Any contractor worth his salt will tell you: when floors and walls are open, take plenty of pictures!

This is especially true in an old house, where stud and joist bays can hide all manner of sins: frayed knob and tube wiring; cracked cast-iron waste stacks; galvanized steel water supply lines in advanced stages of sclerosis.

You might not have the budget to upgrade everything at once, but a good photograph or two will save many a headache when it comes time to do the work later on.

Ten years ago, we scraped together the budget to renovate a second floor bathroom in our old house. The tile floor had fault lines running through it; the walls were covered with webbed stress cracks; the bathtub was shedding bits of porcelain; the drains were slow; the lighting was dreary.

The plumbing and fixtures were ninety years old. The decor, on the other hand, owed a lot to the fabulous 1970s. It was time to start fresh, which meant gutting the room completely.

When the violent noise and dust died down, the bones of the room were visible for the first time since 1913. I made sure to take pictures.

The plumbers were set to replace the old galvanized hot and cold supply lines with copper. Before they got started, they asked me, “What do you want to do about the third floor bathroom?”

“Uh, nothing?” I said. We weren’t exactly looking for another project. We were scraping by as it was.

“But there are galvanized lines up there,” they said. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to replace them. Better to do it now, when things are open.”

“I’d vote for ‘later.’ I mean, is there a way to tie the new copper lines into the old galvanized ones upstairs?”

There was a way. The plumbers did as I asked, and for ten years, we’ve enjoyed our renovated second floor bathroom.

Alas, as I wrote in a column last August, a light rainshower in my office, the result of a split drainpipe buried in the ceiling, suggested it was finally time to tackle the third floor bathroom.

“There’s galvanized steel plumbing up here,” our contractor said.

“I know,” I said.

“How far down does it go?”

“Uh, good question,” I said. “I don’t really remember. But I’m pretty sure I took pictures when we did the work on the second floor…”

Word of advice: after you dutifully take pictures of the open walls and floors of a room, try to keep track of them!

Younger readers, who have grown up in a world of digital photo archives, won’t understand the trauma of staring down several overstuffed drawers-full of old Kodak folders.

“Just open iPhoto,” they’ll say. “Scroll up to the top, to the really old pictures. Then click on the one you want. You can enlarge it to your heart’s content!”

If only.

After more than an hour of sifting through baby pictures, wedding pictures, pictures from some unknown aquarium, pictures of a race car driver apparently in Argentina, pictures of unknown children, pictures of known children, including our own little Nina in every imaginable phase of life from birth to about age ten, when everything pretty much went digital…

I found a folder from September 2002 with a few precious pictures of the open walls and floor of the second floor bathroom. I knew it was the right folder because back then, Kodak printed an extra photo for you, a kind of catalogue of all the images on your roll, but in miniature, as an aid to ordering extra prints. There, in the bottom row of tiny images, were the three bathroom photos I was looking for!

Of course, those exact three bathroom pictures were the only 4 x 6s that were missing from the folder.

Which is how I came to be sitting at the dining room table, Swiss army knife in hand, with the magnifying lens extended, shifting the lens a little closer, the miniature photos a little farther away, and vice versa.

I could see a certain amount of detail in the miniatures — just enough to tantalize. There was the cast-iron waste stack in the corner. But was that faint gleam along the side of the third stud a galvanized pipe? Or was it a neutral wire of the old knob and tube?

I studied and stared, in different light, and with different magnifiers, but I simply couldn’t tell. The resolution of the miniatures just wasn’t good enough.

So back to the drawers I went. Believe it or not, about an hour later, I found those three missing 4 x 6s. They’d somehow made their way into a folder of a trip to a bird refuge, circa 2004. They didn’t show the galvanized lines after all, but at least we knew where they weren’t.

I ran upstairs to show them to the contractor. I was so proud!

I found him lying on the floor with a flashlight, his head deep in a joist bay. “Hey, guess what?” he said. “These old galvanized lines tie into new copper about four feet beyond that wall. If we cut a hatch in the closet floor, the plumber should be able to tie into the new copper, no problem.”

Moral of the story: take lots of pictures when the walls and floor are open; keep track of those pictures; and, above all, hire a contractor who’s worth his salt.

He probably won’t need pictures.

 

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 21 February 2013

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com