Bathroom - Day Two/Day Three - Finish Demolition

I'm pretty sure a lot of people are similar to I am when it comes to taking on a large project. I'm actually wondering if someone is reading this now (in the future), about to do a project of their own. I go online, read other people's stories and experiences doing remodels of rooms in their house. Everyone has some type of horror story -- bad construction, garbage, old beer bottles, rodents, bugs, etc. I'm almost sad that I didn't run into anything that looked like a horror story. If anything, the horror of our place was how well it was built, and I'm a little sad... because I really doubt we're going to be able to do a better job of this. :( Everything was ridiculously solid, overengineered, you name it. For a sixty year old house, it should not have been this well sealed or put together. We're lucky to have the place, but man, did that suck.

The horror story for our house is I'm pooooooooped.

We didn't do much during the week after "Day One", maybe an hour or so of continued work on a Tuesday, so I'm not counting it as a day. Day Two was Saturday, and was actually about four hours of work. We knocked out the rest of the walls except for a couple of corners and the attic-facing wall -- I wanted to make sure we finished the floor before pulling that wall out, as I thought we were going to have to tarp it up to keep the house sealed. The floor was finished, finally.

Man, the floor.

The floor was a standard small-pieces-of-ugly-tile routine. After we took a little class on tiling, we figured ripping that up would be a cinch, but no. This is old school. This is tile, on top of a good 3 inches of floor mix, on top of wire mesh, on top of tar paper, on top of the wood subfloor. My wife decided to take the floor on during the first day, made a good effort, but didn't make it too far at that point. On the second day, we found a bigger hammer, and she found her groove with the larger hammer and using the wonderbar as a chisel and puller. She cranked through the rest of that bathroom tile, and we both pulled up the two layers of metal mesh until the wood subfloor finally appeared. At that point, we called it good for the day.

Just to give you an idea of what the walls and floor look like in a dumpster, this is what is now sitting in our driveway. Trust me, it looks bigger in person.

Today (Day Three) was the finish line for demolition. We took out that last wall to find.. more insulation, so waiting so long to do it ended up being pointless. Fought with some edge drywall, took off drywall sticking to high and low places, accent tile around a closet, and yanked frames off of doors, cabinets, and the window. After everything was yanked out, and the nails removed from the studs, some serious sweeping was required, and the room was totally. finally. done.

Well, done being destroyed. It's now useless as a bathroom. :)

Next step - call a plumber, ask about adding some water lines and a new drain. Once the plumber is finished, drywallin' time.

I'm so glad my wife does most of the work.

I'm pooped. :)

Bathroom - Day One - Begin Demolition!

One of the advantages to living in a fairly close-knit community is that you generally know your neighbors, and those who have been there a while can tell you stories about those who lived in your house before. When we bought the house in March of 2010, one of our neighbors added me as a friend on Facebook the day we closed, as did the two people who owned the house. If anything, that felt like a good sign -- the owners were confident enough in the home that I could stalk them fairly easily, and either the neighbor wanted to know us, or wanted to know about us, and I was okay with it either way. Anyway, one of the stories is that the original owner of our home either designed or contracted the construction of many of the similar homes in the area, but this was the one he designed for himself. I'm not sure why -- it's not the best part of the surrounding area in terms of location, it's not at an intersection with a big yard, so who knows if it's true. What is true, however, is this home is solid as a rock. We rediscovered that today.

We started a little before noon by getting out all of our supplies, and taping up a plastic barrier on the door to keep out dust, especially since the door was likely going to come off at some point today. We sealed the top, and under an hour later, one side. Note that the door matches the angle of the ridiculous ceiling in there.

... and we finally got around to actually starting to pull things apart. Everything starts with motivation, but motivation only gets you so far when you've never taken a toilet apart before, or figured out how those built in soap dishes are actually held on. Bit by bit, though, we figured this old bathroom out. Pulled the toilet out with minimal spillage and sealed it up with a plug. Got the sink pulled off after cranking on the shutoff valve with a pipe wrench. From there, it just slid up and out. We ended up hammering on the soap dishes, toilet paper holder, and towel bars with a hammer. From there, it was an easy transition to start stripping the tile off the wall, since the holes were already there. The worst part of this first part was just carrying all of our newfound crap downstairs and out to the bagster. :(

As mentioned before, we're trying to add a shower to this bathroom. Due to the ridiculous shape, one whole half of the bathroom can't reasonably have fixtures. I mean, sure, we could put a toilet there, but then everyone who uses it would have to sit. Awkward for some. So, the plan was to take a chunk out of one of the walls, and trying to put an inset sink in there. The bathroom's floorplan looks like a horizontally flipped P, which we thought was a little odd, as there was some obvious negative space between the bathroom and the bedroom next to it. We drilled a hole in that wall, saw pipes on either side, and thought that it made sense that there was a wall there -- but we could make it work! So, let's rip out some drywall, and...

eff.

Right about where a fantastic place for a sink would be, of course that pipe has another pipe coming out of it. There's also a lot of wood framing in the way, but that's all workable. This? This may be another few questions and few hundred from either the plumber or another contractor, depending on what this pipe is for. I'm sure we'll figure it out.. maybe.. or there's a lot of sitting in my future.

Anyway, end of the day arrived. We got all of the wall tile off, made a good start on drywall and floor tile, and ordered tile and supplies to tile from one of the tile places nearby. We're tired, it's hazy up there, and a shower sounds great. All in all, a good start.

Kickoff

I'm not all that certain how this first post is supposed to sound, but I should probably just go ahead and do it. We've been planning for a few weeks now on remodeling our upstairs bathroom, and tonight was the "kickoff" of sorts -- we went shopping for our basic demolition supplies, to start tomorrow.

Our house is in the far corner of northeast Minneapolis, and it's full of post-war housing. The vast majority of the housing was built in the early 1950s, at one or 1.5 stories. The 1.5 story houses were generally built with the family on the main floor, and a very large room on top, usually used as a master bedroom. Ours was built in 1953, and is of the 1.5 story variety, but the half story was finished with two bedrooms and a half bathroom. The bathroom looks like it has original fixtures, and lacks a shower or bathtub. Our guest room is up there, which means they have to come downstairs and share our master bathroom to bathe appropriately. :) Let these pictures serve as the "before". Note the beautiful peach-seashell-yellow color of the floor, tile, sink, and toilet, matched against our green carpet outside the door. Due to the design and limitation of the half story, the extreme ceiling angle will stay.

Today was the Home Depot trip to get a whole bunch of plastic covering, chisel, prybar, goggles, masks, gloves, buckets, seals, and a gigantic dumpster-in-a-bag to put all of the crap that we rip off, out, and around. Tomorrow morning, we'll have some breakfast and coffee, suit up, and start tearing some stuff apart. We have no idea how long this will take yet, but we'll definitely be updating tomorrow with whatever progress we might have! Deadline for the remodel? Before Christmas, 2011. I'm hoping this would take two weeks for someone competent to do, so four months should be enough...