Money Pit, part 23423

A week or two ago, I signed a contract to have our eroding sandstone porch (ca. 1929) hammered down and poured as cast concrete in August. It broke my heart to do away with the masonry, but having the stone replaced was prohibitively expensive, and the concrete will be molded and antiqued and sealed so that it looks like stone. More to the point, no one will be likely to injure themselves on ancient stones that have rotted away. Anyway, we had the money in savings.

Last night the Jack and Jill bathroom ceiling fell.

In the fresh morning light.

That particular bathroom, set in a corner and accessed through two kid bedrooms, has been in a bad way since we bought the house (and before, obviously). That window is set in the chimney -- in the chimney, I say, not beside it -- and somewhere up there is a leak we've been trying to fix for nine years. We've capped the chimney, we've tasked the roofers with examining the flashing where the roof meets the chimney, we've had the window worked on. And we thought that perhaps we had dealt with it, except that the past two weeks of non-stop rain have wreaked havoc on the ceiling. It started to crack, then to bulge, and then it collapsed.

A shot from a year or two ago, showing the wall damage.

We knew that one day we'd have to strip this bathroom down to the studs, but we always hoped that day could be pushed out and pushed out. The bathroom has been functional, and has the one really useful shower in the house. (There are four showers in the house. One has never been used due to a leak, one is in the attic in the cat bathroom and subprime, and the third is always draining slowly and has no water pressure and takes forever to get hot.) 

I guess we're all traipsing down the hall to the low-pressure, low-heat shower for a while.