Ducky bathroom
(the hall bathroom)

Oh, boy. Now you'll see one of the two reasons I have gotten so little else done. For some reason, I got it in my head that I could replace the bathtub. Which, really, remains to be seen. But I'm working on it. The tub that is (currently) there was chipped and far too small, and it just had to go. So, I figured why wait? Why re-do the bathroom, then have to tear it up when I replaced the tub? Why not do it now? I'll keep you updated on how it's going...

Inspection Pictures:

Work in Progress:
(all of the pics are clickable for a better view)

It all starts with a sledgehammer... It's surprising how hard it is to take that very first swing, the first step of demo. But once you've started, the 'heck, I've already ruined it, might as well keep going!" mentality kicks in. And that's all well and good as long as you're doing the demolition. Though there was plenty of that! Once I'd gotten the tile wall pulled down, we took out the toilet and started smashing the tub. Let me tell you, hammering on a ceramic-coates cast-iron tub is not only very messy and hazardous to your health, but really, really, really loud. Wear earplugs!

Once we'd gotten the tub out, I found that the floor was... not good. The 'linoleum' was just stick-down squares over an old linoleum floor, and they were coming up - as was the floor underneath it. Also, there was a corner of the chipboard flooring that had gotten wet and was disintegrating. So I started yanking that up, as well. Turns out the yahoos somewhere along the line had pulled up tile, not replaced or even smoothed the sub-floor (you could still see the grout lines) and slapped linoleum over it. Which, of course, was not sticking. So up came the entire floor, except under the vainty.

So all hail the new tub - it even fits! You'd think we were getting close, now, right? Well, you'd be wrong, and this is where the project stalled. See, the demo was all good, but now came the hard part - the part I didn't understand. The 'putting it all back together' phase. So it just sat there. And sat there. And sat there....

Until...

Work started again, this time cleaning up the crappy job I'd done tearing everything out, plus scraping the popcorn ceiling and replacing the insulation. The ceiling looked way, way, way better, and the removal of the old insulation was for the best - it was slightly moldy and probably not that great at insulating anymore. So we put in new insulation, new plastic, and were ready to build the wall and surround for the tub. POWER TOOLS!

So it was out to the garage to make good use of the compound miter saw, my pride and joy of power tools.

Then the lovely plumber-people from work come and took two evenings to hook up all of the piping. It was a lot more work than you might have thought. Or at least more than I thought. But then, what do I know of plumbing? Hence the fact someone else was doing it for me.

We also ended up having to cut a hole in the ceiling of the bathroom below for the drain. That was helpful with the toilet issue (oh, we'll talk about that), but also created a lot more work (more on that when I talk about re-doing that half-bath)

So with the copper pipe and drains in place, it was time to start re-assembling the walls. I have become a utility-knife, dry-wall cutting NINJA, I tell you. There's an art to it, that's for sure. The really, really, really cool thing was that the piece with all the round holes in it for the spigot and handle made it in with only a few modifications. The back wall, however, defied us. Pain in the (insert explative).

Around this time we noticed that the flange ring for the toilet was kaput. Broken. Unfit for use. So it had to be replaced, which ended up being a taller order than I thought. But that came later. Much later.

For now it was just drywall, drywall, drywall... tile!

...

Then came the flooring. We laid the sub-floor, then the tile. (Pictures to come later!). Still need to grout the floor tile and seal all the grout, plus... oh, the list is too long. But it's all minor stuff, and hopefully a couple of weekends should take care of it!