Bathroom Demo Day 2

Woke up Sunday feeling like I’d been hit by a truck.  But we still had to remove the toilet, all of the shower tile and the remaining floor tile.  Removing the toilet wasn’t so easy….

A shoddy (and crooked) install meant we couldn’t undo the bolts.  We didn’t care that much to trouble shoot it, so out came the sledge!  So much for trying to recycle that loo to the Habitat for Humanities ReStore (they love low flow toilets!).  Moving on, we still have all of that floor tile to pull up which was a downright b$%^&!  By the end of the day, though, I was victorious!  Seriously, that floor didn’t come up without a fight and Queen B$%^& of the Household (that’d be me, L-blogger) prevailed over that stupid B%^&* of a floor.  In the end, it was MY B%^&*!  Yea, that’s right.  I called it out, I hammered away and that floor was gone, gone, GONE!!!!!!  Stupid miserable lil’…..I’m moving on, okay?!

Dr. J worked on the shower while I was wailing away on the floor.  We started with the weird arch-y thing and realized that a Sawz-all would probably be pretty damn useful about now.  We don’t own one and we’re in no hurry to get it down, so we just hacked away at what we could and moved on to the tile on the sides of the wall:

Check out that huge chunk of wall!!! Oh, sorry for the biker helmets - we improvised and this is what happens when non-contractors improvise. Better than ski helmets, though!!!!

What’s really funny about that last picture is that as I was taking it, the wall literally fell off and pushed Dr. J back into the corner – oops!  Oh, and the bike helmets were a “better than nothing” solution.  It was either that or ski helmets and it was too damn warm for that!  Anyway, the shower took a *really* long time to demo.  We opted to take the full wall approach rather than trying to demo individual tiles (too time consuming).  So we hammered away at the edges until we got a little clearance to the studs, stuffed our pry bars in there and yanked.  It may or may not have involved us climbing the wall to get the right leverage we needed and it took both of us to get ‘er done!  And then we had to carry all of the pieces down the stairs and holy crap!!!  MARBLE IS HEAVY!!!!!!!!!!!!  I think the neighbors are fully aware that something nuts is going on.  We filled up another 4-5 bags of heavy duty trash bags and dragged them down stairs one by one (more on that later!!).

So at this point, the floor was out, the shower was out, the toilet out and our fears were kind of semi-confirmed about the mold issue on the back wall of the shower.  Fortunately it wasn’t as bad as we thought it was going to be….but after only 6 years of use it shouldn’t have been bad at all!  Luckily the shower tub will also be coming out (eventually) and we’ll be replacing all of that sheathing with brand new here in a few weeks.  For now, we’re back to work this week and taking a break from all of the broo-ha-ha.  And it couldn’t have come soon enough.  I think Maggie was about to have a heart attack from all of the pounding!

Gratuitous puppy shot!

So here is where we left the day on Sunday night…

Shower = DEMOLISHED!

Toilet = GONE!

Not to mention the progress we made on Saturday with the vanity completely gone and the tub surround and tile all removed!  Overall, I’d call that a pretty sweet demolition!  And just remember, things have got to get ugly before they get prettier!!!