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Closing In!

I’ve been tired of looking at studs and wood for a couple weeks so now it’s time to finish all the prep and hang the drywall. Before getting into the insulation and drywall there is a long list of items to take care of while the walls are still open. So on the list to wrap up:

  • Redo the electrical wiring for the light switch
  • Add the plumbing for the tub and shower
  • Clean up all the leftover nails and remaining pieces of wood
  • Fill in the window gaps with spray foam
  • Adjust the door casing which was crazy out of level
  • Add furring strips around the window to have something to attach the drywall
  • Install all the insulation

The wiring in the bathroom was as crazy as expected in an old house that’s been partially renovated a couple times. There were hidden electrical junction boxes on both sides of the vanity mirror which required a couple extra holes in the plaster.

I recruited Rebecca to pull all the nails and trim from the window and door so we can have access for the drywall while I was off messing up the plumbing. I installed the tub and shower spouts only to realize that the valve was installed upside down. Classic. But oh well only 20mins later and i got the valve all fixed up.

It took us two full days to finish all these little tasks, it’s amazing how just a long list of short items soaks up a lot of time. But we finally got everything all wrapped up and installed a bunch of insulation. I used sound proofing insulation since before we took out multiple trucks full of concrete our bathroom was super quiet and with some heavier insulation i hope it’ll be close to what it was. But at last we were ready for drywall and thus had to take lots of pictures before it was all covered up forever.

So onto the last day of the nice 3 day presidents day weekend and calling in some reinforcements aka Pops. Around the shower i am using Kerdi Board for the waterproofing. It’s a great lightweight board that just screws right to the wall. Then using thinset and strips the gaps and cracks are filled in creating a fully waterproof shower that the tile can go right over. Compared to cement board it’s significantly easier to install and also super light. I ordered a kit from amazon that had everything needed for the tub install. All the panels only took an hour to cut to size with an exacto knife and screw them to the wall.

Then it was onto the drywall! Only 4 sheets were needed and even less were actually required but since we were matching it up to the plaster it needed to be 1″ thick so it was doubled up. So after a couple more hours to get all the weird shapes and angles fitted in the room was actually looking like a room again! Next step is on to spackle and getting ready for some more big changes!

  • Before the drywall was installed
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Tub Time!

With the demo and vent all done, it’s time to crest the hill and start putting the room back together. First up in that plan is to install the tub. We purchased an American Standard Americast Princeton tub it’s fairly standard at 30″ wide and 60″ long. After finding a Lowes that had the correct left hand drain, we headed over to pick it up. Luckily they had multiple tubs since the one on the floor was taken in the time it took us to find a cart. There were multiple ones up on the rack but just took some extra time for someone to get it for us.

The tub is fairly light which made it no problem for me to trick my parents to help carry it up the stairs when they brought dinner. With it upstairs w could do our first fit check and it slid in like a glove.

Fit Check

Now it was time to finalize the walls all around the tub first by adding insulation onto the two exterior walls and then button up the plumbing that wouldn’t be accessible after the tub was installed.

The tub plumbing seems simple but since so many things are locked together it needed to be a perfect fit. I did a lot of fit checking of the overflow tube and the p-trap and finally decided it was close enough for the final install. I also fixed the copper plumbing and added a mixing valve-> Which came back to get me later….

P-trap and copper lines installed

This was also the time where I accidently knocked over the PVC primer and it spilled all over my shoe turning my sock purple. It also stained the plywood which is evident in the picture below. Always something fun…

Now that everything was ready I was ready for the mad rush to get the tub permanently mounted. I added a ledger for the far edge of the tub to rest on and mixed up thinset mortar for the tub to rest in. I should have made the mortar a bit more runny to help pour it out but after taking it upstairs there was no turning back. I slid the tub in and then realized I forgot to put silicone on the ledger so with a few sprints up and down the stairs we go the tub situated and all the drain components mounted. This was such a great feeling to start putting things back together.

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What’s in the Vent?

The new vent

One of benefits of an older home is that with changing designs things don’t quite match up to how we want to use them now. This was evident in the fact that the HVAC supply vent in the bathroom was directly under the sink drain, which was all fine when using a pedestal sink but now with any normal vanity there’s a cabinet under the sink where the vent was trapped. Every morning we’d have to remember to open the cabinet doors to get air into the bathroom. We also couldn’t store any of the normal things under the sink as the temperature was either really hot or cold depending on the time of year. What better time to make giant holes in the walls and ceiling then now to fix this!

The start, where the vent was inside the vanity
With the wall removed the vent is right below the sink drain

To start off this required some investigation of how the vent was run. From the basement reno I knew the vents ran up the middle of the house and then turned to run in the ceiling of the living room with a final bend going up to the bathroom wall. I was hoping the vent could be moved without cutting a hole in the living room, but alas it wasn’t meant to be so easy. In the bathroom floor there was a joist blocking access to the vent from upstairs, which meant all work needed to be done from down below. It was a good excuse to fix some paint in the living room ceiling….

