Yes, No or Maybe So

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. 

Part of the mystique of country living, is that we never throw anything away that can be used again. Out in the south-forty, we have an area known as the bone yard, where unused chunks of plywood, lengths of irrigation line, left over 2 x 4’s, the odd 4 x 4 redwood post, discarded doors and windows, winterized T-posts, abandoned stock troughs and various lengths of fencing, go to await their next assignment.

One man's horse trough is another man's bathtub.

Not to be confused with hoarding, because there is an excellent chance that the stored items will once again fill a role in the greater scheme of things, the bone yard is the first place I head when I am making a materials list for a project.

Ultimately I credit-or blame-this penchant for pragmatism on my dear departed mother, Pauline, who instilled in all of her children (I suspect) a set of Depression Era values that have flourished almost eighty years after the fact.

When Gluten-Free Mama and I first moved up to the land, we repurposed a little wood stove for our cabin, including used and somewhat dilapidated stove pipes. We obtained a serviceable kitchen sink that was practical if not particularly attractive, and we scored an antique bathtub from a neighbor, even if it had not been used as a bathtub for a few decades.

I wasn’t skeered ‘cause I had a ready supply of elbow grease handy for the cleanup.

Take the current remodeling job I am working on, and let’s see how this concept plays out. The original impetus was the need to outfit our bathroom with more elderly-friendly access to such basic needs as bathing. Climbing over the side of a clawfoot bathtub to access the shower is an accident waiting to happen.

The original

Five years ago it was determined that the farm needed to build a bathroom within the confines of our drying/trim-shed. It goes without saying, that all permits, all paperwork, and all signatures were in place before construction actually started. 

Honestly.

I undertook this task which included a run down to Friedman Brothers in Ukiah to pick up a shower unit. HeadSodBuster ordered the necessary fir, drywall and accoutrements for success, and that bathroom had been up and running ever since.

Recently, with medicinal cannabis regulation dictating matters, we found out the bathroom out in the drying room had to go. Rather than weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, we leaped through this hoop and landed with both feet square on a plan of action: I would dissemble the bath out in the trim-shed, and make use of what I could for the current project inside our home.

Out of chaos, allegedly, comes order.
Could be yes, could be no, could be just, maybe so.

My remodel included having to borrow a little alcove from the kitchen, in order that the shower unit would fit into the prescribed spot. I was forced to extend a one-foot by three-foot chunk of the shower unit into the kitchen, right where the doorway used to be.

Now, in order to get into the bathroom, one has to walk into the laundry room first, and then hang an immediate right, entering the bathroom from the west, instead of the south. You walk right past the newly installed shower unit on your way in.

So I had to frame in the shower unit using the 2 x 4 fir, and I had to frame both a tiny hallway and a second doorway, so that the laundry room could also be used simultaneously with the bathroom. In this establishment the laundry room is the go-to spot in the house because it doubles as the designated smoking room. 

We’re not talking tobacco here.

Door to hallway and a storage nook

The minor inconvenience of having to restore the used lumber to its original state, was more than balanced by the resulting satisfaction out of a job well done. It’s not about saving money so much as it is about getting over, a twofer if ever there were one. 

I reused the lumber and that shower unit, and moved it into the bathroom through a window that was being replaced (the doors were too small). And the second door that I now needed also came from the dissembled bathroom, saving a couple of hundred bones right there. 

Since the labor was done by me and HeadSodBuster, there were no labor costs incurred. Furthermore, the fortune I would have had to pay to have the detritus from both destroyed bathrooms (dead sheet-rock and questionable insulation) hauled away, was deferred because SmallBoy backed his truck and the utility trailer up to the pile, and hauled it away as efficiently as Mr. Peabody’s coal train.

The repurposing of the shower unit is only fitting when it comes to this particular bathroom, because the bathtub I was telling you about.  When I got it from neighbor Rex back in 1982, for nothing, it was because he didn't need it anymore, so he was happy to get rid of it.

Rex didn’t need the bathtub anymore because he had sold his horse and therefore, no longer had any use for a horse trough.

I'm going to repaint the tub,
black, and the clawfeet, orange.