Demo - Day 1

I would love to say that our first day of demo went off without a hitch. Unfortunately, when you are dealing with an older house with all of its original parts, there are a lot of not-so-great surprises. BUT – our goal was to get the vanity out of there, and we succeeded, so I’m calling it a great day

We started off by packing up all of the toiletries, cleaners, shower curtains, etc. to get them out of the construction zone. I completely forgot that we keep all of our extra linens and towels in that bathroom, so we ended up with quite a few bags of stuff to store (once we find spots for them… for now they are on the floor in the office…). Since we are planning on keeping our current bath tub, Matt wanted to cover it in cardboard and paper to keep it from getting scratched or damaged.

That’s when he noticed The Leak.

My guess is that this tub has been leaking for 3 years since we moved in and we just never noticed because we don’t use that shower. Who knows how many thousands of gallons of water I’ve unknowingly wasted… I feel so guilty. So Matt takes apart the tub faucet, hoping we can fix the leak easily. The darn thing was so badly calcified that we can’t repair it without buying new parts (which we plan on doing, just not before we tile, paint, etc.). Matt says that we need to find a way to plug up the faucet, and I have a stroke of genius and decide to pop open a bottle of wine. We used the cork to plug the pipe, but only seconds later, the water re-routed to the shower head and started dripping out there. Shit. I suggested that we just drink the wine and make this whole remodel thing a little more fun, but Matt said something about being “responsible” or “not killing ourselves” or something like that. We finally settled on hanging a bucket over the spout to catch the dripping water. A temporary solution, but it allowed us to move forward.

After the tub was covered, we decided to remove the vanity since that would give us a lot of room to maneuver around. More plumbing problems: the shut-off valves under the sink were so old that it took a wrench, all of Matt’s P90X strength, and about 10 minutes of fighting to turn the water off without breaking everything. The pipes were no better – so difficult to get off that Matt resorted to cutting them off instead of messing with them further.

*Side note: I am incredibly useless on days like these. For one, the bathroom is too small to have 2 people effectively working in there at once. Secondly, I suck at fixing stuff and solving home improvement problems (although I’m GREAT at solving people problems! Turns out… not so helpful here…). So I spend most of my time offering words of encouragement, bringing Matt treats so he won’t go nuts, keeping the dog out of the room. Nothing super helpful, but better than sitting on the couch while Matt works his butt off…

Next, it was time to remove the tile backsplash situated right above the vanity. We knew what we were getting into on this one – the same tile had been used in our Master Bath and the super adhesive glue on those things was in-sane-o! As we pried off the tiles, there were some drywall casualties, but nothing too severe. It just means more patching later – oh well. Once the tiles were finally off and the vanity was unscrewed from the wall, it popped out with no problem and we were able to guide it out of the bathroom. Instead of buying $50 worth of crummy sawhorses to do the tile cutting on, Matt decided to repurpose the vanity cabinet and save some money at the same time.

Whoops...

Before we called it a night, curiosity got the best of us and we decided to pry up one floor tile to see what marvelous surprise flooring lay underneath. Voila! Brown linoleum hidden under a layer of aqua linoleum! Beautiful… but she’s all coming up tonight…

Classy Tile & Linoleum!!