The hardwood floors in our house were last refinished about 25 years ago. They have lots of scratches and discoloration. I think any other kind of flooring with similar wear showing would look terrible, but I think these floors are fine. But maybe it’s just that I’m used to it.
there is a leak somewhere in between my upstairs bathroom and the main floor kitchen. It only leaks when i use water up there. I do not know which area exactly is leaking, it seems to drip down there when i use any of the water appliances in that bathroom.
I’m mentally preparing myself to pay a plumber to tear open the bathroom floor looking for where the leak is. What do you think ballpark time/cost would be?
Would anyone recommend me just taking a big hammer to the floor and rooting around in between the floors myself? I have zero experience with home repair but I’m eager to swing a big hammer around
@beetlejuice We’ve had a whole bunch of leaks from our upstairs bathrooms down into the kitchen. I still have a hole in the kitchen ceiling that I need to repair.
The plumbers for those issues always went in through the kitchen ceiling. Our ceiling looks terrible from multiple leaks, holes, unfinished patches, mismatched paint, etc. I’ll get around to making it ok at some point.
The latest one - with the unrepaired hole - the plumber never actually figured out what was wrong. I eventually found it.
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Tear out kitchen ceiling: .3 ETH
Tear up bathroom floor: .3 BTC
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We had the bathroom into kitchen leak happen enough that it snowballed into redoing the bathroom. To really get the plumbing fixed we were going to need to open up walls, and well once that’s happening we have to re-tile, and once we’re re-tiling we might as well etc etc etc.
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What’s holding me back from fully renovating my bathroom to a modern luxury standard is the rest of my house is old and in need of major renovations, and idk if one can completely renovate a house starting from a second-floor bathroom. Like i imagine they’ll tear up the new bathroom when they’re redoing the rest of it. But idk! Can a full home renovation be done one room at a time?
Kinda, but it’s not the most efficient way to do it. We did our kitchen/downstairs 10 years ago. Then when we did the kids’ bathroom (the leaking one) we did some minor improvements to the primary bath, but it needs more. Next on our list is our bedroom, which mostly just needs paint and we’d like to replace the carpet with hardwood, which we hope is underneath.
So anyway that’s sort of what my wife and I are doing, just over a loooooong period.
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Thank you for the responses and thank you for denominating the cost in my native currency
What’s the best place to find a plumber/contractor?
My first thought was angi but i see so many commercials for them it makes me suspicious
I can’t think of a good way to find a contractor. I don’t have any direct experience with it, but I’m sure Angi/Angie’s List sucks horribly. A referral is probably the best, but it’s often not very good either. Maybe NextDoor. But, some advice…be the one to find the contractor by searching rather than responding to their ad. If it’s a general contractor doing a huge remodel this is hard to find, but if it’s a plumber, it’s not - the person you are talking to about the job should be the person/one of the people doing the work and not just a salesperson/estimator.
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well there’s always plan B: live with the leak and allow the inside of my home to fill with deadly mold and potentially weaken the structure of the second floor. then the day before i sell the house, quickly wipe down any evidence and by the time the new owner realizes anything is wrong i’ll be in sunny mexico
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Even the monkey knows this is a bad plan.
Nextdoor is a pretty good place to start for local recommendations.
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If it leaks when ANY water appliance is used then the leak is at/downstream of where the individual waste pipes join up. Should be traceable.
I’d be tempted to cut a hole in the downstairs ceiling (gonna happen anyway right?) and have a look. ymmv
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I would guess if it’s easily detectable and accessible from below, like most of my issues have been, it shouldn’t be incredibly expensive to fix. Still a couple hundred bucks at least, but not like thousands or anything.
For example, we had a pinhole leak in a copper pipe. Gradually soaked the ceiling above the fridge. It was an easy repair for the plumber. Obviously had to cut a hole in the ceiling, so that repair is an added expense (we hired somebody once and I repaired once, though I never quite finished the job and the ceiling hasn’t been repainted), but the plumbing job itself didn’t break the bank. We’re not rich, so any expense like that hurts, but it wasn’t as bad as when our water heater broke.
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I did some recaulking in the shower, man is that tedious. Removing the old caulk is the hard part. You definitely need a razor blade scraper. Plan to spend a lot of time hunched over, doing detail work
I’ve never used Nextdoor as I hate apps and making new accounts. What does Nextdoor give you that (say) Google reviews don’t?
Hyper-local, and in many cases I literally know where the people making the recommendations live so I know it’s not astroturfing or whatever.
NextDoor is awful in that it’s just full of people who want to exterminate homeless people, but yeah, it’s not full of fake reviews like the google/angie/yelp and it’s business model isn’t extortion.
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No lies in this post!
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