Balmoral

Built in 1928, and rescued from the demise that befelled the neighboring Romney house, the new owner of this house is rather meticulous in his efforts to return this house to its grandeur. The contractors here are doing fantastic work also.

Our job was to restore the yellow 6″ x 6″ subway tile that adorn the walls of the “Jack and Jill” bathroom. The homeowner found a California company that fired a pretty close match to the original tiles, although we were slightly disappointed that each tile had a “wow” or at least one edge that wasn’t square.

The homeowner and his brother spent painstaking hours removing the all the grout joints on the wall and the floor and several tiles were chipped or broken in the process. So we got our trusty diamond blade out and removed a few more tiles.

Not stopping there, we rebuilt the Republic stems for the tub, added an escutcheon and some re-popped porcelain handles (until we could locate an original set). Add a shiny new old spout we had in the collection and the tub came out looking pretty good.

Our final charge was to restore the side-by-side “Standard” pedestal sinks that had been converted to modern (cheap) delta-style fixtures back to their original form. We located two sets of Standard “Re-nu” faucets and dug into our porcelain handle and escutcheon collection.

Then we found some matching pop-up rods and some Standard shut-off valves……

Of course, as what happens with most jobs, that Murphy’s Law guy shows up. One of the supply lines coming from the wall wasn’t the original chrome or nickel plated brass but instead galvanized. We spun it and it broke. Luckily, a closet wall was directly behind our tile wall, so we opened it up and all the 1/2″ pipe bringing water to the sinks turned out to be brass! So we added a brass elbow and a couple nipples, stubbed out a 3/8″ chrome nipple thru the wall, and spun our re-built Standard shut-off valves.