The Bathroom From Hell

The router that Tim needs to do the woodwork with for the south wing bathroom came in just before we left for England.  He's been catching up on post-vacation house stuff (dealing with the 3-week neglected front yard, plowing through his backed-up work emails, gettingetc.) and hasn't had a chance to start the mouldings, yet.

The north wing bathroom, however, just doesn't want to be ignored.  This is the bathroom we finished last December.  The shower isn't draining.

Here's a refresher on the history of the north wing bathroom...  When we moved in, the north wing bathroom had recently been redone because a branch had fallen into the roof above it.  It had new tile floor and new fixtures - except for the shower.  We thought this was the one bathroom that didn't need anything, so we started using it.  Well, the old shower started leaking right away.  Since the rest of the bathroom was new, we rebuilt the shower only, getting coordinating tile with the new tile that was already on the floor.  Almost immediately after the shower was finished (and Tim had started ripping out the south wing bathroom), the sink stopped up. 

Tim stopped work on the south wing bath, reinstalling the toilet over the bare sub-floor, and started investigating the sink stoppage in the north wing bathroom.  The old galvanized steel pipes in the north wing bathroom were beginning to corrode shut, so - we had to rip out the tile floor that the previous owners had just installed and part of the wall behind the sink so we could replace all the pipes.  When we were all finished, there was only 9" of galvanized steel pipes left under the brand-spanking new shower that we couldn't get to because we didn't want to rip up the newly custom-tiled shower floor - and it was still in good shape.

We knew it might come back to bite us, but at the time it was better to hope that those 9" would remain in good shape.  We figured if it didn't go bad, then we saved us from ripping up the shower floor and if it did, then we'd rip it up at that point.

Well, it seems those 9" went bad.  So, we're going to have to rip up the custom tile floor and transition, replace those final 9" and re-tile it all.

Without that shower, we have no other place to bathe in the house right now.  We can still use the shower in the north wing -- it's just draining slowly.  We don't want to push it, though, so Tim has to absolutely finish the south wing bathroom right away.

This north wing bathroom has been plaguing us with problems since day one and we thought this was the one bathroom we didn't have to do anything to at all.

Maybe it goes along with the ghost in there...