Oh dear

The official color of this tile and tub is called "seafoam green." It will go down in the annals of bad taste with "harvest gold" and "avacado."


This is what greeted me when I peeled back the plastic that had been duck-taped over it to prevent more leakage into the downstairs bathroom.

Yeah, it was pretty bad.

Then I started peeling stuff out of there and it looked like this:

I don't know if it shows really well in the photo, but the tiles were stuck to drywall. Not plywood, drywall. Not blueboard drywall, generally used for bathrooms, but cheap-ass 3/8 inch drywall.

On the wall with all the faucet bits, there were three horizontal boards that the stuff was nailed to. Not screwed, nailed. And they weren't two-bys, oh no. They were one-by-something-cheap and they were spaced nearly 30 inches apart. Yeah. really nice.

On the long wall, the drywall is covering up the rotted out beat up horsehair plaster and lath wall behind it. Look closely and you'll see the various layers of nastiness.

And finally, my lungs hurt just looking at the next picture. What you are seeing in the bottom horizontal piece of sheetrock peeled back at the left-hand corner to expose the fungus that had obviously been thriving between it and the plaster. Yes, I do have a mask. But it still makes my lungs ache to even look at it.


The red stuff in the hole? That's a kind of stiff paper air barrier that was put between the two-by-four wall studs (this is an exterior wall) and the plaster and lath. There is nothing between it and the exterior siding but air. That's right: no insulation. Oh, yeah. Nice stuff. There is some weird insulation kind of stuff on the outside of the wall studs but inside of the sheathing and clapboards. It looks like shredded newspaper or something contained in a brown paper pillow pack kind of thing. Very weird looking. I'll post that picture later. For now I am tired and tired and tired and tired. So I am going to bed. I've been to three meetings in 24 hours and am remarkable peaceful for a person who is so far from home, girlfriend and puppy and who discovered this morning that the floor next to this tub is also rotted and will have to be replaced. I'll go into more detail on that tomorrow. For now, here's a peek:


Now I am headed to bed. Tomorrow will be here very, very soon.