(Published In 1894 )

In the recent reconstruction of the plumbing in a residence on West Eighty-first Street, New York City, some special work was done by John Tucker in arrangement and floor construction of a handsome bathroom adjacent to the owner's bedroom. There were half a dozen other bathrooms in the house that presented no especial features, but this one was more elaborately equipped and elegantly finished, and as its location is directly over some costly ceiling decorations, unusual pains were taken to prevent any possibility of leakage or moisture from percolating below the floor.

The room was paneled 6 feet high with Italian marble wainscoting, and had a floor of large white marble slabs. The fixtures were of marble, porcelain, and plated metal, and are designed to be both handsome and rich. Figure 1 is a floor plan showing the general arrangement and the pitch and jointing of the different sections of the floor, which sloped about one-half inch to the line A B, besides which point B was about 1 inch lower than A, so that it receives all the drainage and conducts it to the strainer-plate B. The floor surface is in three planes, A D D and A D E B, A D E B intersecting in the lines A D, A D, and A B. On the regular rough floor a sloping platform F was built on joists J J at 1-inch pitch and entirely covered by a large safe pan of heavy sheet lead, in which a layer of Portland cement from 1 to 2 inches thick bedded the marble floor slab at a pitch of one-half inch. A deeper pan was made in the safe to receive the 4-inch slab of the needle bath, and to its sides on the outside corner was soldered a vertical sheet of 12-ounce copper about 8 feet high and weighing 60 pounds. This was intended to prevent any possibility of water from the bath spattering and running down behind the wainscot.

Figure 2 is a drawing of the lead safe, dog-eared at the corners. Figure 3 shows the arrangement of soil, waste, and water pipes. The soil pipe is 4-inch cast iron with calked joints and lies on the rough floor. The waste pipes are 1½-inch and 2-inch screwed wrought iron, also laid on the rough floor. The water pipes are laid in channels grooved in the sloping platform, into which the lead safe has been smoothly beaten down. Figure 5 is a diagram of the arrangement of the trap vent pipes behind the wainscoting and over the ceiling of the bathroom. Figure 6 shows the method of making traps on the screwed waste pipes and carrying them through the lead safe. In Fig. 7, S is the strainer-plate S, Fig.1 , and W is the waste pipe from the needle bath. P is a ½-inch pipe supplying hot or cold water at a considerable pressure to the nozzle N. which is concealed inside the waste pipe and furnishes a vertical jet commanded by valves V V.