Hmmm....

So, when you think bathroom remodel, being able to see the shell of the bathroom from the kitchen isn't what jumps to mind for you? Me neither. But when you remodel a 60+ year old house, things don't always go as planned. Case in point:

 We found old termite damage when Joe and I opened up the bathroom walls. Initially, our contractor thought it wouldn't be a big deal to repair. However, when he came to inspect the space, he realized that the damage wasn't concentrated to the corner of the bathroom - it extends from the basement clear up to the top of the second floor. The bright spot, I guess, is that all of the damage seems to be within a 30 inch wide section, and that we found it now, not when we were opening walls to do the upstairs remodel. It's not going to be a cheap fix at all, but at least we now know why the dining room wall had a crack, can explain the sag in the dining room floor and why the dining room window seemed to be dropping down the wall... notice in the picture above two of the studs holding the window up aren't attached to the floor anymore!

Yes, that's a hole where the floor is gone. The other bright spot, sort of, is that all of this damage is concentrated right on top of the foundation, so when the plates and studs holding up the upstairs floors were gone, the house just rested on the foundation, so it didn't have far to drop.

Likewise, the damage that continues up into the ceiling led us to have to continue tearing out walls upstairs to see how bad things are...

We'll probably lose about a third of this upstairs bedroom wall before we're all said and done. I guess we have a lot more painting to do, beyond just the bathroom and hallway (we're closing up the doorway to the old linen closet and moving the door to the bathroom down a few inches). Fun times. Unfortunately, this is going to delay the bathroom being finished, so we are even more grateful to have Ashley and Mikael allowing us to stay with them. I think our hopes of being finished by the end of the year are probably dashed, along with staying in budget.

 I'm thankful we had negotiated the original bid from the contractor to save almost two thousand dollars by doing the demo and some of the finish work ourselves... I'd be even more upset to have that much more money to spend on all of this extra work. But at the end of the day, I'll be very happy to know that all of this old termite damage is repaired, and the structure will be sound again.