A Little Less Action, A Lot More Talk

I ended up doing very little actual "work" on the bathroom remodel this past weekend. Most of our attention was focused on picking out our materials, fixtures, tiles, etc that we're going to use. Oh boy, shopping :-\! Actually, I've enjoyed shopping for this stuff...mostly. Toilets are kinda boring.

Saturday, I needed to get rid of the waste from demo during the past two weekends. My truck was filled higher than the bed walls with bathroom stuff and the crappy rotted doors from when I built new shed doors in Summer 2010. I never took them to the dump, so they were just leaning against the back side of the shed for nearly two years. After going to FPU on Saturday, I loaded up the old shed doors into the truck, grabbed my shovel, and Cass and I went to the solid waste management site in Ypsi Twp. It took me what felt like 5 hours to unload the truck, but I'm guessing it was like 10 minutes. I had everything in there; the shower pan, tiles, drywall, toilet, etc. My truck was my construction dumpster for the past two weeks.

Once I got the bed emptied, I wished I'da brought a broom...whoops. Oh well. Cass and I then took off to patronize Home Depot, Lowes, and the Tile Shop. We've found just about everything we think we're going to get for the bathroom. Sorry for the secrecy, but we're going to keep our ideas and choices of the new stuff semi-secret until the "big reveal". That is unless you've figured out where we keep interesting ideas/things we find for the bathroom. ;-)

After shopping on Saturday, we got home in the evening and I decided not to work on the bathroom. I did do a little bit of work on Sunday. I tore out a spacer wall that was just there to make the shower space exactly 48 inches wide. The 2x4s at the bottom of that wall were pretty nasty from water damage. I also pulled up the raised portion of the subfloor where the shower is because it was reeeaally rotted and ugly. The builders built said box to raise the shower subfloor for the shower pan. I was hoping that maybe I could make the shower subfloor flush with the regular bathroom subfloor, but I figured the builders must've had a reason for doing that. Turns out I was right. Because the shower is the part of the bathroom that is suspended above the staircase, there wasn't enough room for a p-trap to fit completely underneath the subfloor so they had to cut a hole in the subfloor to accomodate the drain and build a 2 1/2" box to raise the shower subfloor.

That's all for now. I'm going to "turn it around" this weekend and begin building things to put in the bathroom like a new raised subfloor and a replacement spacer wall.

Gutted...well sorta...

Well, I didn't get quite as much done as I planned for the weekend but I actually got more done than I thought I would. I always have bigger plans than I think I can do to try and motivate me since I kinda tend towards working at a snail's pace.

The misson for the weekend was to finish the demo for the most part and get the floor pulled out of the bathroom. All I have left to do to complete that mission is finish taking out some more drywall and actually cut the plywood subfloor out.

When I left off last weekend I'd removed all the tile from the shower walls but most of the drywall and the floor tile was intact. So the first order of business was removing the toilet so I could remove the tile floor. Oh, what fun! For those who think that taking out the toilet is the most ungodly, vile thing you have to do, it's actually not that bad as long as you have a cover for the drain pipe like I grabbed before starting this part of the job. Oh, and for the record, the brown stuff all over the floor is RUST. Just wanted to clarify...

Removing the floor tiles was pretty painless once I'd gotten the tiles in one corner removed. I'd just smack the ground with the hammer a few times until the tiles started breaking and hopping out of place with every whack of the hammer. Then, I'd grab the pry bar and lift the only sorta loose ones with it. Once I had the tiles off, I then had an inch thick layer of thinset, essentially concrete, to remove from the floor and guess how you remove that? Yep, you smack it with a hammer! Needless to say my right arm's aching. This was kind of funny, though. Everyone I talked to about the floor I had to rip up kinda cringed when I talked about it because of the thinset being notoriously difficult to remove. It turned out to be easier to remove than the tile! Just like the wall tiles in the shower, once you started to get it to come away from the floor, it came off in one big sheet. The hardest part was loading it into the tub and hoofin' it downstairs and out to the truck. Just like that, the floor was out! Bad news came next though. The moisture in the top left corner of the photo I expected to see. The moisture on the right side, I did not expect to see and the area surrounding the toilet is the most rotted. When I took off the toilet, I was a little worried when I noticed that the wax seal wasn't actually coming in contact with the toilet, only the flange. Yyyyeahh...that floor's REALLY got to come out.

Next order of business, remove drywall.

Dirt simple, and straightforward. In other words, not very interesting to talk about. Took me like 30 minutes.

Finally, the single most finalizing part of the demo, removing the shower pan! This was totally uncharted territory for me. I've never taken one out so I was pretty clueless on how this was going to work. From what I could tell, it looked like the drain hole just had a huge rubber gasket that squeezed over the drain pipe. I was right! Amazing! Cass found a DIY video that showed you how to remove a fiberglass shower pan and I'd swear they were removing the same shower pan that we had. So I followed that and PRESTO, shower panless bathroom! I had to grab my drill and literally drill holes in the gasket to reduce the amount of pressure it was imparting on the drain pipe. After fighting with it for about 10 minutes, I finally got it off the drain pipe and carried it out to the truck! That pan was a lot heavier than I expected! I'm sure emptying my truck bed at the dump is going to be a fun job!


