Demolishing the Bathroom

Don't forget that during the weeks that I've been pulling down wallpaper, Daniel has been tearing down and renovating our upstairs bathroom. Let me take a few steps back and give you a little background on the infamous bathroom.

When we decided to buy the house we knew that we would want to renovate the upstairs bathroom right away. The previous owners had renovated the bathroom in the 1960s, which is definitely not as cool as the vintage look of a 1920s bathroom. At the time, it had matte cream octagonal tiles on the floor, shiny white square tiles on the walls, mauve wallpaper with yellow birds, a cheap looking vanity and an old brass fixture. Our plan was to take it back to the 1920s and 30s with a mixture of black and white tile.


Before


Before


Before

Daniel had seven weeks between the time we moved in the house and when he started his new job. We assumed that seven weeks would be plenty of time to renovate a small bathroom even though neither one of us had ever had experience renovating anything. Daniel read information about laying tile from websites and talking to friends who had done similar projects on their houses. That's enough, right?

It took several weeks for Daniel just to get the old tile out of the bathroom. After taking out the toilet and vanity (we left the original cast iron bathtub), he started on the floor first, which he soon realized did not have a subfloor when he began seeing the joisting beams below. As he took off tiles on the wall, the plaster was breaking off in pieces which exposed a very sharp wiring in the wall that held up the plaster. He actually got cut quite badly several times hammering out the tiles. Of course, at this point we're wondering "what were we thinking?," but now we're knee-deep in the project, and since we're stubborn we kept going.



You can, of course, imagine how much trash we have coming out of this small bathroom. Not only did we have tools all over the hallway upstairs, we also had boxes and bags of concrete and broken tile. One afternoon, I decided that it was time I helped with the bathroom. One thing that I knew needed to be done, but that we were avoiding, was taking the trash down the stairs, out the back door, and to the edge of our backyard. I got a couple of bags out with success. They were heavy enough that if the bag started to rip, I had to separate its contents into two smaller bags to carry out. One one trip down the stairs I got about four steps down, and (ripping noise) the bag broke under the pressure of all the concrete, tile, old grout and wiring. Everything tumbled down the stairs and onto the floor below. Sorry wood floors!