Hello!

[bookworm3390]

Hi!

My name is Bethie, and I live in Minnesota with my husband. We live in a 1914 (or thereabouts) Dutch Colonial house. I found this site because we are planning on doing a major renovation on our bathroom. It's a rather awkward bathroom, as not only has it been hacked about by various people over the years, it also has the attic access as well, taking up valuable wall space. So my various research meanderings lead me here. After reading quite a few posts, I have found this to be a valuable resource indeed.

We have been working hard over the past year and a half on our house to remove past horrors (bad wall paper, red paint, more bad wall paper). Luckily for us, everyone has kept the wooden floors on the main level, and a past saint had removed the white paint from the woodwork on the ground floor. However, that is not true for the second level....

But, our first major effort in changing the house will be the bathroom....and its going to be a HUGE design/functional challenge. As soon as I figure out how to post pics of the bathroom, I will.

Thanks!

[heartwood]

hi bethie the bookworm! welcome to the district neighborhood....yup, you've come to the right place...
my good friend is from fertile (yup!) MN and my niece just moved to Minneapolis...

oh fer gosh sakes.....
...jade

[Gothichome]

Bethie, welcome to the district. I would think your home would have been designed with a bathroom, has the wall been removed to make it bigger ( or smaller) these old homes worked well in thier original configuration. Maybe what it needs is an update rather than another reconfigure. Pics are always good. We are a nosy bunch.

[bookworm3390]

Yay! Figured out how to post pics! Ok, so this is the bathroom, in all of its glory. The floor is laminate, and I would assume that there is wood flooring underneath, and that is what the rest of the house is. The bathroom actually leaks at rare, random intervals, so we have placed this on the "we need to get this done now" section. So the whole thing is going to get gutted and examined so we can find the mysterious leak.

The black radiator, with a cool feature of drawers in the wall. Downside is that they are slowly falling apart.

Bath1.jpg (17.5 KiB) Viewed 770 times

[bookworm3390]

Bethie, welcome to the district. I would think your home would have been designed with a bathroom, has the wall been removed to make it bigger ( or smaller) these old homes worked well in thier original configuration. Maybe what it needs is an update rather than another reconfigure. Pics are always good. We are a nosy bunch.

The room itself, you can tell was never messed with. The inside however, is just so odd...Someone along the way did something to it, and messed with it. I keep thinking that there must have been a claw foot tub in there at one point, and someone got rid of it. Sigh. Right now there is a ton of unusable space and that is disheartening, especially since we have so little storage space. But I agree, an update is definitely needed.

[Nicholas]

Welcome, I am curious about the occasional mysterious leak. Things like that would have me going nuts. Is this the only bathroom in the house?

[1918ColonialRevival]

The leak may be coming from a hairline crack in a cast iron waste line. No guarantees, but I've seen this on numerous occasions, especially if it's intermittent and if it happens only when a high volume of water is moving, such as a filled tub draining. When you see the leak, where does it occur?

It looks like a bathroom appropriate to a 1910s house. The attic access is a little odd, but this isn't the first time I've seen attic access through a bathroom. The drawers are likely original. When you say you can't get the closet door open, what is stopping it? It doesn't look like there's anything there to physically obstruct it. Has the wood swollen?

The intent of the closets were likely linens and cleaning supplies. If the bathroom was ever larger, you should be able to tell by looking at the inside of the closet. Speaking of which, knowing what the closets are made of will help us to figure out if they might be original or not.

Not all tubs of that era were clawfoot. Yours looks to have been replaced at some point, but there were porcelain enameled cast iron tubs and vitreous china tubs that were made to fit in openings like yours at the time. I have a 1914 Standard catalog that's full of them.

That sink is too big to be where it's at. There was likely a wall hung sink there previously, or if the closets aren't original, a sink could have been there.

If the window is original and you are keeping the window in the room, why are you replacing it?

By the way, welcome!

[Sara]

Welcome! Looking forward to seeing your progress!

I'm jealous of all the space you have to work with here but you're definitely in for a bit of a design challenge. I wonder how deep that unopenable closet is? If you remove it - can the space be opened up all the way to the exterior wall? I'm envisioning you rotating the shower/tub to the space your toilet sits in now and then having room for a much larger vanity? Or at least plenty of space to stand in from of your pedestal sink without being right in the center of everything?

[mjt]

My name is Bethie, and I live in Minnesota with my husband. We live in a 1914 (or thereabouts) Dutch Colonial house.

Welcome! Good to have another Minnesotan in The District.

[AngusMacCamsron]

Welcome, Bethie, from another Minnesotan.

Your "drawers in the wall" may be an airing closet. These are closets with a shaft going most of the way up and down the house, so air is pulled up past the drawers. Linens and such are kept dry and mildew-free by the air you may be able to feel moving, especially in the winter. I once lived in a St. Paul apartment house, circa 1910, where the airing closet had so much air movement I could dry wet towels in it.

Kathleen