Stay tuned! There's more to come soon.

Bye Bye Tile!

More Demo today! There isn't much in the way of story telling for today since it was pretty much just more of the same thing from yesterday, tearing down tile. I just took a few more pictures so I figured I'd share em.

I started today off with taking down the tile on the wall in the first picture that already has the tile removed which only took me about 30 minutes to get torn down. When I needed to take a quick break from destroying things, I found this nifty little spot to rest my tools. For some reason, this wall was a bear to break the tile off of. I sometimes had to smack the tiles with nearly all my strength to break them up and even then they didn't shatter. It just left the imprint of the hammer in the tile.


My shoes after today. They used to be brown. Good thing I don't care about them anymore. Finally, here's what the bathroom looks like so far. Bye bye ugly 30+ year old peach colored tile!


More to come soon!

Let the Bathroom Demo Begin!

Today, we began the bathroom remodel and the part that's most fun in a remodeling project (apart from enjoying the remodel when it's finished) is the demolition!

Cass and I went to a movie, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, then got lunch, and after that we went to the hardware store to pick up a few things we'd need to get started...like a mini sledge hammer, dust masks, and some safety glasses. When we got home, I got all "suited" up, grabbed the mini sledge and went to town! Since the "water catastrophe", Cass and I have been talking about what we'd like to do with the master bathroom and what we decided on means we're gutting the entire bathroom. Everything's coming out down to the studs including the floor! This bathroom's shower is literally suspended above our staircase to the second story, so I'm a little nervous about this whole project because it is by far and away the largest project I've taken on. We'll see what happens and pray that it goes well and that I don't destroy the house. ^_^

The first obstacle I ran into today was I couldn't find where the valves were to cut the water off to the shower. Unlike the shower for the family bathroom which has a door on the opposite side of the wall to access the plumbing, the opposite side of this shower's wall doesn't have a door to access the plumbing. Why you ask? Because the opposite side of the shower head wall is that huge wall above the stairs. Yeeeeah, that one in the top-middle of the picture on the left! Which means...you guessed it...the shut off valves to the shower are IN THE WALL which would be really helpful should I ever have to shut the water to that shower off! So, just in case I accidentally hit the water handles too hard and broke the lines or something I figured it'd be wise to shut the water to the whole house off until I could get to those shut off valves.

Anyway, I get started tearing the already loose tiles off the wall and things are going good. I've never put in a bathroom or torn one apart so, I'm being careful in everything I do (except for the swinging a hammer at the wall part) and kinda learning how it's put together as I go along. Thankfully, before I really started making a mess I had the presence of mind to jam a rag into the drain so tile and sheet rock doesn't end up clogging the drain. That would be something I'd forget! Pretty soon after fiddling around with taking off the shower doors and frame, the skirt tiles along the floor and the first row of tiles on the bottom of the shower head wall I decide it's time to start whacking a bit harder on this thing and really start destroying stuff! I start breaking the bullnose tiles off of the top all around the shower and pretty soon I realize something about the construction of this. They put up drywall, then a sheet of concrete board, and then the tiles. That seemed strange to me that they had done this over top of the drywall, but what do I know? So that gets me thinking...what's holding this tile and concrete board to the wall? I still dont know what was holding it up because the more tiles I broke the more it started to feel like the whole wall of tiles was just hanging there.

Another moment I was thankful I had presence of mind to think before I did something stupid. I said to myself, "Self, this wall of tile is probably going to be REALLY heavy. Maybe I should break it in half before I try pulling the entire thing off the wall." So I did just that and sure enough I folded the top half down over the bottom half and just pulled the tiles off the wall with ease. It was, as I suspected, really stinking heavy so I broke it up further into smaller pieces so I'd be able to haul them out of the bathroom.

I then started pulling wet drywall off the studs. I knew it! I knew water was getting behind that wall. I dread to see what under the subfloor looks like. Only time will tell. Hey Look! The shut off valves to the shower's water lines! Yay, now I can shut them and turn the water to the house back on! If you've never shut the water to a house off, drained the lines a bit, and turned it back on I gotta tell you the sound it makes is weird! In some parts of the house it sounds like a space shuttle taking off. So after I turned the water back on, I bleed the air out of the water lines and start cleaning up. I decided that was enough for one day since I had accomplished what I wanted to and that was find a way to shut off the water to the shower. That meant I got to throw tiles and concrete board into a tub and hoof it downstairs into the bed of my truck. That picture may look harmless, but that stupid thing had to weigh 70 pounds, and I had to fill it three times before I cleared out the rubble.

Well, that's all for now folks. I'll share more as more happens. Thanks for reading!