Planning: During our last couple of months in Spokane, we watched more than a few episodes of HGTV network shows online. Inspired, I decided we could take on a "small" project and, since the bathroom is one of the smallest rooms in the house, I decided it would be a good first project. I had about a week off between jobs. I grabbed my brother Dave's tile wet saw when climbing Mt. Hood with him in May. On our drive East, we picked up a bathroom design book and started picking out things we liked.
just getting started...
Demolition: Two days after arriving here, we went to Home Depot and spent nearly $500 on tools, such as a crow bar, cordless drill and saw, a miter box saw, a few cold chisels, wood chisels, some orange buckets, a laser level (yep, I know, a splurge but it's been so, so nice!), and a shop vac.
Megan Hay, Heather's 10-year-old niece, helped with the first phase of demolition: removing some cheap stick-on 12" square linoleum tiles. They were actually brand new. I absolutely loathe such cheap flooring. Well, it wouldn't have been that bad except it was a boring gray with an artificial-looking print, and there were small gaps here and there where it didn't come together all that well. They were amazingly, stubbornly sticky too.
There's something very empowering and exciting about beginning the demolition - it's the point of no return. Not trivial in this case, as it was a fully functioning full bath (the only in our house) and it had a new floor in it. Unlike a fellow co-worker who re-did his bathroom because an old pipe started leaking behind the tile wall, we chose to deprive ourselves of the most essential room in the house. Once we start destroying, there's no fixing it, pressing CTRL + Z, or starting over... BUT... the history of an 80-year-old house unfolds itself with all its ugly and quirky secrets (and the scope of the project) into plain view.
After about 10 tiles, we gave up as they were tearing into pieces instead of lifting off whole. Megan left, and I grabbed the crowbar to pry up the 1/4" plywood under the linoleum tiling, and discovered that it was adhered to an old 1" square tile floor with an excessive amount of glue. I excitedly chipped off some of that tile, revealing an old, white 1" hexagonal tile floor laid in cement. I kinda liked the stuff, but the cement discovery was a HUGE setback.
discovering the original tile floor
Do I carefully demolish down to the 1" hex tile floor? Somewhere during a frenzy of tile-smashing, tub bashing, and vanity crashing, I stepped a little too far beyond the point of no return as a few large chunks of cement came loose and I excitedly pried them up out of the floor. The cement was 5-6" thick, with a heavy wire mesh embedded halfway through, poured onto a layer of support boards made of various scraps of wood (this wood was an exciting discovery as it revealed that the exterior is thick cedar shakes hidden under the insulated aluminum siding we have now).
During the floor demolition, I did run down the stairs more than ten times to verify that the lath-and-plaster ceiling below the bathroom was still intact. I dropped tools, boards, cement, and discovered Brennan walking right on the lath, but it held up! Well into the 2nd full day of demolition, I had the sudden revelation that I should rent a jack hammer, which saved my back and probably a full day's work. I was done breaking up the floor in about an hour with that thing. But it took me many hours afterwords and at least a hundred trips up and down the stairs, to haul out literally tons of concrete chunks, concrete bits, concrete dust, tile, piles of wood, the PINK cast iron tub (smashed into chunks with a sledge hammer), two PINK cast iron sinks, the PINK toilet, and the mirror and vanity.
Heather tackled the waste handling problem by calling our garbage company and discovering they'd haul away the equivalent of 18 bags of trash in one pick-up. Much to our suprise, they also hauled away ALL of the concrete. The garbage truck was parked in front of our house for a solid half hour while they loaded it up. And the cast iron and toilet literally vanished to the scavengers as quickly as I could bring them to the street (we do live on a somewhat busy road).
Some more discoveries during demolition: (1) The first major bathroom renovation occurred in 1968 (I found some newspaper and carefully unwrinkled it - I should post some pieces of the grocery ads...). (2) All of the steel pipe, both the drain pipes and water supply, had at some point been replaced with copper - and all the old steel pipes left embedded in the concrete made for excellent leveraging material when removing the concrete once I realized they were no longer needed. (3) The area of the tub had settled over 1 inch relative to the highest point in the room, which happens to be where the sewer stack sits, which means the sink drains and the bathtub drains now had to fight that 1 inch of elevation difference to get to the sewer stack - this is not an insignificant discovery. I considered at length re-routing the drains down a channel where the supply pipes ran, straight to the basement, but ultimately decided against it because I didn't like the idea of weakening up the floor joists any more than they already were. The original plumbing was run in such a way to preserve the joists' strength but the copper re-do was accomplished by cutting out large sections of the joists, right down the center of the floor, over halfway through in some spots!
Demolition complete (and a new bathtub drain). Check out those chunks of concrete that our awesome new garbage service took away for us!
Next up: Plumbing Problems...
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