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!

Water troubles!

Wow, what a weekend!

Saturday 1/28/2012 late evening around maybe 8 o'clock, Cass challenges me to a game of ping-pong. So we go downstairs and get ready for a game. Cass takes the side of the table by the water heater and says "It's wet over here." One word comes to my mind "Crap!" The water heater started puking water! I frantically try to think of what you do to turn off a water heater. I mean, it's not like you just unplug it from the wall or anything. I find the valve on the water intake and close it, but embarrassingly I have to call my Dad because I don't know how to turn off the pilot. He tells me how and I feel like an idiot because it's so simple, but hey at least it's turned off right?

The one weekend I volunteer to work on Sunday is the same weekend my water heater decides to die! Figures, right? So I got someone else to take my shift and I call up my Dad again and invite him over for a water heater replacing party. Minus the "party" part. Cass and I commence shopping for a new water heater online.

You're thinking I'm gonna start talking about replacing the water heater on Sunday now, huh? Oooh no. That wasn't the end of Saturday night! Cass uses the downstairs bathroom and notices that the plumbing sounds different than usual. So I go down to the basement and the water meter's going crazy. So I said, "Well, is the toilet still running?" Nope, it stopped but the meter's still going nuts. I start following the sound of the plumbing until I notice there's water dripping from the ceiling above the stairwell. UH OH! I scale the stairs in about a half a second and run into the master bathroom to find that the water line for the toilet had busted off of the tank and was spewing water all over the bathroom! The floor had about a half inch of standing water on it by the time I was able to shut the valve and wouldn't you know it, most of that water escapes by seeping behind the walls and leaks onto the first floor ceiling above the staircase and some spilled all the way down the inside of the wall to the basement! I drilled a couple holes in the ceiling below the bathroom and ended up draining something like a half gallon of standing water out of it.

Oy vey, what a night! It's after 10 o'clock once we've got the standing water situation resolved and get the water picked up off the floor and of course neither of us are tired now with all that excitement happening. So we didn't make it to bed until about 11.

Now, Sunday was a much better day. My Dad came over bright and early and we went to Home Depot and Lowes to get a new water heater and all the extras we'd need to get it installed. We finally make it home at noon. The amazing thing is that we got the new water heater installed without incident in about 4 1/2 hours and I only had to go back to the hardware store once to pick up a couple different sized iron pipes for the gas line! We upgraded from a 40 gallon, 32,000 BTU water heater to an EnergyStar compliant 50 gallon, 40,000 BTU water heater. YEAH!

Now, here are 4 amazing things about all of this that only God could've planned.
1) We have been saving up $$ for a while now to remodel our master bathroom.
2) We weren't originally planning on replacing the water heater, but now that we have replaced it we realize that the bathroom remodel would've seemed ruined or kind of empty because we had such a crappy water heater.
3) About 90% of the stuff in our house that sustained water damage from the water line breaking were things we already had plans to replace in our bathroom remodel.
4) The cost of our new water heater and the parts we needed to install it was almost the exact amount that our tax refund is this year. So the water heater is already paid for in cash from the bathroom remodel fund and as soon as our tax refund comes, the bathroom remodel fund will be back to where it was before.

If you hadn't noticed, I mentioned a couple times that we're saving up for a bathroom remodel! So you can count on there being some more updating in the near future!!!

"New" (to us) Car!

Cass and I bought a "new" used car to replace the Oldsmobile. The Olds was really starting to show signs of it's age and since I have an older truck as well we decided we should have at least one newer, reliable car!

So we found this ad on craiglist for a 2002 RAV4 with 45K miles on it, came out to look at it and took it for a test drive! The guy was asking $3k under the blue book value for it, so obviously we had to be somewhat skeptical about it. It had been in an accident but the owner had the damage fixed and there was no structural damage to the car's frame. It turned out to be a pretty solid deal for us so we made an offer and he accepted. We had a pretty good amount of money saved up for the car, but what we offered meant we'd have to take out a small loan but we plan on paying it off real fast.

So, the one hitch we ran into was in order to actually transfer the title, we had to send the title to Bosnia! The owner's wife whose name was also on the title needed to sign it as well in order for us to transfer the title. So a month of waiting and four trips to the SOS office later, we finally got the title transferred. We like our "new" car.

Edit: 11/4/2011 We paid off the car. It's now ours!! We also added some new aesthetic enhancments!