Fixing the Stupid

This is my house:


I bought my house in 2004 intending to renovate it. Unfortunately, a lot of the renovations have been put off in favor of major, if not cosmetic, projects. Since I have moved in, the plumbing stack has been replaced, necessitating the rebuilding of a bathroom wall; we have completely reconstructed the structural support of the front porch; my brother and I installed the privacy fence; new windows were put in the dining room; and a new roof and gutters were put on. As you can see from the photo above, the second floor of my house is essentially a series of dormers, and with all those peaks, that roof was NOT cheap to put on.

Since restoration has been tabled in favor of reconstruction, a lot of what I have done to the interior of the house has been temporary fixes rather than the final restoration that I would like to do. The house was built in 1920, and still has the original butler's pantry, woodwork (although it has been painted), and even some of the original windows. Because of this, I would like to be "true" to the era of the house in the renovation that I do, and not just replace everything with white tile and stainless steel. (The couple that live around the corner from me even restored their house's summer kitchen...a little brick building connected to the back of the house by a breezeway. I love them and hate them for their perfection all at the same time. Their house is fantastic. They even sanded and restored the original swing-out storm windows.)

But, over the last 88 years of this home's life, not every owner has had the same attitude about conservation that I do, and a lot of what I have had to do in the house is what I like to think of as "Fixing the Stupid."

One of the stupidest things in the house is the way that the upstairs bathroom was built. I know that it was added sometime after 1960, because I have met the daughter of the family that owned the house before that time, and there was no upstairs bath. Apparently, the front porch also extended all the way around the corner of the house, and met the back porch, making a huge veranda, and some numbskull decided it would be a FANTASTIC idea to just rip that the hell off. If I ever meet the person that did that, I'm going to hit them with a hammer. The claw side.

But, the level of stupidity involved in deciding to tear 3/4 of a beautiful porch off the house is similar in scale to the stupidity involved in building the upstairs bathroom, so I suspect it was the same person.

Because the upstairs is essentially an over-sized attic (even though I do actually have an attic, that I can crawl into through a tiny hole in my bedroom ceiling), many of the walls are sloped, including one of the bathroom walls. One of the four bathroom walls. But apparently, the person who put the bathroom up there thought that it would be a fantastic idea to put the bathtub under the sloped part of the wall.

This means that if you are anything over 4 feet tall, you constantly thwack your head on the wall reaching for the shampoo.

Oh, and this is what the shower curtain rod looked like when I moved in:


Now, eventually this entire bathroom is going to get torn up and the bathtub is going to be moved to the other end of the room, where the ceiling is not sloped, and you would have to be 9 feet tall to hit your head on it. Instead, the toilet will go under the highest part of the peak, and the sloped part will be enclosed to become a linen closet, so I didn't want to do anything drastic in fixing the bathroom, but that curtain HAD to be fixed, because clearly a man had come up with this set-up. I can almost hear the train of thought "It's ok that the shower curtain only extends half way down the tub, I'll just stand so my body blocks the water from the shower...the floor will only get slightly wet that way..."

Well, an only slightly wet floor was not ok with me, and I needed a shower curtain that fully blocked the spray of the water. After racking my brain trying to figure out how to create a sloped shower rod...sewing a curtain to fit....how would I keep it from sliding....I came up with a simple solution.

Forget trying to alter a shower rod and curtain, just find a way to hang a standard one. I just needed a "stop" for the other end. But how to make that something attractive and not just some chunk of 2x4 screwed into the wall?


Easy enough...I went to the hardware store and in the trim aisle found a variety of bits and pieces of trim for windows, doors, stairs, just about anything your could imagine. I just played around stacking different pieces on top of one another until I came up with something that I liked. This is two pieces of trim, both ready-made and readily available in any big lumber store. The bottom piece is floorboard (attached upside down), and the top piece is a piece of door and window trim.


I painted both white with leftovers from the wall/bathroom repair downstairs. I then used some liquid nails and two screws to attach the larger piece to the wall. I used another spot of liquid nails and four finish nails to attach the square piece to hide the screws. I used a nail-set drive the finish nails below the surface level of the wood, then four dots of spackle and some touch-up paint and....voila:


A shower curtain that extends the full extent of the bathtub. Problem solved. The stupid has been fixed. And this will more than suffice until the bathroom can be fully remodelled and the bathtub relocated.