Escape from Grey Gardens

We finally got started on our final major interior Grey Gardens of the south renovation project: bathroom and closet remodel, which will lead to having a "master suite." What you are about to see ain't pretty.

When we moved in one of the things that was confusing, yet in retrospect I kind of like, was that many of the rooms here didn't seem to say what exactly they were. Which room would be our bedroom, which dining room, which parlor? Several rooms had apparently been used as bedrooms we didn't need for that purpose, and then the room they used for a dining room was right at the entrance, and I didn't care for its formality as a dining room, nor for walking smack into the dining room when one entered the house. The folks who had owned GGLA since 1942 raised 5 children here, and the patriarch was a DIYer and recycler avant la lettre. Since its origin as a circa 1870 addition to a house down the road (possibly it is earlier, came from somewhere else first), its being trucked up the road and made into a house in its own right, several additions and remodelings, it has become a kind of a puzzle. One theory is that every time they had a new child they enclosed a porch and built another porch onto it, and so on. It's hard to date things, since most of the additions and changes made use of recycled materials, some of it really great. We're carrying on what we can of that tradition. For instance, the old shelves in the pantry were old cypress, recycled from something else. Gary and a friend sanded the decades of pantry dirt off them and made them into our new dining room table.

Anyway, when we moved in we opted for a room off the former dining room (now a giant lobby, more or less) for our bedroom since it was the warmest room, and when we arrived it was really cold and GGLA had no central heat, just a few scary decaying floor and wall units and a few fireplaces. Since we had central air and heat installed and have been living here long enough to figure out what will work best, we decided to flip some rooms and make what is now our TV room the bedroom, and vice-versa. The pass-through bathroom which desperately needed to be gutted and redone will no longer be pass-through, but instead will be entered only through the bedroom. We are also wrecking out the warren of 4 closets that surrounded the bathroom (one of which was cobbled together as a sort of large but only 5' high weird cubby off the stair landing holding a hot water heater) to make the bathroom bigger and to make just one big walk-in closet, entrance from what will be the master bedroom. It has all been hard to work out, since the warren of closets was so cobbled together--you'd go in one to try to measure things and get confused, it was like the black hole of geometry, didn't add up.

Now that we've done most of the demo we can see that the bathroom and closet warren were a room of its own at one time, with, guess what, a porch (you can tell from the floor) that the bathroom claimed. We are bumping out one wall to take a few feet of bedroom space so we can have the dream bathroom for aging arthritic people: shower with a steam bath feature, separate tub with jacuzzi, etc. And the closet which will be MINE all mine will be the first (and last!) closet that I get to design and that will make sense for me. It will also be large enough for everything--no more of the old house inadequate closet plague I've had everywhere I've lived as an adult, that makes you put part of your stuff down the hall in another room, for instance. And I finally won the argument for a bidet. Gary was trying to sell me on something called a Toto Washlet but I find that sort of thing really silly--a kind of mechanical toilet seat that contains the bidet function. You press a button on some sort of remote control and this little gadget that looks like an anal probe pokes out and sprays you. No way. Toilet and bidet need to be kept apart, and although this little Toto hard sell flash presentation is bizarre and funny, I can't see actually having an electronic toilet in my house. Yesterday we worked out how to fit both and solve a need for a support wall anyway. There are some things you can't figure out on paper in advance.

All of our plans of course involved trying to save enough money to realize them (harder these days, definitely so). Of course we are doing most of the work ourselves, but even so, this is a pricey redo. But no cutting corners on materials for this one. We were about to start when the ancient septic system failed, and there being no point in attaching new plumbing fixtures to that mess, not to mention how dreadful having sewage back up into the yard was, we had to spend a chunk of time and money on getting the septic redone. By that time we were expecting guests and so we delayed longer. But we're finally on it. Gary thinks we can do this in a month. I know to double that automatically, and from the looks of it, probably quadruple is more accurate. We can't work on it full time--the rest of life goes on. So we will be pretty discombobulated for some months. And even though I threw away a lot, the stuff one has stored in 4 closets has to go somewhere, so, for instance, my clothes are now on hanging racks in the middle of the bedroom.

Last week was an orgy of ripping out closets and junk. And finally, the place is making some sense. The stairway curves around it, so there's still some funkiness, but we've got a plan. I failed to document the kitchen redo (partly because all I wanted to do was scream and rip things out in the "before" days) but for this one I'm keeping track. So here we go.

Before the demolition, here's the pass-through, ugly ugly ugly and very worn out. The plunger is sitting in the tub drain to contain the smelly water that kind of percolated out of it every so often. Not usable.

Looking the other direction, and please note the hideous simulated parquet woodgrain lino. Ugh.

Here's one of the closets from the warren. Dark, full of cracks through which moths entered and ate holes in nearly everything I had with wool in it. Good riddance.

And here, demo started, is a shot looking out from another of the closets.

Here's the kind of thing we discovered wrecking out walls: circa 1870 wallpaper (that's a guess).

Here's the bump-out wall, framed and sheet-rocked before the demo in order to contain dust and mess. That was a good idea, except now the air duct need to be extended to come through it. And while it is containing some of the mess, doing all this is still stirring up a lot of dust, and coming and going tracks it out into the house. Not to mention all the clutter from the closets being out of commission. The shining eyes on the left are Hattie's, peeking to see what the heck is going on here. She hates all the noise and rearranging.

And another discovery: besides the odd rat's nest (I am not kidding nor is that a metaphor) we dug out of walls and from under the stairs, wood shavings used as insulation. I'm happy we found and eradicated this, because the thought of it surrounded by old wiring makes me very queasy.

Most of the closets wrecked out, things begin to make sense.

The closet door visible is from the inside of the same closet as in the third photo above.

Part of demo is of course getting rid of everything. We threw most of it out the window, dragged it out into the yard and burned it. The side yard here is still pretty scarred from where they dug the new septic field.

Gary has a helper, an experienced house carpenter, and he's worked out how to make all the load-bearing stuff work out. They've torn out more (and pitched the bathtub out the window, next the defunct hot water heater, lowered by rope from the weird landing closet that no longer exists since the floor is all gone to get us the ceiling height we need downstairs). They've framed the ceiling and ripped up enough of the floor to determine it's going to be a lot of work but not as bad as we thought it would be. My job has settled into trying to keep the mess down to a dull roar. It takes me 1-2 hours a day to clean up after the day's destruction and carpentry. Yesterday this also entailed eradicating the rat's nest (again, literally) that had been under the tub. Thank heaven for particle masks, work gloves, and my pal the shop vac.

To be continued...hopefully, not over a great period of time. It will be so nice to make a blog entry called "After."