New Ceiling

We really haven't been left a whole month with a big hole in our ceiling, I just didn't get around to posting an update. You may recall that when last we visited the bathroom, the pipe was fixed but the ceiling looked like this. We were understandably eager to get rid of the giant hole.

Well it was definitely one of those instances where things have to get worse before they get better. So much of the drywall was damp and swollen that the handyman said it made more sense to just remove the whole ceiling. It's not a very big room, after all. He also did the ceiling inside the shower stall as well, It didn't suffer any damage from the leak but it had always had a strange paint bubble that couldn't really be fixed, potentially due to some old water damage. So one day into the repair (and after removing everything from the room like curtains, towels, shelves, wall hangings, etc, here was the view:

The next day, it already looked much better:

After that came four days of quick visits by the handyman for layer upon layer of skim coating and priming. It was good confirmation that no matter how skilled you are at drywall installation, there are no ways to take shortcuts on this step Also based on the time each layer took, it confirmed for me that we made the right choice in hiring someone else.

The progress made through al the skim coating days seemed so negligible that we didn't take incremental photos. After a few days of that and two layers of paint, we were back in business. Well, sort of. Not pictured is the full 2-3 hours I spent in that tiny room cleaning all the drywall dust and debris from every ledge, crevice, and grout line. But then it was finally time to move the things back in. As good as new. Kind of crazy that after all that, the best we could hope for was that it looked the same as it did before. Guess that's the nature of a repair compared to a remodel. The paint bubbles are gone at least, and the ceiling is nice and smooth.

I never did get a before picture, but above this light is where the paint bubble has been since we first painted in 2009.

And here is the view inside the shower stall, also bubble-free.

A note about the paint. When we painted, we used Sherwin Williams in Grand Canal. We still had some of the original can. Our handyman preferred Benjamin Moore so he took our can, with the color composition, over to be paint matched. It really does look the same, so either he did an excellent job painting, or they truly were mostly identical (at least enough to cover one up with the other invisibly).

As I'm writing this post, I'm realizing that he never told us what the ceiling paint was. When he asked for our preferences, we simply said we didn't want optic white out of the can (like we mistakenly had used the previous time). But he didn't leave us the can so I probably ought to send him a message and find out what it was, just in case.

Edited to add in the paint color for the ceiling: Benjamin Moore Regal Select, eggshell finish in Brilliant White (if I'm reading the label correctly).

Hopefully that's the last we hear from our pipes for a while...

Two pinholes for the price of...two

A couple of weeks ago, on a Thursday, I came home to find some moisture on the wall outside the access door where our main water line comes into the house. That didn't seem good. Fortunately, it also wasn't bad, just a little damp

If you look at the lower edge of the door, you can see the water stain. Whatever was causing the problem, I'd obviously caught it shortly after it started. I couldn't see an obvious problem, so I put out some bowls to see if they would gather water.

They didn't. The problem was even smaller than we thought. A tiny pinhole in this cap--sometimes it dripped, and sometimes it sprayed a very fine spray. Minor but annoying problem.

A plumber was able to come the next day, Friday, to replace the cap. He said it was slightly too big and had been filled up with solder to seal. It managed for years, apparently, but the stress of being the wrong size--he thought--probably finally caused it to leak. Easy fix.

Fast forward to later that night, as we were about to brush teeth and go to bed. We entered the bathroom and:

Yeah....it was going to be a long weekend. Not picture is the part where we stabbed this giant water-filled paint bubble with a knitting needle and let it drain into a bucket. You can see in this picture above that while most of the water collected in what was already an annoying air bubble in the paint from literally when we first moved in, it also had seeped into other areas where two drywall pieces met, near the upper right corner of the picture.

So instead of going to bed on time, we started pulling off pieces of paint and drywall from the ceiling. Totally normal Friday night--isn't this how you spend yours?

We couldn't see much up there, but there were clearly older and stickier areas to both the electrical wiring and the copper pipes. By this time, we'd gone back down to the water main and turned off the water to the house as well.

For some reason, there was a LOT of insulation in our ceiling. Since this is the area between the first and second floors, it doesn't seem particularly helpful for energy efficiency. The only thing we can think of is that the contractors put it in when doing the second floor bathroom. We had said to insulate everything, but I guess we assumed "outer wall" was implied.

Once everything was cleared away, we were fortunately able to find the leak quickly--ANOTHER pinhole leak. The hole this time was on the top of the pipe and dripping out everywhere, but D was able to use some plumbers tape to reduce the leak and at least direct it down. For the rest of the weekend, we were able to catch the drips in a pyrex measuring cup on one of the wooden crossbeams. We turned off the water to the house when we went to bed, but could run it, under supervision, during the day. Of course we failed to get a picture of that phase.

Then the following Monday, the plumber came and charged us a lot of money to replace about a 4-inch piece of copper pipe. He had to cut the beam to get to it, but that beam seemed to just be there to help hold up drywall.

And so this has been our view now for just over a week, with a hole over the sink. I'm so glad the leak is fixed but this is not the most lovely sight. Someone came out to give us estimates on the drywall replacement and thought that quite a lot of it is soggy and needs to be replaced. So we're going to redo the whole ceiling. The silver lining here is that the ceiling in the shower stall is going to get replaced too, which means we'll finally be rid of those annoying bubbles in the ceiling from over a decade ago. So...yay? I guess.

Work starts tomorrow. Fingers crossed for a smooth repair. We're also trying not to think too much about how we just had two pinhole leaks in 24 hours because well what's the point in that?