one unsolved water stain. This stain appeared in the middle of one of George's bedroom walls - discovered when we removed a picture to set up the bunk beds. Since the water stain seemed to be directly behind the shower in the bathroom -- we called in the plumber this afternoon to check the whole thing out for us and take care of any plumbing problems before we start rennovating the remaining three upstairs rooms in earnest.
The easiest way to check for plumbing problems was to, of course, cut a hole in the wall -- thus the creation of George's hole. Luckily, I think... No problems with the pipes could be found. Unluckily, this leaves much of the water damage to that wall a mystery. However! We did find that the tub/shower unit itself (one of those one piece acrylic/fiberglass units) was actually leaking and most definitely causing the balance of ceiling stains in the foyer downstairs. Add 'replace tub/shower' to the list of things to do when repairing the upstairs bathroom.

It's mildly daunting to continue to find non-Katrina related problems to fix as we get so close to actually finishing the Katrina related problems. But Hey! We've conquered much more. Just time to crack out the hammers and crowbars and the digital camera once more.