One of the quirks of this little house is that the bathroom floor was quite tilted. I’d crawled around under the house to convince myself that this wasn’t a harbinger of some profound evil, but everything seemed to be basically sound.
The bathroom is only 63 inches wide, and over that space it drops more than an inch. That’s a lot! It was actually disorienting to walk into it.
The main house was built in 1914. It didn’t have an indoor bathroom and likely didn’t even have an indoor kitchen — we haven’t found records to verify it. Though only about 900 square feet, the original was a three bedroom house. What is now the bedroom was a great room on the south side of the house. If the house had an indoor kitchen, it was formed from part of the great room. Three doors led north off the great room into the bedrooms. One of the bedrooms is now the closet: it’s big for a closet, but would have made a tiny bedroom. The other two bedrooms have now been joined and form the living room.
Some time in the early 1930’s, an addition was built on the west side of the house. Most of the addition formed a kitchen, with the rest creating an entry hall (the front door was moved) and the heretofore tilted bathroom. The quality of the construction of the original house is actually somewhat better than the “new” part.
Against the outer wall of the bathroom, which is the low end of the floor, there was a claw-foot iron tub.
I removed it the bathtub the help of the Hired Hand, and I would say that it easily weighed over 300 pounds. When in use, it probably had three to four hundred pounds of water in it and a couple of hundred pounds of bather. As if that wasn’t enough, in more recent times someone had added a small solar plant with an inverter that weighed over 100 pounds, over 400 pounds of lead-acid batteries, a solar load control panel, a notorious Stab-Lok electrical service panel, and some rooftop solar panels all resting on that self-same wall.
So that one short wall, already on the weakest part of the house, was carrying as much as 1,800 extra pounds. Mystery solved.
We removed the tub in favor of the outdoor shower because the bathroom was Just Too Small. We’ll probably put the tub in an outdoor recreation area of some sort eventually. We removed the solar equipment in favor of a much, much larger solar plant. This month, we’re getting the house re-wired and can remove the service panels. In celebration, we’ve started leveling the bathroom floor.
We hired the same gentleman who did a wonderful job upgrading some of the original foundation and who also did much of the work on the new garage. He placed jacks under the sagging wall and lifted it an inch or so.
He then replaced the main post with a longer one and reinforced the beam. Once we’ve completely finished removing the old equipment, we’ll build a more solid wall for the foundation. We’ll be replacing and enlarging the front porch to make a larger, covered outdoor living space. It will be self-supporting, not connected to the existing wall.
—2p