This is Mr. Bulkhead:

Mr. Bulkhead lives in my bathroom, above my tub.  He holds my shower fan and is covered with tile on his lower side.  Until this evening, I thought he was full of blown-in insulation from the attic.  Then I dremeled my way into him to see what I was in for when I demolished him later this week.

I was a bit startled with what I found.

If you were to poke your face directly into the hole up there, this is what you would see– a perfectly clean and dry space (any dust you see is from cutting through the drywall– not so much as a spiderweb despite the hole back there,) seriously over studded on the bottom (I assume to carry the weight of the tile?) and featuring unexpected and currently (that’s a pun) inexplicable electrical wires.  I think that the one on the left runs to a power switch in the hallway– or maybe to the power switch in the bathroom itself, if it turns toward the camera and goes through a bunch of studs along the way.  The other one is a bit of a mystery, because it’s not coming from the attic like all the other power lines in the house– I’m guessing there’s a junction box buried in the wall somewhere(*).  Best guess is that it feeds a power outlet in the entryway to the house, although it seems like it’s in a weird place for that.  Note the drywall along the back wall; that drywall has the bathtub surround tile on it once it gets south of the box.

Here’s the fan:

 

I cannot believe that that rinkydink summamabitch has been keeping my bathroom dry all these years; that tape should have dissolved somewhere in the eighties.  The new fan is considerably larger and more powerful; we got the best one we had available to us.

Hooking it up is gonna be interesting.  I had the idea that we’d be pushing away a bunch of insulation around it, moving the ceiling up, and tying it into the existing vent pipe however that might be done;  the nice clean box we have is now calling that plan into question– like, maybe we keep the damn thing now that we know what it looks like?  I dunno.  We’d still have to redrywall at least the “floor” of the thing since the ceiling tile still has to come down.  That electrical line in the back has me concerned, too; to keep that in the wall we’d have to notch out the studs back there or something.  Doable, obviously, but I wasn’t planning on moving electrical lines even if it’s easy.

On the plus side, the wallpaper removal has been the easiest thing in the world.  I’m honestly not sure right now if this new discovery has made this job more or less of a pain in the ass. As always, I’ll keep y’all updated.  Especially if I hurt myself.

Suggestions and advice are welcome, obviously.

(* It’s my understanding that you’re not supposed to do that?  Although maybe that wasn’t code when the house was built?  I dunno; right now I don’t even know what it’s back there for, so speculating about whether the possibly-nonexistent junction box is up to code or not seems kinda pointless.)