The house is a full-blown construction zone and I've been living in it full-time since the end of April...at first in two of the upstairs bedrooms, one of them set up with a camp kitchen, my office and a recliner, the other a comfortable bedroom. Other than having to run extension cords into the rooms to turn on a lamp and not having any indoor plumbing yet, it was great. Not having indoor plumbing yet was the worst, but I put on my big girl panties and ordered a camp toilet off Amazon.
I was "hoping" I wouldn't need to replace all of the plumbing in house, but the prospect was looking dim; even dimmer the first time we tried to run water through the system. It was literally a s**t-show. I won't go into it right now, other than to say that the only original ceiling on the main level that I wanted to save began to sag, then big sections of plaster started to fall. I almost cried.
Finding a plumber who could replumb the entire house proved to be difficult. The plumber who had started the project was booked out for months, but I was fortunate to find Les Ryan of Ryan Plumbing and Heating from Cataldo. He was available the first week of June; three weeks and several thousand dollars later, I had a flushing toilet on the main floor and a lime-green inspection sticker from the State of Idaho, stamped approved for completely updated plumbing.
Les finished the job on June 22, two days after my 67th birthday. I had decided that I was going to move down to the basement as soon as he was finished because the upstairs, west-facing bedroom was getting unbearably hot. The basement was a comfortable 68 degrees 24/7. The antique furniture that I had been collecting from Market Place to furnish the main floor was there and I could set up a living space for the summer.
The next day, I uncovered the antique furniture and arranged it against the unfinished, newly furred out walls in the basement and moved my camp kitchen and office down two flights of stairs. The Pacific Northwest heat dome had just settled in and living in the basement was heavenly. Between the cooler temperature and the darkness of the basement with its painted over windows, I slept like a baby that night.
My comfortable temporary apartment in the basement.
Camp kitchen at its finest! I have everything I need, an electric cooktop, microwave, Keurig coffee maker, toaster oven, and refrigerator.
Here is a photo of the basement when it was first purchased. We tore down the wall with the doorway, where it concealed a marijuana grow room.
The only ceiling in the entire house that was still original, with a beautiful chandelier and medallion intact. I was able to save the chandelier and medallion. I am planning to style the millwork throughout the house to match this room.
Here is the completed plumbing for the two bathrooms on the upper level. The ceiling will need to be dropped 7 inches to accommodate the newly installed plumbing. All of the joists needed to be reinforced as the original plumbing had cut through them to the point of being too weak to support the two cast iron bathtubs in the upstairs bathrooms.