Demo and Complications

We demo-ed our bathroom Sunday night, sort of as an after thought to a busy weekend. After our last demo took 6 weeks of chiseling due to the concrete floor, we were expecting this to be a long, strenuous process. The plan was to get started and do all the mostly quiet work so any loud machine work could be done later. Fortunately, this one only took 2 hours. Hooray!!!  

Here's a little reminder of what we started with: a bathroom that didn't make a whole lot of sense. There were 3 towel bars and one small cabinet, leaving an awkward space under the counter that was of no use (except for kitty litter).

Now on to the demo. We took out the mirror first and put it in a safe place, as I do plan to try to fix and reuse it. It's perfectly fine besides the edges. Then I unscrewed the multiple towel bars while Adam worked on the counter and got the cabinet going. After, Adam and I took out the toilet, and finally I got down to the tile.

The cabinet gave him some trouble, as we had lent almost all of our saws to multiple family members, so he had to get a little creative. Needless to say, we were not able to salvage the cabinet!

Finally, for tile removal, I pried while Adam carried everything down the stairs and out to the curb. I was so excited to see wood, not concrete, under that tile, that I just went to hacking!

By the time Adam got back up after taking the cabinet down, I had the whole floor in one sheet leaning on my pry bar, and I had no idea what to do with it! We ended up chopping it up into smaller pieces and taking it outside. Tile removal was really a 6 minute thing, and it was fantastic.

HOWEVER, after we stepped back and admired our work, we noticed a smelly, dark spot in our sub-floor. Then we poked it and, boom, a hole! Really warped baseboards beside the toilet told us that we were going to have some water damage, but we couldn't tell how bad it would be. At least we were somewhat prepared!

Flashback to when we bought the house: during our home inspection, we noticed that literally none of the toilets in the house were functioning properly. This particular one was leaking from the tank all over the floor (which we had them fix) and would not flush properly (which they tried to fix but failed).

Uh oh.

We let it go knowing that we wouldn't use it much and would be replacing the whole bathroom soon. Flash-forward to rotted and moldy sub-floor boards. The wonky toilet was probably an ongoing problem years before we moved in, so the sub-floor never had the opportunity to dry out.

Turns out, it should be a relatively easy fix. I'll follow up here soon in a few days to let you know just exactly how we replace it. Let's hope it goes smoothly!