20081202

Unexpected Trouble


One of the cardinal rules I learned soon after buying a 1901 limestone brick fixer-upper was: Expect the unexpected.

And how.

One Saturday morning, I awoke to find my bathroom flooded, its ceiling bowed and dripping water. Panic quickly took over and I ran upstairs to look for the source of the leak. No one was yet living there and we hadn't done any plumbing work yet other than installing a new pedestal sink, so I was bewildered.

The second-floor ceramic tile seemed a bit damp, but there was no geyser to deal with. That's when I decided to start chipping away at the tiles to discover wet subfloor concrete and joists — originally 3-by-8 — that had nearly rotted through to about an inch's thickness. What little wood remained there was spongy and unnaturally dark.

A call to my brother, Marco, led to us stripping it down to the bare joists.

Later, a visitor to the house to whom I had related this story remarked:

"Oh, you really have no bathroom floor. When you said that, I thought there was probably a hole in it at most."

These days, I'm not much for hyperbole.

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