This vent goes up into the bathroom wall
Nico didn’t like all the dust

I contacted an HVAC company who was coming out on Friday morning , so on Wednesday night I did some exploratory drilling to find the vent and then with a drywall saw and oscillating saw I cut a nice big opening in preparation for the move. After adding some braces and cutting a hole in the bathroom floor for the new vent I was ready for them to come. After only a little over an hour the two guys had the old vent removed and a nice new vent back in its place.

The hole for the new vent
The new vent split
New vent moved from the sink drain to behind the door

Turns out cutting the hole and moving the vent was the easy part. Now I had to put the living room back together. This involved cutting some interesting shape drywall pieces and adding in a lot of supports to attach the drywall too. Once the drywall was mounted I put my spackling skills to the test. The ceiling wasn’t fully flat and adding the new drywall made a lot of highs and lows in the ceiling. Adding lots of spackle helped to smooth everything out but it took a long time to dry.

Drywall fitted back in
Spackling drying for a long time
Sanding and Primed

I needed to sand and spackle a few times in order to get a nice flat ceiling. This created a nice dusty portion of the living room, thankfully the plastic really helped from preventing the whole first floor from being covered. Finally after a week of the living room being moved into a corner the ceiling was painted white and back to normal. Not a bad side quest.

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First Step is a Doozy

Don’t Fall

Clean Up

Now that demo was mostly finished, it was time to clean up all the extra concrete, and get ready to put down some new floors. All the floors boards had to be pulled up and luckily they weren’t nailed down so pulling them up was nice and easy. The downside is that all the sledge hammering created so much dust and pieces of wall that fell onto the top of the living room ceiling which needed to be cleaned up. The shop vac came to the rescue even with an old filter that needs to be replaced.

Plumbing

Of course now that there’s no floor, all the plumbing was completely accessible and my initial thought was to replace the toilet pipe as it needs to be a tad bit higher. After buying all the fittings and a trip to multiple home depots it turns out there isn’t enough room to fit in the modern plastic fitting so rather then rip out all the 2nd floor plumbing I’m going to live with the 1/4″ height difference. But it did save me a full day’s worth of work so i’m not complaining.

On the Tub side of the world i replaced the connection to the cast iron plumbing and plan on adding a new ptrap and tub drain. I also replace the funkily bent plumbing lines with nice new shiny lines that include shut off valves so future work will be nice and easy!

Floor Time

The floor was surprisingly flat but definitely not level. For the tile we are planning the floor doesn’t need to be perfectly level as long as it’s fairly flat to avoid any lippage on the large tiles. The top of the floor joists were actually cut down with what looked like a hatchet to make a better connection to the concrete but provided almost no place to attach a new sheet of plywood. Because of this we sistered the joists with 2x6s ensuring the new joists were nice and flat with all the surrounding ones. After adding some of the nice pink insulation between the floors it was almost time to close them all up again

The area around the toilet was definitely a thinking challenge. Since the flange was already attached to the pipe the floor needed to be slid underneath it. After some hard thinking (Thanks Trevin!) and 3 pieces later it fit like a glove

Now with the floor completely prepped, each floor joist add a nice layer of glue applied and plywood was laid down on top. Of course the fit checks and getting the floor to slide past all the drywall, nails and studs that were on the wall was an extreme challenge. Luckily I had Trevin to pull out all the annoying forgotten nails so we could maneuver the pieces down.

With all the plywood in place it can be said for certain that no feet went through the ceiling of the living room which is definitely a win!

Walls? What’s a wall?

With a nice flat secure surface to walk on, focus could now be turned to prepping for the new tub. The first order of business was to make a flat level wall where the shower controls are so that the back wall could be referenced square from that. With the help of a reciprocating saw and a nice level, the studs were shaved flat.

The new back wall was made from cut down 2×6’s for two reasons: 1) It helps ensure they are nice and flat as they were cut with a table saw and 2) It’s what i had and didn’t want to drive to home depot in the middle of a snow storm. Using the square and laser level we got the back wall installed and flat with little issue. Next up is to flatten the full back wall and get it lined up with the existing plaster which will definitely be more challenging then this first wall…

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Demo Weekend is now Demo Week

And so it continued… It turns out that in 1948 they built bathrooms that included as much mortar and cement as a nuclear bunker. It must have been the early designs for underground bunkers and explains why the room was so sound proof. Not only did all the walls have mortar and concrete the floor was covered in 4″ of the stuff… But i’m getting a head of myself. Lets start with the tub:

As expected, the tub was cast iron and extremely heavy. Which meant the only way to get it out of the room was with the trusty new sledge hammer (the one that survived earlier demo).

With the tub out of the way ( and carried into the truck with 5 gallon buckets), it was time to take on the floor. There were two layers of tile on top of 2″ of mortar. The original tile was small 1″ pink and white tile, definitely the fad from the 50s. However, under the 2″ of mortart was 3″ more of concrete! In between the the floor joists, there were floor boards recessed down and then backfilled with concrete. I suppose this made for a very stable floor, but it also made for a lot of trips down the stairs.

