Hey! The tub wasn't leaking after all! It was just poorly worked flooring around the pipes behind the tub! YIPPEE!

But once we got going, we ended up gutting the whole bathroom. The floor in there is not the original floor, but it's still tongue-in-groove, probably maple, not oak. It was never actually finished (no varnish). It's hard to tell exactly what happened. My guess is the floor rotted out at one time, and a new floor was installed, intended as subfloor. The plaster and baseboards were below the floor level. It is hard to tell if the plaster was original to the house, but we busted it all out. They had busted out parts of it in order to put the paneling over it at some point, probably when the floor was put in, so we couldn't save it. There was only one coat of paint over the plaster (pink, of course).

So I'm thinking the tub and floor (or the bathroom) are not original to the house at 110 years. I'm thinking 1940s or 1950s judging by the style of the layer of linoleum under the peel-n-stick tile. We'll know more about the floor when we rip out the styrofoam ceiling tile in the room beneath, which we intend to replace with tin.

Now I'm looking for a person who knows something about plaster, lath, and whether to do drywall, veneer plaster, or plaster. We didn't take out the lath, in case it makes the most sense to just drywall over it.

Talk about burning calories! Prying up those layers of floor was hard work!

Karen