New Year, New Project!

With the basement winding to a close, we decided that our next project was going to be our two bathrooms upstairs (the Ensuite and the Main Bath). As we need to still have a working shower, we decided to approach the bathrooms in a phased approach – first we’d tackle the ensuite, then the main bath, but we would buy the floor and wall tiles for both at the same time (as the main bath will have the same tile).

Here are some photos of the bathroom before!

Over the holidays I had some days off so I decided to start the demo. First I removed all the towel hangers, etc, the shower door, and this lovely thing:

Then I taped up the room, Dexter style, to keep dust out of the bedroom and hallways:

After that, I used my new favorite tool – this corded Ryobi drill with the chisel attachment – to get the old porcelain tiles off the wall.  This took about two three hour sessions, so not too bad.

After that it was Christmas and working on the bar (which is almost finished!) so today we got rid of a lot more!

We pulled off the cement board first, which was used to hold the tile onto the wall. 

Surprise surprise! There was no insulation between the one shower wall and the guest bedroom. It was also damp. Fun.

We used a sledgehammer to bust down the two supports and also managed to extract this stud that looks like it would be a favorite of Neegan’s from Walking Dead: 

 There’s some interesting supports for this piping… 

The floor of the shower was one huge piece of cement with little tiles attached to it! We used a pry bar and the sledge to smash it into pieces small enough to carry downstairs.

At the end of the day we loaded it all into the van,

Just a few more pieces and we’ll be ready to start re-building. :)

Tips:

You can chisel off tiles with a hammer and prybar, but if you can get a drill like the Ryobi, it’s much easier. 

WEAR A MASK when dealing with taking apart a shower – we found some mold and you don’t want to be breathing that in.