Half the floor pulled up and concrete between the joists
No floor means it’s time to rebuild!

And now with all the concrete removed I’m calling demo complete! Next step is to actually start to put things back together. First up is the floor, we need somewhere to actually walk around without the danger of falling through the ceiling. If we can complete the floor without falling through the ceiling that’ll definitely be a win…

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Demo Weekend!

Well turns out plaster, concrete and wire mesh is very hard to get off of a wall after 70yrs… It’s impressive how much concrete and plaster were actually under all the tiles but luckily the worst of it was only going about half way up the wall. Over the 2-day weekend we spent a total of 9 active hours working inside the bathroom. That doesn’t include the hour of setup to prepare the steps and hallway as well as another hour to remove the vanity, toilet, cabinet and shower valves.

The Method

The first part of the demo started with us just going at the tile with sledge hammers, large hammers and the best tool we ever bought for demo the wonder bar. But as previously mentioned the tile and concrete was extremely hard. So hard that our sledge hammer didn’t stand up to the punishment:

Another one bites the dust

I bought carbide blades for the reciprocating saw, oscillating saw and then a diamond blade for the angle grinder. The only thing that actually worked on the tile and concrete was the diamond blade but it created so much dust it was unusable in such a small space, even with the window open a fan blowing through the room. After fumbling around all morning and some after lunch (and a quick home depot trip to get caps for the plumbing lines so we can turn the water back on) we finally came up with a good method.

This tile was installed as a mud-job where a layer of metal mesh is nailed to the studs, a scratch coat about 1″ thick is put on top of that, then a brown coat is added that varied between 1/2″ to 1 1/2″ and finally the tile was placed on top of that. The best trick we found was to use pry bar to split the brown coat off of the scratch coat before trying to remove the metal mesh. Once all the tile and brown coat was removed we were able to then knock off sections of the scratch coat before cutting the wire mesh with an angle grinder. Once it was cut into sections a crow bar helped to get behind the wire mesh and pull it off the wall.

The end result was two sets of hands that are very sore and multiple blisters from swinging hammers all weekend, But the bathroom now has no tiles and is down to the studs all the way around

After the walls and two trips to the dump to empty the truck we started on the tub. Turns out cast is extremely hard even if it’s supposed to be brittle. After several whacks with a sledge hammer and moving the tub out of the alcove to make sure it didn’t fall through the floor we finally called the weekend quits. It also might have been due to the puppers being so scared from the loud sounds of the sledge hammer on the cast iron, but either way it was a good weekend .

Next Steps

Well it’s a full work week again, so progress will most likely be limited but the tub needs to be fully demolished and then the tile floor needs to be removed . All the corners and plaster edges need to be cleaned up in preparation before putting it all back together!

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Bathroom Prep

The Before

The plan was to buy all the materials before starting anything… Well at least we picked everything out that we’re planning on using. We’ve picked out the tile and have a good idea about the tub, so now we’ll see if not actually having everything on site is going to be an issue in the future. I’ll check back in a few posts from now…

The Plan:

I’ve started doing home renovation modeling on Homestyler and have to say it’s nice and easy. I’ve tried several over the past few years and although I used Sketchup for the basement design, the ability to modify the default component designs/tile as well as the renders has made me switch. I still wouldn’t use it for detailed dimensional planning but to get the overall design sketched out it’s been a great tool.

It’s blue!

Finally a project where we don’t plan on moving any plumbing lines, although we’ll see the quality of the plumbing to determine if anything needs to be replaced. Instead of the 50’s half wall tile we’re going to replace it with a nice modern board and batten wainscoting. Of course it’s 2021 so white is a must but since it’s a bathroom we needed a pop of color on the upper half of the walls. The exact shade of blue is still TBD as we see what’s on sale at Sherwin Williams but you get the idea.

The tub is going to be completely replaced with new subway tile going all the way to the ceiling unlike the 5ft that was all the rage in the late 1940s. We unfortunately have to remove our nice cast iron tub and will be replacing it with a standard steel tub with a porcelain coating. On the back wall of the tub we have planned an accent window frame that’s a similar size to the window to provide some symmetry. The render makes the tiles reflect the blue walls, however, once we throw a shower curtain in there i doubt we’ll have such strong reflections

Layout

Our Bathroom isn’t large. A total of ~45 sqft with an alcove bathtub, toilet and a very narrow vanity with the countertop overhanging the cabinet. There isn’t much room to reorganize any items so we’re sticking with what works. I thought about moving out some walls to give us extra room but there are 2 exterior walls, 1 that overhangs the steps and the last wall is the closet of the master bedroom which is already too small so stealing from there was definitely a no go.

Let the demo begin!

As mentioned, we’re just going to go for it so we started prepping the floors and bathroom for the demo. The bathroom has been emptied (for the most part) and paper has been taped down in the hallway and stairs. Turns out taping paper to stairs is harder then it looks and I expect to be re-taping several times throughout demo.

I’ll leave it off with some more before pics and hope that we don’t slide down the steps while carrying all the old plaster and rock lathe down the steps.