Bathroom Demolition

So last week, we got the bathroom demolished :) and began working on construction (which of course goes much more slowly!).  Here’s a little re-cap of the demo.

Here’s where we started. Our goals were to take out the hardwood floors (originally, we weren’t sure what we were doing with the flooring in there and we built that wall on the left side of the picture on top of the existing floors) and to take out some of the drywall on the exterior walls so we could put in new insulation.  That stuff would pave the way for the new plumbing and electrical work we’d have to do. We also realized we’d have to move some of the heat ducts.

Taking down drywall looked like this:

Then we got to work removing the floors. Like I said, the wall on the left was built on top of the existing hardwood, so we needed something that would cut the wood right against the wall – which a regular circular saw won’t do.  Luckily, I watch a lot of This Old House and I discovered that there is something called a toekick saw designed exactly for this purpose. (Really, it’s to cut flooring out from next to the toekick on kitchen cabinets.)

We bought ours at Harbor Freight Tools – our favorite place for inexpensive tools that we amateurs really won’t be using too often.

Here’s the toekick saw in action.  Look how it cut right next to the wall – and you could guide the saw against the wall to make a perfectly straight cut.

Then we got to work pulling out all the floor boards which were nailed in.

The subfloors underneath were only 1/2” (I wish they were 5/8” for strength) and weren’t put in in the smartest fashion (lots of corners and seams meeting in bad places) so it seemed a little weak.  But we decided that since we were putting concrete backerboard down, it’d be okay, so we didn’t replace the subfloor. We also decided that under key areas like the toilet and shower drains, we’d go down in the basement and add some 2x4 supports.

Here’s a bad picture that shows the concrete backerboard floor. :)

Lastly, but certainly not least, we ended up deciding that taking down the ceiling drywall (and having to re-drywall it later) would be better in the long run since we want to install so many things up there! Speakers :), heat lamps, lights, and exhaust fans. Doing all that work would certainly be easier with full access to the ceiling – and not having to climb into our attic with its super shallow hip roof.

But it resulted in this mess!

Luckily, Grandpa and Brian’s stepdad are amazing and did all that nasty work as well as cleaning it all up!!

So that, I think is the demo in a nutshell. I’ll be posting the cool finishes that we’re (hopefully) installing and of course, about the construction as it goes along.

What have you been up to this week?